The Yid Read online

  “Dacha,” says Levinson, extending his hand for the keys.

  “I think I might as well come with you,” says Kogan. “I have a week. Fresh air will do me good.”

  At 5:07 a.m., Levinson opens the back door of the Black Maria. “You will be traveling in the cage.”

  After Kogan climbs into the cage, Lewis gets behind the wheel and Levinson in the passenger’s seat.

  “I hope you don’t mind the company, Professor Kogan,” says Levinson, looking back through the bars as Kogan eases into the seat above the corpses.

  “I do, to be honest. But it’s good practice.”

  * * *

  “Comrade Lewis!” Levinson calls out as the Black Maria passes by the Kazan Railroad Station.

  “Present, komandir,” says Lewis, not looking up. The familiarity in his response verges on mockery.

  LEVINSON: Comrade Lewis, what have you learned about our country over these past twenty-two years?

  LEWIS: You are drunkards, brutes, barbarians. You have an exaggerated sense of duty and honor, which makes you reliable, and you are prone to messianic delusions, which makes you insufferable. Most of you cannot be counted among inhabitants of the world of real things. Am I missing anything?

  LEVINSON: Where do I fit into this?

  LEWIS: Not a drunkard, but the other things—yes.

  KOGAN: I second that, Solomon. These comrades, whom you have offed, would concur also. Half of me wishes I saw that, the other half is glad I didn’t.

  LEVINSON: I was speaking with Lewis. What have you learned specifically about our peculiar traditions of law enforcement, Comrade Lewis?

  LEWIS: Law enforcement? Do you have that? Do you even have a genuine police function?

  LEVINSON: Continue, Comrade Lewis, you are making a valuable point. What do we have instead of the police?

  LEWIS: Do you have anything but terror?

  LEVINSON: Excellent! Look at what we’ve done so far. I killed three MGB operatives. That’s three armed men. It was so easy. I am surprised it’s not done more often. We threw the corpses in the back of their Black Maria and drove through the center of Moscow, running every red light. We showed the MGB the corpses of their colleagues. And you, Comrade Lewis, were in whiteface through much of the operation. A badly done whiteface, at that.

  LEWIS: Your point, komandir?

  LEVINSON: I am not as far as the point, Comrade Lewis. Patience, please. Only questions for now. Here is another: In our country, what will happen if someone decides to break every law in the most flagrant ways imaginable? Comrade Kogan, would you like to answer this?

  KOGAN: He will get far.

  LEVINSON: I am still doing questions. Here is one more: What if, instead of resting on our laurels or crawling into a hole, we take this as far as we can?

  LEWIS: Am I starting to hear a plan?

  LEVINSON: I have been looking at our situation this way and that, and I see no way we can survive for more than a couple of weeks if things are left as they are. Even as stupid as they are, they will find us.

  KOGAN: I concur, with obvious reluctance. Of course, this situation isn’t particularly significant in my case.

  LEWIS: How can that be?

  KOGAN: A competing life-limiting factor. Unrelated unpleasantness at the hospital. It’s complete idiocy. The Special Department wants me to make a preposterous public confession, name names, that sort of thing.

  LEVINSON: Comrade Lewis, there is some chance that they will not learn about our connection. So this would be a good time for you to get back to your Siberia, dive under your desk, and pretend that nothing happened.

  LEWIS: I thought of that, and I don’t believe it. It’s well known that I stay with you when I am in Moscow. Never thought I’d need to make it secret, so I didn’t.

  LEVINSON: So you truly believe that you have nothing to lose? This is important.

  LEWIS: Yes.

  LEVINSON: I was hoping you would see it this way, because we could use you. You have a good strategic mind.

  LEWIS: Use me for what?

  LEVINSON: Patience! Not there yet! First, Kogan, am I to assume that you are up to trying something ambitious, something that may be our only hope?

  KOGAN: Yes, you know my limitations. I don’t kill. Not anymore.

  LEVINSON: Squeamish you’ve grown in your old age. Your hands will remain clean. What I do is my business.

  Lewis, Kogan is a perfectionist in all of life’s endeavors. Since he has been a doctor much longer than he was a machine gunner, he may have indeed saved more lives than he has taken.

  KOGAN: I hope so, Solomon. Do you believe you have reached the point where you can conclude your strategic onanism and tell us directly what your plan is?

  LEVINSON: We are at that point, old goat. The plan is to escalate the process I have begun to its absolute furthest extreme. There is no point in halfway measures. They will not help us in the least. We must go for the top. The very top. Nothing less than a beheading will do.

  KOGAN: Levinson, are you suggesting what I think you are suggesting?

  LEVINSON: I think you understand correctly. Beheading … the top … eto odnoznachno. There is no way to misunderstand. You have to eliminate the root cause. How can I be more clear?

  LEWIS: Beheading a specific individual or beheading the system?

  LEVINSON: In our country, comrade, aren’t they one and the same?

  KOGAN: Whom or what do you want us to behead, Solomon?

  LEVINSON: Is something wrong with my diction?

  KOGAN: Is something wrong with my hearing?

  LEVINSON: Does it have to be one or the other?

  KOGAN: Are you saying you want us to behead our beloved Iosif Vissarionovich?

  LEVINSON: What other choice do we have?

  KOGAN: You want us to behead the Great Stalin? The Genius of all Times and Nations?

  LEVINSON: Was I so vague that you have to pester me with questions?

  KOGAN: You are insane, but did we not know that?

  This can’t be serious, Lewis concludes. Yet, Levinson’s demeanor suggests that it is, in fact, completely serious. He appears to be resolute, komandir-like. Unless, of course, he is acting.

  “You scare me, gentlemen,” he says.

  As a Soviet engineer, Lewis is trained to identify objective difficulties. These are daunting. How do you slip past thousands of soldiers of the MGB? How do you evade tanks, cannons, guard dogs, missiles, bombs? How do you get through the layers of defenses? How can you suggest such nonsense?

  “How do we scare you, Mr. Lewis?” says Kogan. “Do you fear becoming an accessory to regicide?”

  Is Kogan really getting involved in this insanity? Or is this the weirdest practical joke ever staged?

  “No. Not that. Why would I give a shit about regicide? You know me better than that. I am just unable to tell whether you are genuine plotters or just two idiots.”

  5

  The purpose of art is to ennoble. The purpose of shtick is to stuff you with the rich diet of self-parody and self-hatred for no purpose beyond making you open the wallet and burp.

  The timing of these heroic events—1953—coincides with the integration of Jewish humor into the American mainstream.

  The Yiddish language is still heard in America’s streets. Yiddish theaters are still drawing crowds, and off-color humor fueled by vaudeville, jazz, and burlesque is flourishing in the Jewish Riviera resorts of the Catskills.

  Jewish humor is completing its life cycle: blossoming, rotting, becoming shtick, transitioning into English. You can talk about Rodney Dangerfield and Henny Youngman, even include the young Lenny Bruce before he got real.

  The purveyors of shtick may have been literally the American cousins of Levinson and Mikhoels. They would have been cousins who speak the same language and who are somewhat (not uniformly) aware of each other’s existence. Yet, they are cousins who exist oceans apart. And, more important, they have few reasons to like each other.

  In an
article about his wartime visit to the United States, Mikhoels expresses deep contempt for the state of American theater.

  Vulgarity is the currency of the New World that unveiled before him. Rockettes kick up their heels in shows that get neither better nor worse. The words of Shakespeare aren’t heard on Broadway. And as America’s sons are sent across the seas to die and as Europe and Asia burn, New York feasts. Mikhoels seems infected with the dark mood of his old friends, German intellectuals, as they contemplate ending their lives in rat-infested hotels in Midtown.

  Forget shtick. Mikhoels expresses contempt for Broadway. “Broadway brings together everything that’s not serious about America,” he writes. “It’s the place where you find a high concentration of cafes, cabarets, and all the theaters. From the point of view of the God of Business, it’s the Boulevard of Sin. It’s where the entrepreneurs conduct their business.”

  Mikhoels understood the business schema of Broadway theater: a producer, basically a businessman, leases the premises and proceeds to seek out a director who has a play. “But if that director is someone like Max Reinhardt, who doesn’t happen to have a play, he remains unemployed.”

  Reinhardt, a German and Austrian director and theater educator who had been a friend of Mikhoels’s for decades, is in New York, bemoaning the need to please what was then the shorthand designation for Broadway’s target audience: “a tired businessman,” abbreviated as TBM, someone who has no use for culture or, for that matter, politics.

  Reinhardt has just escaped from Fascism, yet he doesn’t want to talk about Fascism. Instead, he wants to talk about theater in America, that is, the tyranny of TBM. “American theater isn’t just a zero, it’s negative one,” Reinhardt says.

  In another essay, Mikhoels describes his argument with Charlie Chaplin, who tries to convince him that his work is apolitical.

  Mikhoels disagrees. The character of the Little Tramp, his travails, his efforts to survive as the machine age deals him one setback after another, is as political as it gets, he argues. And what does he make of Chaplin’s film about the rise of Adolf Hitler, The Great Dictator?

  If The Great Dictator isn’t politics, what is?

  Is it surprising that Mikhoels returns to Moscow, to GOSET, the theater born to integrate its audience into the societal mainstream, to make them strive for something better, a task that often involved using humor to evoke self-awareness, often through ridicule and shame?

  Whether you are a Communist, a Zionist, or both, GOSET existed to enlighten and inspire. Please note that in the early morning of February 24, 1953, with Mikhoels gone and the GOSET lights dark, Levinson turns to the Bard to illuminate the magnitude of his defiant pirouette with Finnish daggers. Ask yourself: Would the soft-bellied comics of American wealth have either the athleticism or the sense of purpose to execute such a maneuver?

  Shtick is for the TBM. Art is for the soldier.

  * * *

  Malakhovka is a dacha settlement forty kilometers from Moscow, a quick train ride.

  At the turn of the century, Moscow’s Jewish illuminati established a summer colony amid its gentle, wooded countryside. After the Revolution, the Jewish culture in Malakhovka revolved around the Orphanage of the Third International. There, the children could hear the writer Peretz Markish teach the works of Sholem Aleichem; they could learn drama from Mikhoels or Zuskin and art from Marc Chagall, a set designer who had just arrived in Moscow from Vitebsk.

  In those days, Chagall’s interests included erasing the boundary between the players and the audience and using costume to create moving sculpture.

  Now, the great names are gone. Mikhoels run over by a phantom truck, vilified upon death. Chagall, in Paris, makes poetry out of movement, building a fabulist past. Markish shot dead in the Lubyanka cellar. Zuskin dances foolishly on the clouds, an executioner’s bullet in his head, his calico dress in shreds.

  * * *

  In February, Malakhovka’s graceful dachas stand dark and empty behind tall fences.

  Gusts of chilling wind whistle through the rotting latticework of the summer theater. Rowboats by the lake lie buried in snowdrifts. The gazebos—those shaded temples of tea-drinking rituals of the summer—stand deserted beneath the wrap of bare vines, and white marble lions of Judah survey the cloud-like expanse from the tombstones at the Jewish cemetery.

  At dawn, the Black Maria approaches Kogan’s dacha, located on the edge of the Malakhovka Jewish cemetery.

  The dacha used to be part of the grounds of a large, prerevolutionary estate. The original dacha, which belonged to a Moscow banker, burned down in the late 1920s. The plot was split into four pieces. Kogan has exactly a quarter of the original plot.

  It is a simple peasant log hut, two rooms separated by a wood-burning stove and an open veranda. The stove is of typical Russian construction, large, white, with a heated surface to cook on in the area that serves as the kitchen. On the other side of the wall, there is a shelf Kogan can sleep on. This stone sleeping shelf makes the place usable even on the coldest winter days, which means Kogan can use it for his favorite pastimes: picking mushrooms in the summer and skiing in the winter.

  Since paint was perpetually in short supply in the late twenties, when the place was built, the dacha was left unpainted. Kogan has done nothing to keep up or renovate the place.

  The prerevolutionary owner of the dacha took great pains to shield his estate from the cemetery. This delineation of the romantic from the inevitable was accomplished with a hedge of pine trees, which now shade Kogan’s little world.

  The Black Maria fits snugly between the line of trees, the house, and a shed. Like three blocks of lard, the corpses lie in their cage.

  * * *

  Lewis doesn’t get much sleep on February 24, just a couple of hours beneath a sheepskin, on a folding bed.

  Anyone who has had the experience of coming awake on a jailhouse cot after a night of unbridled revelry would recognize the cluster of feelings Lewis experiences that morning.

  On the bright side, there is the exhilaration of unknown origin, something that is a likely outcome of casting away the taboos, something fundamental, something liberating, something that, upon reflection, makes you wonder: “Did I actually do that?”

  This sense of freedom is weighed down by dim memories of vows taken, deities acknowledged, deities cursed. “What did I do last night? Hmmm, let’s see, Comrade Lewis, you became an accessory to a triple murder of uniformed agents of state security, you took part in an effort to dispose of their bodies, you had a chance to run, but chose not to, and instead you joined a plot to murder the most powerful czar Russia has known. Now you find yourself on this cot, beneath this sheepskin, at this dacha. What the fuck are you going to do about that? Ideas? Regrets?”

  Even after twenty-two years in the USSR, on some mornings, he wakes up thinking that he is in Chicago. That’s the magic of half-slumber: overshadowing reality, it leaves you not knowing where you are.

  In Chicago, Lewis had a room on the South Side, near the university. He worked the night shift at the smelter between Chicago and Gary, and during the day he donned his Sunday best and attended classes.

  He was the academic equivalent of a stowaway. Yet, in a class on Hegel, when other students meandered blindly between thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the professor called on Lewis, the young man in the back of the room. He had the look of a student who understood, really understood the material. Even if he had been a bona fide student at the University of Chicago, Lewis wouldn’t have raised his hand. His primary purpose was to learn, not to demonstrate.

  Soon after he poached the class on Hegel, Lewis was moved to day shift at the smelter and he continued on his course of acquiring knowledge, this time in solitude. His knowledge of Marxism-Leninism was impressive. Once Lewis was asked to teach a night class to other enlightened workers, only to learn that their enlightenment didn’t reach deep enough to enable them to take instruction in the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism from a black man.
“What do you know about Hegel?” an Estonian comrade challenged Lewis on the first day. “You should be swinging from tree limbs.” The Estonian completed this criticism with what he surely thought was a cacophony of piercing sounds of baboons in the jungle. Far from ejecting the racist from the class, other workers laughed. No one attended Lewis’s second class. Even Lewis stayed home.

  Marxism was Lewis’s escape route from the construct of race. Theoretically, a man is defined based on his class, which in turn is defined by the relationship to the ownership of the means of production. National origins and race are negated, voided. That is how it should be, yet race remained un-negated, menacing Lewis as he crossed the oceans, the steppes, and the frozen wilderness.

  Had he escaped from the land of Jim Crow to become a trained baboon of World Revolution?

  For a moment, he thinks that he is waking up in his room on the South Side, but that illusion vanishes as he takes a silent inventory of events of the previous night: “Siberia … Moscow … Levinson … corpses … whiteface … Black Maria … Kogan … dacha … escape … France … How the fuck did I get here?”

  As soon as he asks the question, the answer comes: Solomon Mikhoels. Solomon fucking Mikhoels, the man Levinson called a gonif, a crook.

  Were it not for Mikhoels, Lewis wouldn’t have come in contact with either Levinson or Kogan, wouldn’t have learned Yiddish, and—most important—wouldn’t be at this dacha, praying to God that no one would notice that a Black Maria and its crew have gone missing.

  In 1932, Mikhoels was shooting a talking picture, his first and only. And it is true that the film required one happy, good-natured Negro to play an American Communist, a bricklayer who joins a Jewish comrade to build Socialism in the USSR.

  The story was set in Magnitogorsk, a city located on the southern tip of the Ural Mountains, on the boundary between Europe and Asia. The city was named after a mountain of pure iron, a geological oddity. The name means the city of the Magnet Mountain.

  The USSR built up massive capital by dumping gold and artwork onto the world market. The funds would finance rapid industrialization. To plan the project, in 1928, the USSR hired the Arthur G. McKee Company of Cleveland, giving it the task to replicate the city of Gary, Indiana, upon the Magnet Mountain.