The Yid Read online

  The city and the steel mill went up rapidly, with only a loose plan.

  The place was a construction camp, where workers—mostly displaced peasants and unskilled laborers—had to survive Siberian winters in canvas tents. Workers’ barracks went up; they were filled beyond capacity.

  Though some visitors described Gary as the gates of hell, by comparison with Magnitogorsk, it was a garden spot.

  The latter metropolis was a forest of half-completed smokestacks tied together with a tangle of pipes and railroad tracks. American earth-digging machines sat abandoned to rust in the open pits where they became incapacitated. In the residential areas, you could see the beginning of incongruously wide boulevards that became rivers of mud in the spring. There were also people’s palaces, with massive columns that grotesquely mimicked Russia’s imperial past. All of it was unfinished, probably impossible to complete, yet amid the chaos of construction, completed smokestacks were starting to spew out clouds of dark smoke, melting ore, making steel.

  Workers’ barracks, tent cities, and the zones of prison camps were woven into this mad landscape.

  German architects were brought in to make an attempt at urban planning. The Germans wanted to separate residential zones from industrial, creating a kind of balance between work and life. Alas, this vision was just that—a hallucination. Construction of industrial and residential zones was well under way before planning began.

  Large numbers of skilled foreign workers were brought in to exercise some control over the situation, and Lewis, an expert welder, was among them.

  Dark skin was a rarity in the Soviet Union’s workers’ barracks. There were two Negroes in Magnitogorsk in January 1932. By February, their ranks declined by fifty percent when the African welder, who spoke French and mostly kept to himself, slipped off a scaffold and fell forty-five meters, landing on a pile of steel bars.

  This left only Friederich Robertovich Lewis.

  Born to descendants of freed slaves, named after Frederick Douglass, and raised in Memphis, Omaha, Chicago, and Cleveland, Lewis was what used to be known as “an enlightened worker,” an autodidact drawn to revolutionary ideologies. He worked as a porter, then a waiter, and ultimately apprenticed as a welder at McKee, a company whose projects included building blast furnaces in the USSR.

  One could say that Lewis’s disgust with Jim Crow’s America drove him to a new life in Joe Stalin’s Russia. That would be a bit simplistic, but mostly true. In the late twenties, Lewis tried to join a Chicago cell of the Communist Party, hoping to be sent to the land of victorious revolution, where the color of a man’s skin had been negated. But the wheels of Party machinery turned slowly, and in the spring of 1931 he asked the capitalists at McKee to send him to Magnitogorsk.

  On entry to Russia, his name became Friederich—Germanized, presumably, in honor of Engels. The clerk who issued Lewis’s visa knew nothing of Douglass. A Russian-style patronymic Robertovich, son of Robert, was inserted into his name in accordance with rules and traditions.

  In his search for a race-free society, Lewis found himself in a place where he felt like a revolutionary from the planet Mars. There was racism in Stalin’s Russia, too, a naïve kind of racism. While a foreman at McKee wouldn’t hesitate to call him a nigger, a drunk on a Moscow streetcar could innocently refer to him as a primate. Along the same lines, his appearance was known to move street urchins to jump like baboons and shout good-naturedly about “djazz.”

  * * *

  On a particularly cold February morning in Magnitogorsk, Lewis climbed to the top of a scaffold only to be summoned to the office of the kombinat construction director. It was unclear why the matter was so important that even the American engineer Charles Bunyan descended from Olympus, but there he was, in the meeting room, kindly offering his services as a translator.

  Bunyan was one of humanity’s secret heroes.

  Short, bearded, bespectacled, he was as old as Lewis, yet had the gravitas of a European professor. Armed with a cold Lutheran stare (he was presumed to have been at some point a Lutheran), conspicuously grammatical Russian, and considerable ingenuity, he fought off the ideological hacks and ignorant central planners, preventing complete bungling of the project.

  Lewis regarded Marxism as a powerful tool for generating mathematical insights into history and all aspects of the world around him. It was the fundamental science, the science of science. During his enlightened worker, pre-Communist phase, he became attuned to what he called “paternalism” among white comrades. His analysis of the phenomenon yielded the following insight: Paternalism = Racism Repressed. Lewis trusted his ability to see through a man, to gauge his innermost feelings about race. Turned on Bunyan, Lewis’s finely calibrated gauge registered the most extraordinary reading he had ever observed: zero. No paternalism. No racism. A perfect zilch.

  The difference in their social status notwithstanding, the welder and the construction director met often and spoke openly, without fear.

  “You’ve made the right choice to come here,” Bunyan once observed over dinner in his bungalow. “This is the ultimate land of opportunity. Extraordinary wealth is perpetually up for grabs. Billions of dollars in gold, soon to be dwarfed by immense wealth of oil, coal, ore, steel. All of it changed hands in 1917, and it may again.”

  “I didn’t come here for wealth,” said Lewis.

  In those days, he still found it difficult to accept the idea that a white man of Bunyan’s stature would find him a worthy interlocutor.

  “Nor I,” said Bunyan. “I came here to help them make something of it. To give them focus.”

  “You seem to be succeeding,” said Lewis. “The blast furnaces are going up.”

  “By hook or crook. Do you know what makes this country run?” This was, of course, a rhetorical question. Bunyan leaned back in his chair to offer the answer: “The mandates.”

  A mandate was no more than a piece of paper: a letter, preferably handwritten, from a high-level bureaucrat, stating that the bearer should be given whatever it was he seeks. Some used the mandates for their personal benefit. Others, like Bunyan, to break through bureaucratic logjams.

  At that time, Bunyan operated with a supply of mandates from Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the people’s commissar of heavy industry.

  “These are simple pieces of paper, not always on letterhead, not always stamped,” Bunyan continued. “Just imagine having a mandate from Stalin himself. There would be no stamp, no letterhead, no date of expiration. Who’d ever dare to check whether it’s real? And how would you check?”

  “I wouldn’t want to be caught with one of those,” said Lewis.

  “Neither would I.”

  Bunyan’s ability to procure freight trains, copper wire, pipe, lumber, and welding torches was legendary in Magnitogorsk. Indeed, were it not for Bunyan, the construction of the kombinat would have turned into an exercise in marching in place, and without Magnitogorsk, Russia would have had less pig iron, less steel—and fewer tanks, planes, and Katyushas—when it needed them.

  Were it not for Charles Bunyan, the war could have been lost.

  * * *

  As he had come down from the scaffold, Lewis showed up wearing a singed sheepskin coat, an ushanka with ear flaps down, and black valenki, felt boots that had all the traction of bedroom slippers and left his ankles wobbling. Large gloves protruded from his pocket.

  “This is our brigadier of welders, Comrade Friederich Lewis,” Bunyan said, introducing him to a diminutive, middle-aged, paleskinned man and a young woman.

  Lewis had never heard Bunyan call him comrade before. After all, neither of them was Soviet or, technically, a Communist. Bunyan worked for McKee and drew a hard currency paycheck. Lewis had overstayed his McKee assignment, and though he was being paid in rubles, he was still an American.

  “This is Comrade Solomon Mikhoels and his assistant, Tatyana Goldshtein,” Bunyan said in English. “They are from the Jewish theater in Moscow, here making preparations for filming.”

/>   Mikhoels sat beneath a large portrait of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. It was an oil, in a heavy gold-leaf frame, a big portrait probably done by a big artist. In accordance with long-standing tradition, the portraits of Soviet leaders weren’t hung flat against the wall, but were angled slightly, to create the impression that the leader is looking down at the viewer.

  Lewis nodded politely. What did any of this have to do with him?

  The man looked like a Party worker, a new aristocrat traveling with his mistress. He wore a blue European suit and black leather shoes that were so small and delicate that they surely precluded any attempt at mobility in the frost and mud of Magnitogorsk.

  * * *

  “Kak vam nravyatsya nashi zhenshchiny?” Mikhoels asked, looking over the unusually pigmented builder of Socialism. How do you like our women?

  This was not an effective icebreaker.

  “Our women…” Lewis knew that even people who swore to have negated race could not be trusted on the subject of what was once known as corruption of blood. Did he catch Lewis staring at that girl’s charcoal eyes, her thick braid, her small upturned breasts?

  Did this man, who surely lived in a heated apartment, understand what it was like to live in the Magnitogorsk workers’ barracks, where every square centimeter was shared with others, and where fucking was, in effect, a spectator sport?

  Did he want to know about peasant girls who raised their skirts—actually, untied the drawstrings of their trousers—without waiting to be asked? Or did he want to know how Lewis’s adolescence shaped his attitude toward white women? If so, he would want to hear that after the murderous Omaha race riots of 1919, Lewis’s mother took to smacking him upside the head every time he looked at a white girl. Would this Comrade Mikhoels care to know that punitive measures intensify one’s interest in the forbidden?

  Cringing, Bunyan translated Mikhoels’s artless question. He knew that Lewis’s Russian was good and getting better, and he sensed correctly that with or without a translation, the question would remain unanswered.

  The intense stare of Mikhoels’s dark eyes glaring beneath a soaring forehead added to Lewis’s discomfort.

  After a long, tense pause, Mikhoels posed another question: “Vy Kommunist?” Another icebreaker.

  “Tell him I have no part-bilet,” Lewis replied in a mixture of Russian and English.

  Indeed, Lewis was not a card-carrying Communist, and the reasons for his decision not to join the Party were inseparable from his reasons for declining to discuss “our” women.

  “How can I help you?” Lewis asked in English.

  “We’d like you to consider appearing in a film,” said Mikhoels in Russian.

  “That’s not what I do,” Lewis answered in English.

  This wasn’t a conversation. These were chunks of ice slamming into each other randomly, with great force.

  “Vy budete igrat’ vashego soplemennika,” Mikhoels continued. You will be playing one of your tribesmen. That was an odd choice of words: tribesmen. What did he think Lewis was? A Zulu?

  Surely Mikhoels understood that the audience had gone home, yet, speaking slowly, enunciating, he proceeded to lay out his film’s storyline: a Jewish Communist, a bricklayer, returns to his native shtetl after twenty-eight years of laying brick in America. He is accompanied by his wife and a Negro comrade …

  “Why?” Lewis interrupted in Russian. “Why not just have him travel with his wife and no Negro comrade?”

  “Your Russian is very good,” noted Mikhoels with a faint smile.

  “And that surprises you…”

  “It does, I confess.”

  The smile was still there, infuriating, frozen. What was its cause? Did this man think he had solved some quintessential mystery? Was he pondering something Lewis didn’t want him to ponder? Lewis wanted out of that room, out of that idiotic conversation, away from that clueless film that shouldn’t be made.

  “Then maybe you’ll answer my question: Why not leave that Negro at home?”

  Mikhoels turned to the young woman: “Tanechka, please go down to the cafeteria and bring me a glass of tea.”

  The young woman got up with hesitation and slowly headed for the door. Lewis refrained from watching her leave. This was what they wanted, of course, to catch him casting a glance at her buttocks.

  “Let me guess, your Negro comrade is incidental to the story,” said Lewis as the door closed.

  “He is…”

  “And your main characters are Jews, all of them, no doubt, exquisitely portrayed?”

  Mikhoels nodded. “It’s a good script.”

  “And the Negro has bulging eyes, a radiant smile, broad shoulders, massive ivory teeth, bubbly enthusiasm.”

  Another nod.

  “Zachem vam eto?” asked Lewis in Russian. Why do you need this?

  “To make the whole thing passable, Comrade Lewis, to tell a deeper story. Comintern wants the Negro angle. The Negro Question is America’s Achilles’ heel, as they say. Personally, I don’t know whether it is or isn’t. Is it?”

  “It can be,” said Lewis. He smiled, realizing that surely Mikhoels would be pleased to see that the Negro before him had big, white, healthy teeth.

  “Like you, I am not a Communist,” said Mikhoels. “You are a simple welder, and I am a simple storyteller. And without you, I can’t tell my story.”

  “Po ulitsam slona vodili/Kak vidno napokaz…” said Lewis, quoting a fable he had learned soon after arriving in Russia. An elephant was led through the streets, evidently for display …

  With considerable satisfaction, Lewis noted that Mikhoels started to look tense, uncomfortable. His point seemed to be getting across.

  “You need an elephant, Comrade Mikhoels, and I am not an elephant. I am a welder.”

  “The question of nationalities is complicated and fraught with inconsistency, Mr. Lewis.”

  “The Party’s policy toward American Negroes should be guided by the same principles of internationalism as its policy toward Soviet Jews.”

  “That would be correct…”

  “So why do you need a character who is so devoid of substance that even a clowning welder can portray him? You know what this character would be called where I come from? Repeat after me: ‘a happy nigger.’”

  “A happy nigger.” Mikhoels mouthed the English words he had obviously not heard in the past. “Sounds Fascist,” he added in Russian.

  “Let me guess: his name is Jim. Nigger Jim, or Comrade Jim. Find yourself someone else, Comrade Mikhoels.”

  “There is no one else here.”

  “And in Moscow?”

  “In Moscow, they are busy.”

  “I am not jolly enough for you.”

  “You are obviously a person of substance. Is there anything at all I can do to convince you?”

  Was he offering money? A heated room? A door? A transfer to Moscow? Admission to an engineering institute? A trip to Crimea? A complimentary season pass to his theater? His girlfriend’s ass?

  The girl returned just in time to hear Lewis’s reply:

  “Take my advice, Comrade Mikhoels. You go get yourself a bug-eyed, toothy Jew and paint him black.”

  6

  Where is it written that a man is entitled to a history?

  Levinson has little more than a few shards of facts about his parents, but he has one feeling, the feeling of joy he felt when his father, Shimon Levinson, came to see him to play their game. Even years later, he can hear the bursts of his own laughter.

  The game was simple: Shimon lifted his son to his shoulders, then said with a straight face: “So, remember me?” Solomon felt his father’s big palms on his sides, then the hands parted and the child dropped down, almost to the ground, only to be caught and lifted again.

  “Can you climb to my shoulders all by yourself?” his father asked, and Solomon made an honest but futile effort at jumping and climbing. Then, always unexpectedly, his father grabbed him again, usually by the hand and foot, and st
arted a spin.

  The best part was the bag. Theirs was a massive bag made out of a fishing net. Shimon must have made it himself, for such devices have no known purpose in fishing. Levinson climbed into that bag to be spun wildly. Soon after Levinson turned seven, his father stopped coming.

  The boy never asked why he had lived with his aunt and uncle for as long as he could remember. And where did his mother go? He had only the dimmest memory of her: her long hair, not much else. Even her voice was a mystery.

  Facts found him slowly. His father was killed while collecting money for the protection racket he ran. His mother was back in the street, entertaining sailors. The “establishment” she had kept while she was still with his father had collapsed soon after Solomon was born.

  Now other men, friends of Levinson’s father, came to visit him. There were two of them, and they took turns showing up, almost always one at a time. It was part of the promise they made to his father: take care of the boy.

  They threw him in the air. They spun him in the fishing net. They brought him adventure and detective books, mostly Russian translations of Walter Scott, Jules Verne, Alexander Dumas, James Fenimore Cooper, and Arthur Conan Doyle. When Levinson turned twelve, his father’s best friend, an ominous-looking Russian named Nikolai, pulled out a pistol and took him to the woods to learn to shoot. Abramovich, a tough little Jew whose first name was never used, taught him to throw knives.

  They showed up together when the time came to take Levinson on his first trip to a brothel. They drank vodka downstairs as two girls not much older than Levinson instructed him in the art of love. When Levinson gingerly stepped down the stairs, his father’s friends applauded, then handed him a glass of vodka.

  These men became his real family. They replaced his father in reminding him who he was and teaching him the tricks of survival. The uncle and aunt were mere caretakers. He formed no bond with them. When they left for America, expecting that the young man would come along, Levinson got as far as the seaport. At the gate, he turned around and ran. He thought he would be able to join his father’s gang, but the gang kept him out, and he moved from one family of gang members to another, toting the books in the bag his father had made for the purpose of making him airborne.