by Chaim Potok
That might have been the fate of Solomon Slepak as well had he and his family remained in Peking. But now, in Moscow, he went on working as acting head of International Tass, his many years in China inexplicably overlooked by Stalin and the secret police.
3
Cutting Down the Forest
There were uprisings in Spanish Morocco and parts of Spain in 1936, and the British Labour Party expressed its support of the JL faltering Spanish Republic while the British government remained uncommitted. With Hitler’s approval, twenty German transport planes flew to Spanish Morocco to airlift General Franco’s Army of Africa into Seville. It had been Franco’s idea, the first such use of aircraft in history. Granada fell to Franco, and the Comintern agreed to help the Republic. The Spanish Civil War began in earnest.
That summer a Spanish soccer team arrived in Moscow to play a Russian team called Spartak. Solomon Slepak took nine-year-old Volodya to the game. In the stadium before the start of the game, a party leader spoke of the menace of fascism and General Franco, and a worker representative praised the courage of the Republican forces. The Soviet team won. That was the only time Solomon Slepak took his son to a sports event.
The Slepak family lived then on Petroverigsky Pereulok, having moved in the spring of 1935 from their rooms on Petrovka Street. The city still bore a gray and grimy look; many of its buildings stood half crumbled. There were few automobiles on the streets; people traveled mostly by tram. Many streets were being paved over with asphalt. The first line of the Metro had been completed the previous year. Only in the center of the city was there electricity. Most people cooked their food on kerosene stoves. Many homes were heated with firewood taken from torn-down wooden houses, but the apartments in which the Slepak family lived had central heating and hot water. There were no landlords in the Soviet Union; one obtained an apartment from the government and paid rent to the government. The Slepaks occupied rooms assigned to people who were working abroad for Tass for a year or two. Thus they moved five times during the decade of the thirties until, in 1940, they settled into an apartment on Gorky Street—as of 1936, the new name of Tverskaya Street. (In 1992 it again became Tverskaya.) There they lived until 1986.
The family often went to the movies. Volodya remembers seeing, among numerous other films, Zlatie Gory (“Golden Mountains”), Tzirk (“Circus”), Iskateli Shastia (“Seekers of Good Luck”), Vratar (“Goalkeeper”). They attended the Bolshoi Theater. Bolshoi tickets were difficult to obtain, but Solomon Slepak had connections and tickets were somehow always available to him, and the family saw with much pleasure the operas Carmen, Rigoletto, Eugene Onegin, and Snow Maiden and the ballets Swan Lake and Nutcracker. They visited the city zoo and went several times to the Moscow Circus, where they delighted in the clowns, gymnasts, jugglers, lions, tigers, elephants, and Russian bears.
From the time he became acting head of International Tass and began to work twelve-hour days, Solomon Slepak seldom saw his family on weekdays. He and his wife woke around six-thirty in the morning; Volodya and his sister, Rosa, a half hour later. Breakfast consisted of eggs or porridge, on occasion sausages, cheese, salad, tea. Solomon especially liked wild strawberry jam. Volodya and Rosa ate lunch in school, where they bought salad and tea and ate the sandwiches they brought from home. For dinner Fanya served soup and then meat or fish with potatoes and cooked grains. Food rationing had ended in 1934, but there was barely enough food in the regular city shops; people were happy to obtain bread and potatoes. The Slepaks ate better than most Russians did because they had returned from China with American dollars. Soviet citizens who worked abroad in the 1930s received part of their salary in rubles, deposited to their savings accounts in Russia, and part in American dollars, which they used abroad; they were permitted to bring back their savings in American dollars and shop in special stores that sold food to foreigners and Russians for hard currency. On most weekdays Solomon ate supper in the Tass cafeteria. “Your father is very busy,” Fanya told the children. “He is doing important work.”
Even in the summers he was busy. But sometimes the family rented a dacha outside Moscow, and Volodya and Rosa would swim in a nearby lake and walk through the forests of pines, firs, birches, and mountain ashes and pick berries with their parents. Solomon would swim, too, and take long walks alone in the forests and fields. Sometimes after a meal he relaxed in an armchair with a book. At times friends would visit.
For two years they rented a dacha very close to the dacha of Gregory Voitinsky and his family, whom they saw every day Two middle-aged Bolsheviks talking quietly about—what? Old times in China? And guardedly, and only when absolutely certain they were alone, about the current nightmarish time in their homeland? Voitinsky was teaching then in the Department of Far Eastern Studies at Moscow University. Good memories, those weeks of summer in the dachas away from Moscow.
In the fall of 1936 the Slepaks moved to Neopalimovsky Pereulok, and a year later they moved again, to Bolshaya Serpukhovskaya Street. One of the apartments in which they rented rooms was occupied by two women who, because their husbands had been arrested, were suddenly bereft of all economic support; their own incomes left them with far less than they needed to survive. They had decided to rent part of their apartment, and the Slepaks were their first tenants. The women could often be heard crying in their room.
Volodya’s first school was on Starosadsky Pereulok, not far from where he lived on Petroverigsky Pereulok. Schools had no names, only numbers: his was number 329. Because of a citywide shortage of school buildings, there were two shifts for the school’s total student body of about eight hundred. When a school building was completed nearby, half the students of school 329, including Volodya but not his sister, were sent to the new building, number 617. It was a four-story brick building located on Spasoglinishchevsky Pereulok (now Arkhipova Street) opposite the Moscow synagogue, the city’s only remaining Jewish house of worship. For Volodya the synagogue was connected “not with Jewishness but with religion,” and as he had no interest at the time in anything religious, he has no recollection of ever seeing anyone entering or leaving it. Today school 617 is a hospital.
Most of the teachers in the schools Volodya attended were the sons and daughters of illiterate peasants, the very first educated peasant generation. He studied arithmetic, Russian language, Russian literature, geography, natural science, history There were about thirty to forty students in each classroom. The walls were painted a light color; a blackboard covered the wall behind the teacher’s chair and table. In almost every room there was a photograph of Stalin above the blackboard, and in some rooms, of Lenin too. Every student was required to join the Young Pioneers at the age of ten. They wore red ties and marched with red flags and attended meetings at which one of the teachers, a party member, spoke about events in the Soviet Union; about the international bourgeoisie who were the enemies of the people; about the fascists in Hitler’s Germany who persecuted the Communists, arrested them, sent them off to concentration camps, shot them. No one ever mentioned the Jews.
Two of the apartments into which the Slepaks moved—on Neopalimovsky Pereulok and Bolshaya Serpukhovskaya Street—were quite far from the schools Volodya and Rosa attended. Solomon Slepak took them along every day in the Tass car that brought him to and from his office, at that time on Armiansky Pereulok. From there the children would walk the rest of the way to school so no one would spot them using the car. Solomon insisted that they continue to attend those schools despite their distance from where the family now lived; they were among the best schools in Moscow, he said.
On occasion Volodya caught the word zhid directed at him by certain students, and ignored it. The first time he had heard the word, he asked his father what it meant, and his father explained that it was a bad word used by ignorant and misguided persons as a nasty and crude description of the Jews, an ancient and honorable Mediterranean people who had been persecuted all through history and to whom their family belonged, and, his father went on, when
the dream of a perfect Communist state came true, that persecution would end and all the peoples of the Soviet Union would live in harmony as one great nation and as a sign to the entire world that Comrade Stalin and the Communist Party had finally put an end to religious hatred and bigotry.
Volodya was about eight or nine at the time. A Jew! He was a Jew! Apparently he had forgotten the Purim celebration he had attended in Mukden years before. Then again, perhaps there was nothing especially Jewish about that event; it may have been merely another party, unremarkable save for the costumes and the clamor.
There was no organized Jewish community in Moscow when Volodya discovered that he was a Jew.
Lenin had detested anti-Semitism. He thought it contrary to the socialist ideal of equality and believed, with Karl Marx, that the Jews would have assimilated and disappeared long since had it not been for the persecutions to which they were endlessly subjected. Indeed, he had approved the decree of the July 1918 Council of People’s Commissars condemning anti-Semitism as “fatal to the interests of the workers’ and the peasants’ revolution” and instructing all Soviet deputies “to take uncompromising measures to tear the anti-Semitic movement out by the roots.”
But Jewish Communists had other notions about the future of Judaism in revolutionary Russia. At the June 1918 Second Conference of the Jewish Communist Sections, the Evsektsia, in Moscow, they resolved that the “Zionist Party plays a counterrevolutionary role” by hindering the penetration of Communist ideas among the toiling Jewish masses. They urged “the promulgation of a decree suspending all activities of the Zionist Party” and concluded that the “communal organs, which are the mainstay of all reactionary forces within the Jewish people, must be suppressed.”
Lenin’s government immediately adopted the resolution. Two leaders of the Jewish Commissariat, Simon Dimanstein and Samuel Agursky—the former a onetime yeshiva student, rabbi, and Lubavitcher Hasid—were appointed to the task of tearing down the Jewish community.
In June 1919 the government issued a decree closing all Jewish establishments. The decree carried the signatures of Samuel Agursky and Joseph Stalin. Most synagogues were padlocked or turned into Communist clubs, schools, dining halls; their possessions became the property of the Soviet state. There is a photograph of a pile of Torah scrolls from desecrated Russian synagogues, and it is difficult not to wonder if somewhere in that heap there might be the scroll whose completion was once celebrated with music and recorded in the photograph of Dubrovno Jews assembled before the Ark in their synagogue. Youngsters under the age of eighteen were forbidden to receive religious education outside their homes and required to attend classes in which communism would be taught. The Zionist movement, which had once numbered about three hundred thousand Jews, was banned. Religious officials—now regarded as “declassed members of society,” individuals without civil rights—found it difficult to secure housing, jobs, food rations, and the admission of their children to schools. Circumcision—illegal. Marriage and divorce laws—repealed. The Hebrew language—suppressed. Jews were even warned against kissing the Torah; it was unhygienic. A secular Yiddish culture was what the Jewish Communists wanted for the Jews of Soviet Russia. Yiddish elementary schools; Yiddish newspapers and journals; Yiddish to be spoken at the meetings of the Jewish soviets. The Jews were to be a nationality culture, with Yiddish as their language, socialism as their secular religion.
The campaign to cripple Judaism and assimilate the Jews into Communist culture was waged by Communist Jews; non-Jews did not participate in it. It was a Jewish civil war, brutal and unrelenting.
Hastening the process of assimilation was the breakup of cohesive Jewish townlets and the displacement of Jews into Moscow and Leningrad as a result of the World War, the Civil War, and the pogroms in the Ukraine and White Russia. It is estimated that in the 1930s more than 3 percent of Moscow’s population of four to five million people was Jewish. To accelerate the process even further, Lenin urged the Jews to colonize certain areas of Russia, and thousands went. Some of the colonies were funded in part by the American Joint Distribution Committee, which had been established during World War I to bring aid to distressed European Jews. There are many photographs of Jews in those agricultural colonies: They shear sheep near Odessa; they eat breakfast in the fields of the Ukraine; they are on their way to a meeting in the Crimea; they live in temporary barracks; they raise pigs, as a way of demonstrating their rupture with the Jewish religion; they drive a John Deere tractor; they celebrate May Day.
But few Jews seemed interested in becoming part of a Yiddish-speaking nationality or in colonizing Russian land. Most secular Jews preferred assimilation into Russian high culture. In only a few years the intermarriage rate of Jews in the heart of the Soviet Union reached 25 percent. Zionists and religious Jews quickly came to regard Communist rule as a grim continuation of the repressive regime of the tsars. Indeed, many Jews believed themselves worse off under the Communists than they had been under the cruelest of the tsars.
Economic conditions had improved somewhat in the years after the emergency period known as War Communism and the devastating famine of the early 1920s. When the guns of the Civil War finally went silent at the end of 1920, Lenin had gazed upon widespread rebellions, strikes, hunger, and the shambles of the Soviet economy—a declining harvest, rampant inflation, industrial production at 13 percent of the prewar level—and had begun a reluctant retreat from pure ideological communism. In the spring of 1921, after a number of stumbling moves, he instituted his New Economic Policy: Peasants were now subject to standard taxes rather than to cruel outright requisitions; small businessmen could hire workers and freely trade the goods they produced; one could buy and sell urban property, enter the field of publishing, establish and take part in privatized retail trade. Gradually rationing was abolished, and the economy began to recover. A photograph of an open market during the period of the New Economic Policy, from 1921 to 1928, shows stalls bulging with produce. Most Soviet citizens—workers, peasants, small businessmen—seemed to benefit from the new policy. Jews, about one-third of them “declassed” because they had been artisans, small merchants, and craftsmen, found the policy a boon to their broken lives. But Bolsheviks like Zinoviev worried that the reappearance of private enterprise might destabilize political control and made a point of declaring that the New Economic Policy was nothing more than “a temporary deviation, a tactical retreat.”
Lenin’s policy regarding the Jews—the destruction of their institutions and their total assimilation—was followed and intensified by Stalin. The Comintern’s failure to incite revolution throughout the capitalist world led Stalin to a new interpretation of communism: the continuing development of socialism in one country, the Soviet Union. Those who opposed him in his clash with the internationalist-minded Trotsky—Kamenev, Zinoviev, and others—he took to calling “rootless cosmopolitans”—that is, party members who cared more for socialism in other countries than in their own: Stalin’s way of calling someone a Jew without sounding like a tsarist anti-Semite. At the same time, Jews were among Stalin’s most loyal adherents; one among them, Lazar Kaganovich, headed the first Five-Year Plan’s pitiless effort to forcibly collectivize the peasants of the Ukraine. Thus the urban Russian hated Jews because they were “rootless cosmopolitans”; the rural peasant hated them because they were ruthless oppressors. Speculators, petty traders, parasites, Bolshevik overlords, made up the image of the Jew in the eyes of most Russians.
In 1928 Stalin initiated an effort to settle Jews inside their own autonomous province in distant Birobidzhan, 23,321 square miles of territory near Manchuria, 8,000 miles from Moscow, and near the region of Solomon Slepak’s forays into mainland Asia. It was a harsh, primitive land, ridden with disease, insects, rains. At its height, in the late 1930s, the Jewish autonomous region had 128 Jewish elementary schools with Yiddish as the language of instruction, a daily Yiddish newspaper, a medical school, a music school, and 27 Jewish state and collective farms. But lit
tle came of the effort. Crippled early on by the unwillingness of Jews to be concentrated in one area—particularly so distant from the centers of culture—it was further weakened by the purges of the 1930s, during which many of its leaders, accused of being Trotskyites, nationalists, and Zionists, were imprisoned, exiled, executed. By the end of the 1960s Jewish Birobidzhan was dead.
Stalin ended the New Economic Policy in 1928 with his first Five-Year Plan to industrialize Russia on a massive scale and collectivize its agriculture. For that enormous effort a vast pool of highly trained workers was necessary, Townlet Jews and village peasants poured into the cities and entered the work force.
A photograph shows a group of young Jews in a workshop for the training of metal laborers seated in front of a large portrait of Stalin, who is wearing a white army-style jacket and holding a cigarette in his left hand. By the end of that first Five-Year Plan, more than a million Jews had become wage earners who worked with their hands, and salaried bookkeepers, teachers, engineers. Gone were all the tsarist restrictions that had barred Jews from entering higher education and the professions. In 1934—1935, the Slepak family’s first year in Moscow after their return from China because of Volodya’s dysentery, fully 18 percent of the graduate student population of Russia was Jewish.
Russian Jewry was dissolving into the larger body of the land and its culture. Battered from without by the Communist Jews of the Evsektsia, weakened from within by Jews no longer willing to take on the burdens of an ancient tradition and fearful of being branded Trotskyites or Mensheviks, the Jewish religion and its institutions vanished or went underground. So successful did Stalin think the anti-Jewish program to have been that by the mid-1930s he was certain that the young generation of Jews knew nothing of Judaism. And he was in no small measure correct.
