“Secret work won’t always be necessary,” Dmitri said. “You’ll see. After the war we’ll give peace a chance. It will be a wonderful era for mankind. There will be open borders; nations will hold hands. You’ll come openly to Moscow and you’ll meet all your old friends again. Oh, they will be so glad to see you, Sidney. We’ll have a great party and we’ll paint the town red. Oh, we’ll have a marvelous time.”
Sid had begun to tell his American contacts that he was married to a redheaded woman with freckles and that he was the Father of twins. Perhaps, he thought, in doing this, he was affirming the fine old family values he believed in.
In October 1943 Sid received a gold medal: “The Order of the Red Star.” In December, he was asked if he would accept the most important assignment any agent had ever had.
In January 1944 he met Herman Rolle, and from then on traveled to meet him to transmit stolen documents on a regular basis. Sid liked this tall, thin, somewhat austere man, a noble genius in his estimation. Those huge horn-rimmed glasses!
At their last meeting in the hills between Santa Fe and Los Alamos, Rolle told Sid of his impending transfer back to England. Rolle raised a toast: “I hope that sometime in the not too distant future, we shall be able to meet openly as friends in Great Britain.”
“I would love that,” Sid said. “I hope you won’t think I’m being presumptuous in saying that it would be a thrill for me to visit such famous landmarks as where Walter Scott, Bobby Burns, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare worked, with you by my side, Herman.”
“That’s certainly a visit I will look forward to,” said Rolle.
Sid entered the apartment on Perry Street as if going into a darkened theater and having the stage light up on his fondest dreams and hopes… . Josh Moroze sang “This Land Is Your Land,” “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and the “Starvation Blues.” Bobby Metzger had taken out his guitar and Joe Klein his harmonica and paper comb and they accompanied Josh, stomping their feet.
Sid saw men and women with warm Jewish East Side faces, red shawls, moustaches, suspenders, black silk stockings, garter belts, Professor Myron Wooman, the tap-dancing magician, Hershel the horn player leading the musicale, in a corner two microfilm machines blazing away, people scurrying to and fro in a fire of happy activity, Jews stroking, hugging, nipping at each other’s faces, nibbling… . “Sid, Sid,” they called his name; as soon as they heard it, he was one of them, their breaths were his. … A fat man on two chairs fluttered his eyelids and said, “Is that the kind of thing you kiss me? A little sick kiss?” Sid gazed upon them, and as his face swept around the room, he spotted a tall, moustached, cigar-smoking young man sprouting a beaver coat, a gift from the Soviets; the young man lifted a wad of documents from the pile on the floor beside the microfilm machines, and gleefully handed them to Sid.
A few hours after F.B.I. agents began to interview Sid, he broke down and said, “Yes, I am the man to whom Herman Rolle gave the information on atomic energy.”
He said he wanted a lawyer who was not a “pinko” or a “bleeding heart.”
“Punish me and punish me well,” Sid said.
As Sid was admitted to prison, he noticed that the admitting sergeant was struggling to spell the word “espionage.” The word was strange to the policeman.
The virgin hermit Sid Smorg thought, “Why did I do it?”
Awake and Sing
How to understand everything once and for all.
—G. L.
He knew the score, and he could never go back to what he had been.
Shortly after his bar mitzvah in Alabama, Solly returned to New York with his father. The price of cotton, which had been thirty-six cents a pound, dropped overnight to six cents. Solly’s father had paid for his stock with cash. He was wiped out. Solly’s mother Sarah and sister Ruth, who had been living with relatives on Pitt Street, rejoined Solly and his father at a flat on Delancey Street.
When he was in his junior year of high school, Solly’s father wanted him to return to yeshiva study afternoons after school. He told his father he could not go back. Society was collapsing all around him, and at the yeshiva they discussed what happened when you cut open a pregnant cow: was the baby a dairy or a meat product?
He could not consider the 613 laws of the Halakhah while capitalism was reaching its final stage: fascism. One day on Rivington Street, a man in a red beret had handed him a Communist Party pamphlet. Solly stayed up all night reading and rereading it. So this was why there was so much suffering all around him in the face of so much plenty. He had always been moved by the idea of the prophet Elijah coming and the hearts of the fathers returning to the sons and the sons’ hearts returning to the fathers: the time when there would be love in the world, when people would be compassionate and their hearts would turn toward one another. And here was the way to reach that reality.
He would help to smash the legacy of endless wars, racism, and white chauvinism. He understood, he understood everything; he shouted down his father at the dinner table as a Jew who buried his head in the sand.
In Harlan, Kentucky, the coal miners were shot down in cold blood by the capitalist pirates because they struck for a few more pennies. When his father cursed the Communists, Solly told him, “Look what’s happening in Kentucky. All the miners want is to live, Papa. What happens? They’re shot down by the ruling class in cold blood. Do you really think the workers can take over the means of production without a violent revolution when even for pennies they’re dropping blood?”
Solly could quote a certain pamphlet, a transcription of one of Stalin’s speeches, The Soviet and the Individual, by heart: “Of all the valuable capital the world possesses, the most valuable and most decisive is people,” and the intriguing passage: “We pushed forward still more vigorously on the Leninist road, brushing aside every obstacle from our path. It is true that in our course we were obliged to handle some of these comrades roughly. But you cannot help that. I must confess that I too took a hand in this business. …”
He learned about deviationists and social fascists and Trotskyite vermin. He stood up and shouted, “Comrades, let’s not be bashful about the trials of the Trotskyite and Bukharinite wreckers and spies. Let’s hail the death of the twenty-one traitors and the findings of Soviet workers’ justice with gusto and joy. Hurrah! Hurrah! Let’s eradicate this scum and smooth the grid for the coming advance of peace and solidarity.” Standing on a soapbox at City College, it was Solly who answered a Jewish heckler by declaring, “Stalin brought Russia into the twentieth century. He is the new Moses of the Jews.”
Solly’s face was aglow, sitting in Madison Square Garden, watching Earl Browder, the quiet man from Kansas, mumble, “We’re living in the rapids of history and a lot of folks are afraid of being dashed on the rocks. But not us, comrades!” After the cheering, Browder mumbled, “Our ideological struggle has to be conducted as a concrete struggle arising from unfolding events. We demand that it be carried out in a fresh language. We will defeat those who spread pessimism and despair, confusionism and obscurantism, adventurism and recklessness, and thus establish unshakable ideological ties with the workers and the peasants. As the great, the wondrous Stalin says, ‘We will abolish underripe fruit and overripe fruit and quench our spirits with fresh fruit forever!’ All hail to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the first land of Socialism! All hail! May Stalin’s example be a fresh banana forever!”
Since revolution should be fun too, Comrade Stalin had designated a little laugh that the comrades could insert into their daily speech. It went like this: “Hey huh! Hey huh!” and it could be correctly expressed with a snicker or a snort.
And so as Comrade Browder spoke, he was interrupted after each lofty phrase with the audience of twenty thousand snorting, “Hey huh! Hey huh!”
“We will root out petit bourgeois influences, eliminating the final vestiges of right-opportunism and left-adventurism, never adopting a middle-of-the-road policy, steerin
g a firm course at this critical crossroads. At this juncture we must particularly stress the next immediate stage of progress for the people, which is inseparably bound up with, and requires the crystallization of, a broad democratic front coalition.”
Browder drew a breath, smiled, and finished reading: “Comrades, it’s no accident that we are here today. It is no accident, furthermore, that ours is the party that combats left-sectarianism, right-opportunism, and philistinism of all sorts. We shall continue to develop correct tactics adopted to the concrete situation.”
The crowd stood and shouted, “Hey huh! Hey huh!”
29 Perry Street
Combining espionage and rich cultural evenings.
—G. L.
In the late fall of 1954, three months after Solly and Dolly Rubell had been executed for espionage, some of the gang assembled for a musicale at 29 Perry Street.
It wasn’t easy to talk: walls had ears. They confined their conversation to certain topics and what might be inferred between the lines, and they played the radio loudly. Josh Moroze, the People’s Songbird, tuned his guitar in a corner.
Sophie Rich, Dolly’s best friend, said, “This happened in Florida a year before the arrest. It was a family vacation. Dolly’s father, Sammy, was getting senile. His wife Ruth would treat him like shit. He came out of the cabana with his penis hanging out of his pants. Dolly went up to him and told him very gently so he shouldn’t be embarrassed, and he put it back in. She loved her father to the very end.”
Hermie, Sophie’s husband, said, “And how that witch Ruth tormented Dolly.” Dolly’s mother Ruth had come to the death house only to put pressure on Dolly to confess, was buddy-buddy with the F.B.I., and didn’t even go to the funeral. “I don’t go to political rallies,” she said.
They were the children of Seward Park High School, CCNY’s engineering school, the Y.C.L. and the Steinmetz Society, old pals. Who says children cannot kill?
They had escaped the net. They didn’t know whether to laugh or cry: Solly, Dolly burned to death, unimaginable suffering; Maury Ballinzweig caught in Toronto after fleeing from New York; Bobby Metzger in jail for five years on a perjury conviction (only Wilfred Fuller and Joe Klein escaped to the Soviet Union)—and here they were, guffawing with relief, sucking candies, afraid to speak out loud, but free: “Ain’t this an amazing bitch?” said Max Finger in a half-whisper. He’d been in it up to his eyeballs.
“Look, I don’t know what they got,” Renée Finger said, “but I do know what they could have had when they went through my stuff.”
“Darling,” whispered Sophie Rich, “I had a camera that was no bigger than my garter.”
They had done the microfilming in this room. Once they had spent seventeen hours in a row photographing classified aerodynamics stuff Bobby Metzger had filched overnight from his Columbia University physics prof—he’d been entrusted with the combination to his personal safe. Then they’d collapsed in nine sleeping bags on the floor.
There had been drama in this room, soirees, good fucking, lectures on child rearing and string quartets that Solly had hired. Bobby Metzger had learned to play the guitar here. Dolly had sung arias here; they had celebrated Rosh Hashanah here by singing Christmas carols and roasting delicious suckling pigs and candied apples, rinsing them down with Riesling wines and Soviet vodka. Then they had watched porno movies, a thing they did only on Jewish holidays. There were glory days to reflect on; nobody could take them away from them.
The great Negro tenor Radford had been flown in from Holland one beautiful night; that booming voice, those eyes that were worldwide: “THE LIGHTS OF WALL STREET BURN BRIGHT ALL NIGHT LONG, COMRADES: WE MUST KEEP OUR LIGHTS BURNING TOO.”
Josh Moroze began softly strumming “The Peat Bog Soldiers.” Sure enough, Hermie’s lips moved and he was singing not the original words to the concentration camp song, but the words that Dolly had penned in her cell:
“We’re on our way, death house defiers
To remove you from their midst, those fascist liars.
Up and down we hear them marching
Millions, millions by our side—
Those who live and those they buried
Shall no longer be denied.
“Until at last the death house defiers
Wait not in terror for that dark and lonely chair.”
Renée Finger ran from the room, weeping.
Do We Ever Really Know Anything?
Define “ever”.
—G. L.
I
Six days after Solomon Rubell’s arrest in 1950, Sophie Rich had been sent by Solly’s friends from Manhattan to Bobby Metzger in Pittsburgh, where he was working for NACA. To Bobby’s amazement, Sophie had knocked at his door, walked in (her finger to her lips), sat down on the couch, took out $3,000 in bills, and wrote out a message in longhand on a pad of ruled paper. The message from Solly gave Bobby instructions on how to flee the country through Mexico. Declaring aloud, “Begone, stranger, I know not what thou seeketh, you must be nuts,” Bobby slammed the door on his old friend and flushed the message down the toilet.
Only a few days before Sophie’s visit, the F.B.I. had called Bobby in for a chat about the Perry Street apartment, and he was now sure they knew of Sophie’s visit. He panicked, and went to the Pittsburgh F.B.I. office and told them of the strange visitation. He said he thought he was being set up, although he did not know “by whom or what for.”
The following day, F.B.I. agents knocked on Sophie’s apartment door on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and told her what Bobby had told them. Bobby was no stool pigeon, so this was very strange news indeed. Sophie pulled herself together.
“Yes, indeed, gentlemen, Bobby is correct. Except that the message was not from Mr. Rubell, whoever that is.”
“Who was it from?” the beefy Irish F.B.I. lad inquired.
“Well, I really don’t know,” Sophie answered. “Why don’t you come in?” Beckoning the two agents into the apartment, she explained what had occurred.
“This may sound funny,” she said. “A stranger knocked on my door. I was on the phone with my boy friend at the time. The stranger was carrying an apple in his hand. I was uncertain about him, but told him to come in. Just to make certain, I left the phone off the hook so no one could disturb us.”
The agents sat down on the chairs Sophie provided for them and gazed up at her. “Well, sirs, the man came in and asked me if I knew Prescott. I said no, and he said, okay, that didn’t matter. He wanted me to go see Bobby in Pittsburgh. He took out $3,000 in small bills wrapped between pieces of black cardboard and held together with a purple rubber band. I hope you’re writing this all down.
“I immediately made plane reservations for Pittsburgh using the name Mrs. Harry Salsberg, and flew there the next day. When I saw Bobby he was very negative about this whole thing. He said I was ‘nuts to get involved with such people.’ He was absolutely right. Sometimes I don’t think I have a brain in my head. I went back to New York with the $3,000. Two nights later, the same stranger turns up here, asks me what goes, and took back the money. That was it.”
Summoned to appear before the grand jury the following week, Sophie sat in the waiting room across from Solly Rubell. The two sat facing each other for two and a half hours without showing any sign of recognition. Solly, whom Sophie had known for fifteen years, who had given her the greatest break you could ask for in this life.
When Sophie was called in to talk with the prosecutors, of course she told them she had been advised by her lawyers of her right to avoid self-incrimination. She would answer no questions without a grant of immunity.
Dolly Rubell was arrested three days later.
Sophie was given summonses four more times. Each time she refused to answer any questions, although they threatened to jail her for contempt. Agents followed her wherever she went and inspected her garbage.
Then she was called in and asked to look at pictures of men who might have been the stranger with the apple
who sent her to Pittsburgh.
She gazed at pictures of her dearest friends, all the group from Perry Street: Maury Ballinzweig, Wilfred Fuller, Joe Klein, Max Finger, everybody she knew from the neighborhood. None of them, she said, was the stranger who sent her to Pittsburgh.
When Bobby Metzger was summoned before the grand jury, he was asked if he knew Solly and Dolly Rubell, Maury Ballinzweig, Jed Levine, and the rest of the old gang. He said he did not know Solly at all and could not identify a photograph of him, and that he’d seen some of the others around but knew them only casually when he was at City College. He said he had not stayed in the apartment on Perry Street since June 1948 (when he had dropped in sometimes) and that there was never any photographic equipment there.
Bobby went on trial for perjury in February of 1953. The prosecutor recalled his answers to questions from the grand jury about Sophie’s visit to him in Pittsburgh.
QUESTION: What did you say to her, “Hello, Soph”?
METZGER: I may have said, “Hello, Sophie,” and “What are you doing here?”
QUESTION: What did she say after you said, “Hello, Sophie. What are you doing here?” You probably added, “To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”
METZGER: She must have said something to the effect of, oh, she would like to talk to me.
QUESTION: What did she talk about?
METZGER: Well, I don’t think she said anything about her mission to me aloud. She may have mumbled something else.
QUESTION: “Do you have a piece of paper,” or something?
Red Love Page 8
