People gasped. “Harry, oh my God,” a woman said to her husband, “this society is killing us. We’ve got to stop the killing before it’s too late.” And she bent his nose with a kiss. The second collection began. “My daddy is innocent—” began one of the children. Screams resounded across the auditorium and klieg lights crisscrossed, the organ ripped into the shrill light and the natural voice of the people was heard:
“INNOCENT … INNOCENT … INNOCENT … TOSS THE WRETCHED MONOLITHS INTO THE SEA … RIP THE MARBLES OF STEEL OFF BY THEIR HINGES … ISSUE FORTH THE DAWN.”
A speaker added, “And don’t forget Maury Ballinzweig.”
Maury fidgeted as they talked.
“I’ve read a lot about you,” the reporter said.
“Yes. What?”
He hesitated. “Well, that your wife told you of her relationship with another man while you were in prison.”
Maury stared at the toe of his slipper. He glanced up and looked down quickly, hiding what the reporter thought was a flush.
“The way the warden and the prisoners baited you about your wife. Your lousy lawyers, your best friend’s betrayal. The death of your father.”
Maury remained immobile.
“How did you survive?”
“Historical and political perspective,” Maury answered. “I didn’t look at it in personal terms. Solly was an ordinary person. I can’t consider myself heroic either. ‘Ordinary’ doesn’t mean you can’t become a hero.”
“About Solomon—” the reporter said.
There was a long silence.
“I never had a good hold on him.”
“Did you like him?”
Maury didn’t answer for a long time. They looked at each other. Maury lifted his arms behind his head and breathed from the belly. Then he looked down. “He was a comrade. This to me is saying a good deal. To understand what this meant is a whole story in itself.
“At that time I couldn’t relate to people. I was an atheist at five. I got into people much more in prison.”
“But did you like him?”
“He was wonderful with his kids.”
“Whenever people mention Solomon, they mention you.”
Maury shrugged. “It was a long time ago.” He paused.
“You said that to understand what Solomon’s being a comrade meant is a story in itself. What’s the story?”
Maury shifted.
“My friend,” he said, “beyond that, you’ll have to use your imagination.”
Later, the reporter said: “I thought it was Solomon I was most interested in.” He added, “Now I think it’s you.”
“Well, I’m here,” Maury said immediately. “Solomon isn’t.”
At the door, they said goodbye. They would meet again soon, Maury said. They shook hands, and Maury held the reporter’s hand for a moment longer.
Such buoyancy! Such sweetness! Such willingness! Such trust toward a stranger! Such civilized jargon! The reporter was astonished.
What had preserved Maury?
“I want to help you,” Maury had said to him.
The reporter went in search of Solomon Rubell’s sister. He found her living in Lefrak City with her second husband. Color TVs flashed in the living room, where her husband sat, and in the kitchen, where she talked to the reporter. She turned off the sound, but left the picture on.
“When I went to visit Solly for the last time, I was waiting outside. I heard the guards talking in the enclosure. One of them said, ‘When the spy is put on the slab.’ I wanted to run in there and say, ‘He’ll never die.’ I held myself back. I didn’t want them to know I was Solomon Rubell’s sister.
“A little boy, I remember him. He was the youngest of all the kids we played with. And such a beautiful baby. Little gold curls. And blue eyes.
“He sold lollipops on Shabbat, he wouldn’t take the money for them. He would come back the next day to collect the penny for the lollies.
“I loved his character. Nothing but pride. He was a wonderful person. Knowledgeable, very well educated, well read. To me he was like a king. If you look at me you’ll see Solly, but you’ll see a much handsomer man. Before you knew it he went to Hebrew school, took a keen interest in Hebrew. Put his whole heart into it.
“When he walked, he may have sloped a little. I don’t remember. He entered school speaking Yiddish and didn’t know English. But he learned so fast.
“Stanton Street and Pitt Street where we used to live are torn down. All gone. It was a shtetl. You were happy, you walked out, you were among friends and relatives. It was just a haimish atmosphere. In later years we had hot water and steam too. Jewish girls went with Jewish girls and Jewish boys went with Jewish boys.
“We used to walk by the river and throw our sins away … on Tashlikh on the first day of Rosh Hashanah … like crumbs or something. You say a prayer.
“Mama would cook and bake for every occasion. I loved Fridays but I hated Sunday when the laundry had to be done. Everything had to be stripped. And that tub in the kitchen. Mama used to stand with the board and wash the clothes. The tub would have curtains around it that she made.
“When my father got up to talk, everybody listened. And this is Solly, he inherited his intelligence, ability to talk; he was a born leader, a brilliant boy. He made sense. He wasn’t as fiery in later life as he was in youth. He changed. He married and had a family. Responsibility. You look toward prospering.
“The lawyer Rubin kept saying, ‘They won’t dare kill them.’ When my husband opened the door at eight o’clock, the first thing he said to me was, ‘I didn’t think they’d do it.’ He repeated that several times. And he embraced me. And we both cried. A half hour before, my little son who was twelve years old got up on the chair. He turned the clock back a half hour. He had the sense to get up on the stool, a little fella, to turn the clock back.
“Maury Ballinzweig? He wasn’t cut from the same cloth. Even his mother, I heard her say in court before he testified, she said, ‘I hope he’ll have some of Solly’s courage.’ She wasn’t sure.”
As a boy of fifteen in the fifties, the reporter learned about the Case. The Party took it up only after the Rubells had been safely executed.
He had stood in the thin crowd, the blinding sun on the podium at Union Square in 1954. They toiled onto the stage, the released Smith Act prisoners, blinking into the sun, thin, waving at the barricades behind which no one stood. Telegrams from Moscow, China, people’s republics of Eastern Europe were read. Fists clenched. Anna Louise Strong took a bow. Johnny “Apple Seed” Beaver sang. Reverend Jilly Morris Rogers blessed the Red Army. Molly Leash read martyr poems. Solomon’s sister spoke in a trembling voice: “To think he didn’t live to experience the joys of television”—and wept.
Henry Winston, blinded in prison, stood with his stick. Robert Thompson, his skull bashed in by a Yugoslavian fascist in prison, sat on a chair with a pillow. Benjamin J. Davis, dying of cancer, stood tall. He shouted, “I’d rather be a lamppost in Moscow than president here.” He dropped the rest of his speech and went right into his crowd pleaser: “They can call me red, they can call me black, but they can’t call me yellow. They can call me red, they can call me black, but they can’t call me yellow. They can call me red, they can call me black, but they can’t call me yellow.”
They bared their throats for slitting.
This was what they knew.
Their pale complexions and gabardine suits.
They knew their lines.
Eugene Dennis read and squeaked his proclamations. No one listened. There were no human sounds. In the dry listless day, on the hot earth across from Klein’s, the people’s martyrs stood silently.
The problem was that two days before Solomon Rubell was arrested, Maury Ballinzweig fled to Toronto with Linda. Within three weeks they were located by the Canadian police and Maury was handed across the border to a United States agent.
Maury had locked up his house in Flatbush, left his new Chevrolet in the
garage, and had not told his employers of his plans.
When he reached Toronto, Maury cashed in his return trip airline tickets and wrote to a friend in Manhattan, using such aliases as “M. Ballbearing” and “Myron Ballast.” Enclosed in his letters to his friend, Maury included notes for his parents and aunts and asked his friend to forward them.
Maury left Linda in Toronto and traveled to Vancouver by himself, using five other false names, to try to find a boat that would take them abroad. Traveling around the west coast of Canada, he inquired about passage to Europe or South America. He wrote later of those lonely days:
I spent a lot of time at the docks, walking around, hoping to find someone to talk to, someone who could give me a lead. Frankly, a lot of the time I just stood around, observing the local customs, or went “slumming.” The music in the pubs was mainly starkly conventional; Doris Day and Guy Lombardo, and at first it was a novelty to observe another culture. Then it got on my nerves. I hope the music did not adequately reflect the cultural outreach of the habitues. I might have enjoyed a dance or two, but this seemed to me like impermissible self-indulgence. For these forays, I purchased prescription sunglasses, fearing slip-ons would mark me as a tourist.
After he returned in despair to Toronto, Maury and Linda were sitting peacefully in their room sipping wine and reading the Bill of Rights and the Constitution when the door was broken open. Four men surrounded Maury with guns. “Don’t shoot,” he pleaded. They picked him up and carried him to a car, where they beat him over the head with truncheons.
They drove around with him for hours, questioning him and slapping him in the face when he refused to answer. At the Canadian border he was handed over to a U.S. agent, handcuffed, placed in jail, then returned to Manhattan. This kidnapping became the basis of Maury’s unsuccessful appeal of his conviction.
His flight had occurred at the height of McCarthyism.
But it just didn’t look right.
At the Rubell-Ballinzweig rallies, there were endless explanations of Maury’s “flight from the fascists.” They said that what had happened “would never be allowed to occur in the Soviet Union.” Progressive historians and dialecticians explained it over and over, and Maury himself called it “the most traumatic event of my life” and said that he had acted irrationally because of the atmosphere of “intimidation and repression” against opponents of the Korean War. The explanation that stuck came from the historian of the Case, Jim Bailer. Only he had read all the intelligence sources, he said. Only he had discovered the wonderful news that the Soviet Union had never once conducted espionage against the United States. The Soviets had told him personally that espionage was forbidden by the Soviet constitution. Then he presented the obvious parallel between Nazi Germany and America.
“Why did Maury flee from the truncheoned fascists, you ask? Should he have just stood there and waited for the knock at the door?
“I had the special privilege after I was wounded in World War II to visit Dachau with the fabulous people’s singer, Paul Robeson, in 1945. In traveling from Munich to Dachau, we asked lots of people where the concentration camp was. Not one of them admitted they knew. This should tell us something about our fellow Americans who pretend not to know what is going on all about us here in America. When we got to the camp, the most significant experience for me was this: seeing the ‘shower rooms’ at the death chambers, where they put so many innocent victims, both politicals and Jews, to their death. There were nozzles on the ceilings. They thought they were going to be given normal showers. Instead gas came from hidden pipes on the ceiling. Let us not be like those victims in Germany who went to their death not knowing what was happening. Let us be like Maury Ballinzweig”
In a public letter to Linda, Maury later wrote:
I am trying to conjure up memories of that time, yet I can remember the most trifling incidents of my life more easily. Whence the disparity?
The vacation—or “flight”—had many motivations. To see the land, to search out others—these too contributed a taste to the feast.
History entered, as it must: the Korean War, the witch-hunts, fascism’s imminence. Perhaps I was frightened of something, or thought I was.
Why did I apparently decide to opt for the experience of an “assumed” name? Why did I crave this particular experience more than once? Was I trying to hide something, and what could it have been?
Clearly there was some movement on my part toward anonymity. Was I on some level running away, or perhaps toward myself? Perhaps you, my wife, could contribute some wisdom to our understanding of these events.
Was I sympathetically projecting onto Solly’s experience and did I fear the concept of execution?
Put brutally, was there a cause for my behavior? What was it? Can one isolate in the maelstrom of being one simple cause in any case? This reduces life to simplistic levels, and is not my style at all.
The reporter called Maury every Sunday night, trying to get him to agree to a second meeting.
One Sunday in January, Maury told him that his mother had been mugged and that he was proud of her for not identifying the mugger. Then he said perhaps he could see him again in the springtime.
“I haven’t been sleeping well since I saw you,” Maury said.
“Maury, look, I want to see you again. I don’t want to push you—”
“Pal, you don’t have to—you don’t have to! Really! I understand. Let’s put it this way: the only chance I won’t see you—” Maury paused, and out came a stream of laughter, “is if I go down to El Salvador!”
“Oh God.”
“Look, going to these places is my idea of having fun!” “But—”
“I know, but I’m trying to have fun!”
Linda Ballinzweig had been impressed by Jack Henry Abbott. “These jailers who destroy people: they’re the ones who are guilty for any murders that happen afterward,” she said. “Look at the black people. They’re robbed of everything before they are even born. They don’t even get necessary nourishment in their mothers’ bellies. They’re justified in whatever they do.”
Maury’s early attempt to join the antifascist struggle on a politically mature level took him to Cats Paw, Georgia, on a dusty hot August day in 1941. Dressed in old khakis, sweatshirt, and sneakers, driving his beat-up old Ford, he planned to melt into the local population. He carried two expensive cameras with him.
Several things bothered Maury immediately about the town: the accent of the people, which grated on him, bringing to mind reactionary viewpoints of the worst racists; and the curiosity of the townspeople toward him, which he didn’t understand. Why did they stare at him? They were especially interested in his “German accent.” He told them with a snort of contempt that he did not have one, and “obviously could not have one, since I was born in Brooklyn.”
The young man checked into the Loveheart Tourist Home on Route 5. Then he walked into the Pevear Flour Mill and asked to see Mr. Pevear. He asked Pevear for permission to take pictures of the mill. He photographed the outside and inside of the mill and took close-ups of each piece of machinery. Then he headed for the Harris Lumber Mill and asked the foreman where and how much of the lumber was being shipped. The foreman didn’t reply. Maury asked if he could take pictures. The foreman told him to get permission from the owner. Within a few minutes, the foreman saw Maury snapping away and assumed Maury had gotten permission. When Mr. Harris, the owner, saw Maury taking pictures, he did not know that Maury had been told to ask his permission.
Crowds gathered.
Maury tried to relax them by chatting about matters of general interest on a level they could understand. He asked one worker if there was a shortwave radio set in the town, and the man stammered he didn’t know. “Well, can’t you find out?” Maury said and turned away. He asked a man who looked more enlightened, but the man walked away without replying and called the police. Maury said to a group who were looking at him, “Can you believe those English? Such incredible arrogance? In t
his day and age, with all those outmoded customs and mores?”
“What do you want here, mister?” one of the men asked.
“Basically, I have a deep interest in studying Tobacco Road country,” Maury replied.
When the town was getting ready to arrest Maury, Pevear took him aside and told him that he was acting in a very peculiar way. Maury took out his navy shipyard card and explained that he was on vacation. “But what does that have to do with your taking pictures of the mills?” Pevear said.
“I’m sorry I can’t seem to satisfy you,” Maury said. “Nobody seems to know anything,” he continued. “The English go on acting like they own the world, and in my estimation they can’t do anything right. Would you want to place your destiny in their hands?”
Maury walked off and entered a radio shop. He again asked about a shortwave radio, explaining he wanted to send a message.
Maury disappeared the next morning. When the F.B.I. arrived, the landlady told them, raising her eyebrows, that the young stranger had received two special delivery letters and that he was carrying one small bag.
Before meeting Maury, the reporter had spoken to anyone who was close to him: old Communists, a progressive historian, Sylvia Pollack, and Sophie Siskind. He traveled to Washington for the Freedom of Information files. He’d gone to a rally for Nicaragua on a steaming hot Sunday in Tompkins Square Park. Linda had mentioned the rally, and he thought Maury might be there and he could see what he looked like now. And there he was: an old man with a long white ponytail bobbing along with quick little steps, bringing a Coke to the tall young blonde who towered over him.
The progressive historian who knew Maury well had a cheery face. Yet when she spoke agitatedly in the dark room about the Hitler-Stalin pact, the reporter could swear a change took place—her face became redder and redder. Sweat poured down her; her cheeks hollowed out. He saw horns, and smoke.
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