Outwitting History

by Aaron Lansky

  Fortunately the shul wasn’t hard to find. Located at the end of a shady street lined with crumbling colonial mansions, the building would have been more at home in a New Jersey suburb, save for a bright blue arch that towered over the front entrance, giving it the appearance of a tropical McDonald’s.

  Our only contact at the shul—our only contact in the entire country, for that matter—was Adela Dworin, the head of the library and vice president of the official Cuban Jewish community. We found the Biblioteca, a narrow, windowless, book-filled room in the synagogue basement, but to our dismay, Adela wasn’t there. “Donde está Adela?” we asked one of the half dozen people in the room (contrary to what we had read in the tour books, almost no one in the country spoke English, and our Spanish was limited to what we had been able to cram from a phrase book the night before). “In a meeting,” we were told. We waited, ten, twenty, forty minutes, until Adela finally appeared, accompanied by Dr. José Miller, the seventy-eight-year-old president of the Jewish community—the man who had stood in the way of our removing Yiddish books three years before.

  This time we tried to soften the opposition by bearing gifts: expensive books in English, CDs of Jewish music, videos of classic Yiddish films, and more. But as we slowly laid them out, we received our first lesson in the harsh realities of daily Cuban life. Adela picked up one of the brand-new books we had brought—Joan Nathan’s Jewish Holiday Kitchen—and asked with a sad smile, “So tell me, did you happen to bring the ingredients to go with this?” Gabe and I shrugged sheepishly. We agreed to speak again that afternoon, after we had had a chance to examine the library’s Yiddish holdings.

  Over the years, I had heard rumors that there were “thousands upon thousands” of abandoned Yiddish books in Cuba. If that was true, we didn’t find them. According to Adela, most were probably lost when Castro confiscated Havana’s Zionist Center in 1978 and turned it over to the local Arab League. No one knows for sure what the new tenants did with the center’s Yiddish books, but Adela felt certain that the few hundred volumes in the synagogue library were all that remained.

  I picked a random volume off the shelf—a copy of Habana lebn (Havana Life), a Yiddish magazine—and, just leafing through the pages, began to understand how rich Cuba’s Jewish life had been before the Revolution: Yiddish schools, libraries, publishing houses, literary journals, lectures, cultural centers, and three kosher restaurants, one of which went by the irresistible name of Moyshe Pipik’s (Moses Belly-button’s). Was it really possible, forty-three years after the Revolution, that of that whole rich, teeming Jewish life, only these few hundred books survived? And if so, imagine how valuable they must be!

  With Adela’s help, Gabe and I squeezed between the stacks and set to work. I’d like to report that Cuba’s few hundred remaining Yiddish books were in good shape. They weren’t. Relegated to the bottommost shelves, many had grown farshimlt, covered with mold from the heat and humidity of the Caribbean climate. Stuck to one cover was a dead cockroach the size of a mouse. It wasn’t long before Gabe and I were sneezing from the dust and spores, our hands black, our clothes filthy, our backs and knees aching.

  But it was worth it. Some of the volumes were the same New York imprints we had seen a hundred times before: Yehoash, Sholem Asch, Sholem Aleichem, even a Yiddish translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But there were also rare books we had never seen: an 1872 imprint from Stuttgart, and another from Palestine dated 1947; a Yiddish translation of Isaac Babel’s short stories published in Odessa in 1925; Holocaust memoirs published in various D.P. camps right after the war; and just as we’d hoped, hard-to-find Latin American imprints, including three printed in Havana before the Revolution. By the time we had finished, we were more eager than ever to get these precious volumes back to the States.

  Ober vi kumt di kats ibern vaser? (How was the trick to be done?) Gabe and I discussed strategy over lunch, and that afternoon we presented Dr. Miller with what seemed to us a reasonable offer: Instead of actually taking the books, we proposed borrowing them long enough to digitize them. They were moldering anyway; in their place we would return brand-new, digitally generated, acid-free reprints.

  Dr. Miller didn’t agree, exactly, but he didn’t say no, either. So that night Adela, who cared deeply about the books and wanted to see them saved, let us load two bags with the most valuable titles and take them back to our hotel. We returned the next morning, and this time the library staff not only greeted us warmly, they led us to a stash of additional Yiddish volumes hidden in a closet. But the key to success still lay in Dr. Miller’s hands. So at noon, we offered to take him, his wife, and Adela to lunch. In a country where good food is scarce, Dr. Miller didn’t have to be asked twice. He suggested we go to “the best fish restaurant in Cuba,” a waterfront establishment run by the Ministry of Fisheries that, outside of the tourist hotels (where Cubans were not allowed), was one of the most expensive eateries in the city. We were driven there in style, by a native Cuban driver in a brand-new van donated to the Jewish community by our good friends at the Kaplen Foundation of New Jersey. (Larry Kaplen, a young screenwriter and a trustee of the foundation, was a member of our board.) On each door of the van was a Jewish star, and on the back, in large block letters, the English words “Kaplen Van,” which apparently was the Cubans’ idea of an acknowledgment. “People think it’s Hebrew for ‘Hyundai,’” Adela quipped.

  From the outside, with its large neon sign, Cuba’s “best fish restaurant” reminded me of the Cape Cod of my youth, but inside it was straight out of the Soviet Union: more waiters than customers, and huge, multipage menus with only a single item, red snapper, actually available.

  “Why only one kind of fish?” I asked Adela.

  “What does it take to go fishing?” she asked in return.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, “what does it take?”

  She raised an eyebrow, as though marveling at my naïveté. “It takes a boat!”

  She didn’t have to spell it out: If the government started supplying boats, how long would it be before the entire Cuban fishing fleet was docked in Miami? So we settled for the snapper, along with lox, Coca-Cola, and ice cream—unimaginable luxuries in a country where even rice and beans can be hard to come by. When we returned to the library, Dr. Miller informed us that the books were ours. Adela sadly conceded that she was one of the last Yiddish-readers in all of Cuba, and she asked for nothing, not even reprints, in return.

  Carrying two suitcases packed full of Yiddish books, we returned to the States the same way we came, unhindered by officials from either side. Regrettably, several hundred volumes had to be left behind (there was a limit on how many we could stuff into our luggage), but Adela graciously agreed to put them aside until we could send someone to pick them up. I wrote a letter to our members asking for help, and among the scores of responses was one on behalf of Jimmy Carter, who was planning to be in Havana in June, the first visit there by a former U.S. president since the Revolution. We were honored, of course, particularly in light of President Carter’s role in freeing Cuban prisoners. But other members and friends were able to go even sooner, and within a month of our return, every one of Cuba’s known Yiddish books was safe and sound in Amherst, ready to be digitized and shared with the world.

  23. Back in the U.S.S.R.

  Ladies and gentlemen, we are now entering Soviet airspace . . .”

  Kenneth Turan, our translator Kevin Lourie, and I crowded around the small window. All we could see was winter far below: frozen tundra, vast solid lakes and marshes, and evergreen forests shrouded in snow. We stared for an hour, maybe more, as our plane rushed on. There was only snow, ice, and emptiness as far as the eye could see. If Napoleon had been on this flight before he ordered his troops to advance on Moscow, he surely would have called the whole thing off.

  What, then, were we doing, advancing on Moscow at the end of November 1989? After distributing Yiddish books to students and scholars in twenty countries, we had, for the first time, beg
un receiving requests from individuals and organizations in the Soviet Union, where most Jewish books had been illegal for fifty years or more. As one man wrote from Estonia,

  During the decades of Stalin’s murderers they stuffed our mouths and cut off our tongues, and we were unable to speak Yiddish, forbidden to read or write or learn about Jewish history and literature. Two generations have grown up knowing nothing about Yiddishkeit; they are strangers to the sound of mame loshn, strangers to Sholem Aleichem, Mendele, Peretz, Opatoshu and the other bearers of our culture. You cannot imagine the fate of those of us who tried to do something to further Jewish knowledge. But now, at last, the times are changing. . . .

  Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, liberalization, had opened unprecedented opportunities, and all over the country scattered Jews were looking for Yiddish books, determined to reclaim the language of their parents and grandparents, the culture that prevailed before the repression began. Our initial response was to ship books by post, but they never arrived. We sent two more trial boxes six weeks later, two more a month after that, two more the next month—much like Noah sending out his doves after the flood, except that our books neither arrived at their destination nor returned. Officials in Washington surmised they had been confiscated by overzealous customs agents or, more likely, waylaid by thieves—corrupt postal workers who routinely intercepted foreign parcels, looking for items to sell on the black market.

  So we decided to go to the Soviet Union ourselves, to figure out firsthand a way to get large numbers of Yiddish books into the country. It’s hard now to convey the sense of urgency that informed our travels. Today we think of the fall of the Soviet Union as inevitable; back then no one knew for sure if glasnost was the precursor of deeper change or merely a window that would be slammed shut at any moment. We moved quickly. My friend Kenny Turan, a noted film critic and seasoned journalist who had traveled in the Soviet Union before, agreed to accompany me. We left right after Thanksgiving and didn’t return until Christmas Eve. During that eventful month—it felt more like a year—we attended the founding conference of the Vaad, the first-ever gathering of Soviet Jewish organizations; we shivered with thousands of other mourners at the outdoor funeral of Andrey Sakharov; and we were present at the Lithuanian Embassy in Moscow on the night the Lithuanian Communist Party declared its independence. But mostly we were on the move, traveling unofficially by train, asking questions, making contacts, laying the groundwork for a second trip in the spring, when we would return with the books themselves.

  To call most of Russia’s one-and-a-half million Jews assimilated doesn’t begin to capture the reality of their lives. Although their internal passports clearly marked them as Jews, most lacked even the most rudimentary Jewish knowledge. In Minsk, the capital of Byelorussia (now Belarus), we met the granddaughter of a rabbi who had never heard the words “Torah,” “menorah,” “Pesakh,” or “Shabbos.” In Moscow, the Mikhoels Jewish Cultural Center—the opening of which had warranted a front-page picture in the Times —turned out to be a sham, a Potemkin village for the deception of American Jewish officials.

  It wasn’t always that way. The founding document of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (the precursor of the Bolsheviks)— a document roughly equal in significance to our Declaration of Independence—first appeared in Minsk in 1898, in a bilingual text of Russian and Yiddish. During the Kerensky regime, the official Russian currency was trilingual, printed in Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. The early Bolsheviks, many of them Jews themselves, embraced Yiddish, as opposed to Hebrew, as the authentic language of the Jewish proletariat. After the Revolution the government supported secular Yiddish schools, newspapers, journals, publishing houses, and perhaps most important, Yiddish sections of the major Soviet research academies, where scholars conducted first-rate research in Jewish history, ethnography, and linguistics. State-run theaters produced experimental Yiddish plays, and avant-garde artists explored Jewish themes. As a counterpoint to Zionism (and to strengthen their own borders), the Soviets established Birobidzhan, a Yiddish-speaking “Jewish autonomous region” in the Soviet Far East, near the border with Manchuria. But it was not to last.

  By the early 1930s, as official anti-Semitism intensified, Yiddish schools and research academies across the country were closed, books burned, and finally writers imprisoned or killed. Solomon Mikhoels, the director of Moscow’s Yiddish art theater, perished in a suspicious automobile accident in 1948. The best writers—Dovid Bergelson, Peretz Markish, Moyshe Kulbak, even the poet Itsik Fefer, who wrote, “When I say sun, I mean Stalin”—all were executed in a final purge on the night of August 12, 1952.

  Even in 1989, this history was still uncomfortably close at hand, as we learned on our second day in Moscow when we were introduced to a Yiddish poet named Chaim Beyder. In 1949, Beyder had been in Birobidzhan when a directive came from Moscow denouncing Yiddish writers as “enemies of the people” and ordering that all Yiddish books be destroyed. Even now, forty years later, Beyder’s voice trembled as he told us how he was forced to watch as soldiers emptied the Jewish library, doused the books with kerosene, and set them ablaze—an experience he captured in a Yiddish poem called “Der shayter (The Pyre)”:

  With what anguish those Yiddish books burned

  and trembled in the smoke’s stationary vortex,

  their very pages upturned

  like lifted limbs

  writhing in pain amid the flames

  This was not ancient history. Gennady Estreich, the assistant editor of Sovetish heymland (Soviet Homeland), the country’s only Yiddish literary journal, a man not much older than I, told us that his mother had been a Yiddish librarian in a small Ukrainian city from the 1930s through the 1950s. “Every week Moscow would send the librarians a list of the latest banned books they were supposed to destroy. Every library had a special fireplace in the courtyard just for this purpose, and every week my mother had to join her colleagues all across the country in burning another batch of Yiddish books.”

  Even worse than the fate of Yiddish books was the fate of those who wrote them. In Minsk we were visited by an elderly woman named Dina Zvolovna Kharik—the widow of the Yiddish poet Izi Kharik. “What I have lived through!” she sighed as she settled into a chair in our hotel room and poured forth her tale. She was just fifteen, she said, and Kharik thirty-four when they met. They married a year later, in 1932. “The government married us; I was in Komsomol, he was in the Party, we didn’t believe in a khupe [the traditional Jewish wedding canopy]. We got congratulations in Yiddish from France, from Argentina, from all over the world. I took everything I owned to his apartment in one little suitcase. One dress, that’s all I had.”

  Kenny Turan, who was taking careful notes, picks up the story from there:

  For a time, life was sweet. The Khariks had two sons. Dina Zvolovna remembers with glee the many new experiences which awaited her, including a 1937 trip to Moscow. . . . But by the time the Khariks returned to Minsk, life started to unravel. “They began taking people, arresting them all over the city,” Dina Zvolovna remembers. “At first, we thought that because the people were arrested, they must be guilty. We knew Kharik was innocent and besides, what could we do?”

  Then a close friend was arrested. “Kharik was very upset, he said, ‘I know he’s innocent.’ It was a horrible situation and Kharik was afraid. I said to him, ‘Why don’t you go away and rest.’ So he went to a small town near Minsk, a little bitty place where the Writers’ Union had a rest house. And soon after that, I got a message: ‘Dina, they’ve arrested Izi Kharik.’”

  A month later, she received a letter from Kharik. “He had to write all the bad things he’d done, sign that he was an enemy of the people, to be able to write that letter. ‘I’m not guilty,’ he wrote, ‘they must have mixed me up with someone else. I’m coming back—don’t marry anyone else.’” It was the last communication from him she was ever to receive.

  There was worse to come. “A month later, at night
, someone came for me. They were taking all the wives. My oldest son, three years old, and his brother, a year and a few months, were lying in their beds. I had to leave them where they were. They took me and I never saw them again.”

  Dina Zvolovna ended up in a women-only prison camp in the Soviet Far East. She was assigned to a forced labor brigade, and nearly died from drinking contaminated water after exhausting herself fighting a grass fire. “We fell on this water like animals,” she remembers. “Afterwards, I was so sick, I couldn’t stand for a year. There were no medicines, no remedies. One woman carried me everywhere. Without this woman, I would have died.”

  Dina Zvolovna spent ten years in this camp before a doctor gave her a certificate saying she should be released for health reasons. She spent most of the next decade living clandestinely, without proper papers, fearful of renewed police sweeps, before Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin began the process of Kharik’s rehabilitation. Eventually, she was able to return to Minsk, where she was given an apartment and a small pension. “I found out recently,” she says quietly, “he was shot in 1937 together with other Russian writers.” And the children? “No one,” she says, “knew where the children were.” To this day she had not found them.

  After politely but very firmly refusing to be photographed, Dina Zvolovna stood up, shook hands, and expressed regret that we hadn’t given her enough notice of our arrival to allow her to cook something for us. As she prepared to leave she mentioned that all her own copies of her husband’s work had been lost. Aaron asked if she would like us to send her copies. “With all my life,” she said, emotion suddenly in her voice. “With all my heart!”