by Masha Gessen
Ruzya is wrapping up the night shift, translating the reports by American correspondents—only the Americans file at night. It has not been a difficult night: for once, the big Soviet story of the day, Ambassador Andrei Gromyko’s initiative in passing the UN resolution in favor of a Jewish state, is written out of New York. Moscow-based correspondents have filed simple regurgitations of the official Soviet media reports—the easiest work for the censor. Here all she has to do is compare the English-language copy to the Russian text and, provided there is no commentary, stamp her copy “cleared,” then ring the bell for the secretary, who fetches the dispatches and sends them on before handing their copies back to the reporters. Only once did she have to translate a small passage and call it in to Stalin’s secretariat on the direct phone, the black one without a number pad. It was something about the possibility of Soviet Jews now moving to Palestine, and being purely speculative, it was, of course, not cleared.
She has already prepared the morning report, a digest of the journalists’ dispatches. As usual, it begins with United Press’s Walter Cronkite, at once the most concise and least imaginative of the reporters, so she translates his brief item almost in its entirety, then adds a few details mentioned by the others, then the passage that was not cleared—and she is done for the day. This is certainly not as interesting as when she has a long New York Times essay to translate—these often lose large chunks when she is censoring, but she translates the unadulterated copy, and this is always a challenge, the most creative part of the job. But the short report means it won’t take long to dictate it to the typist, then she is out the door and in the car, which will make an ostentatious U-turn on Gorky Street and rush her down the Garden Ring to present the report to Omelchenko. By then it will be daylight but still an hour or so before the city’s homemakers come out to raid the stores, so she should be able to find something in the food shops before going home to sleep. Shopping has become an especially depressing chore in the months that have passed since the rationing and money reform, with most food-distribution centers closing and prices rising by a factor of three. Compiling today’s report is such mechanical work that she is already thinking through her shopping as she writes it, and, as she anticipates the wave of exhaustion that will cover her in the store, she starts to hurry and rings for the typist.
The door opens immediately, and for a moment she tries to fathom how the typist transported herself so quickly, but, of course, it is Zadorozhniy, one of the two people on the day shift today. Of all the people she dislikes in this department—and, if pressed to talk about it, which she never is, thankfully, she would have to admit that she dislikes all the people in this department—Zadorozhniy makes her the most uncomfortable. Here he is, smiling at her as he takes off his tall military-type hat and carefully hangs his soft British-style coat. Possibly the only difference between the ones from the Foreign Ministry and the ones from the Interior Ministry is that the former are snappier dressers. Otherwise, they are equally uncultured and comparably unpleasant.
Zadorozhniy hangs his brown silk scarf over his coat and smooths it lovingly before turning his large figure toward her again. “So, good morning and congratulations!” he booms.
“Hello.”
“A national holiday for you, eh?”
She looks silently at the door, making it clear, she hopes, that she is just waiting for the typist so she can complete her work.
“Finally, a state of your own!”
The typist enters with a few sheets of paper, says her greetings, and sits down at the typewriter. Ruzya starts dictating, hoping she can pace herself so that she does not have to pause. But as slow as Ruzya tries to be, the typist cannot keep up and glances up in slightly pathetic surprise. Ruzya stops.
“So, you must be packing your bags to go to your new motherland!” Zadorozhniy laughs at his own vision.
Ruzya thinks she notices the corners of the typist’s mouth struggle with a smile that wants to break through. She dictates another two sentences.
“I see your friends the Americans are just as excited about this.” Zadorozhniy demonstrates that he is paying attention to the dictation. “You’ll all have a great time living in the desert together!”
What a relief that the report was short, that she is already pulling on her coat even as she rushes out the door toward the car. A year ago the car seemed so glamorous. To think: she was driven around by a personal driver! Not her personal driver, but still. Now it signifies only relief, and the pleasant calm of a visit to Omelchenko. He is such an unusual man, the head of Glavlit, so—well, for lack of a better word, he is so cultured. He is very literate, and sometimes he finds small errors in her text, like when he pointed out that commentary is a masculine noun, but he is always gracious about pointing out mistakes. In her department everyone says that this handsome, imposing sixty-year-old widower is courting her. This is absurd, of course, but she can sense that he is attracted to her, and she feels safe.
The same morning that saw Ruzya, exhausted and dejected, step out of one of the back doors of the Central Telegraph building and disappear into a shiny black car, brings Ester, animated, flushed, and slightly disheveled, running in through the front entrance. She is holding the morning’s Izvestia in her hand.
The words in the paper are plain. As though Jewish homelands were created every day. Ester wonders if there has been a mistake, for surely life could not so casually go on if the dream of all dreams has been fulfilled. And if it is true, what is she to do with this information? For what to Ruzya is at once an abstraction and a threat—the news has already turned the tension in the office up another notch—to Ester is a thrilling, astonishing promise. She was reared to wait for this event but never to expect it, and she certainly never believed in the possibility of Erez Israel after all of those with whom she had dreamed and hoped were killed.
So who will share her joy? True, almost everyone she knows well is Jewish. Still, her mother was always only a reluctant participant in the dream, and any mention of Israel’s existence now will make her grieve for her husband. Ester’s husband, like her friend Lena Zonina and her acquaintances at the university, are Soviet Jews, a separate breed whose disregard and even distaste for all things Jewish she will never understand. She knows what they will say: the era of nation-states is over; any state must base its culture on a spirit of internationalism. They say this even though that spirit is less and less in evidence in the Soviet Union these days, and there are ominous signs that when all of them graduate the university in six months’ time their job options will be as limited as their ethnic origins are clear. There is no immediate personal cause for celebration in the creation of Israel. Ester cannot leave this country. There was a brief window of opportunity a year ago, when former Polish citizens were allowed to go back, but she hardly considered it: there was nothing left in Poland to call her back and, at that time, no other place in the world she could call home. Besides, Soviet-born spouses could not go along, and she figured Boris would not let her take Sasha. Not that she particularly wanted to leave Boris anyway.
This recent history reels through Ester’s mind as she arrives at the Central Telegraph, which is no more than a twenty-minute walk from home. Why is she here? Because festive occasions call for congratulations. She has no one to congratulate at home, but surely there are people alive still who can share her thrilled amazement? Where would these people be? In Erez Israel, sure, but she does not know anyone there. She once knew a lot of Jews in Poland. She knows—she is not sure how or where she snatched this bit of information—that there is a Jewish committee in Warsaw. She recalls the Soviet-style name: the Central Committee for the Jews in Poland. They are her people; they will know what she feels.
She marches up to the polished wood counter, grabs the red-painted pen, and, dipping its point into the well of purple ink, writes out the telegram: CONGRATULATIONS NATIONAL HOLIDAY STOP LASHANAH HABA’AH B’YERUSHALAYIM STOP ESTER GESSEN. “Next year in Jerusalem.” She pauses
. There is a chance, always, that someone she knows will read the telegram. Is that not why she is sending it? She adds: HYPHEN GOLDBERG. She elbows her way to the telegram window before she can think better of her actions, as she well knows she should: the risk she is taking is great. She imagines the NKVD coming to arrest her and Arnold looking at Boris in reproach, as though to say, “I told you marrying someone so emotional and willful was a bad idea.” But she has already put down the coins that will pay for her words to travel to Warsaw.
Where Chaika Grossman, the blonde girl from the Bialystok Hebrew Gymnasium and the ghetto resistance, will pick it out from a sea of impersonal telegrams sent by Komsomol committees and figurehead international friendship organizations and recognize “Ester Gessen-Goldberg” as the wonderful Estusha Goldberg from Bialystok Ha-Shomer ha-Zair and remember it for the rest of her life.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
JANUARY 14, 1948
The morning papers are brought in the still-black night, as usual, and the top one—Pravda—has a few melting, prickly snowflakes on it. Ruzya already knows what is going to be in the papers: there was a TASS—Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union—announcement yesterday, and more fact whispered as rumor and rumor declared as fact than she could absorb. And still first she looks to the obituary, as though something could be gleaned from it. “One of the greatest actors of all time,” Pravda says of Mikhoels. “The image of this great, admirable Soviet artist will rest forever in our hearts.” None of the papers has a word about the circumstances of his death. “Has died,” “death has ripped out of our ranks,” “left this life,” “life has stopped”—such are the terms for murder. Even the official version—a car accident—is but a whisper. But Batsheva, Samuil’s mother, is no whisperer. Last night, when Ruzya went to the Minkins’ to pick up Yolochka, Batsheva announced: “He was murdered.” She said it with a certainty that made Ruzya reach for Yolochka with both hands, as though to snatch her away from the knowledge. Batsheva saw.
A single image haunts every memoir’s description of Mikhoels’s funeral: a nameless thin man, standing on the roof of a low two-story building to one side of the theater courtyard where Mikhoels’s body lay in state, playing the fiddle in the brutal cold, well into the night. I suspect the image may be inspired by the role for which Mikhoels would be best remembered—Tevye in Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman, later popularized in the West as Fiddler on the Roof. In any case, Ester, who went to the funeral with Bella and several fellow students, does not remember the musician. Ruzya did not go. As a principled cosmopolitan she felt no strong pull to such ethnocentric occasions, and in this era of “anti-cosmopolitanism,” which really meant anti-Semitism, it was best to stay away no matter how one felt. She had seen Mikhoels in the theater only once, as Tevye. Decades later she still remembered his performance, which had reduced the audience to tears.
Both within the country and abroad, Mikhoels had come to symbolize all of Soviet Jewry. In 1942, moved by a creative fit of desperation, the Soviet authorities formed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), whose main purpose was to mobilize American Jews to aid the Soviet war effort. Contrary to Stalin’s statement at the end of the war, when he gave ethnic Russians exclusive credit for the victory, Soviet Jews proved very useful to him during the war. Virtually all prominent Jews who had survived the purges of the 1930s were called upon to join the JAC board; they included foreign minister Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, film director Sergei Eizenshtein, and violinist David Oistrakh. In 1943 Mikhoels, poet and secret-police informant Isaak Fefer, and writer Ilya Ehrenburg were dispatched on a public-relations mission to the United States.
The trio’s first line of attack was damage control related to the then-recent disappearance of Polish Bund leaders Henryk Ehrlich and Viktor Alter, executed by the NKVD on the credibility-defying charges of collaborating with the Nazis. In addition, they had to cover up the Soviet government’s abandonment of about a million and a half Ukrainian, Belorusian, and Russian Jews to the Nazis, by advancing the fiction that the Soviet Union had evacuated a million of them (this particular lie survives in some Western books about the Soviet Union to this day). Some members of the Soviet Jewish propaganda team may have been more deluded than others, but on most occasions, it seems, they were consciously lying. They worked wonders: rallies at which they spoke drew tens of thousands; estimates of the amount of money they collected vary from a million and a half to sixteen million dollars. They managed to convince the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—“the Joint”—to renew its relief work in the USSR: the Joint had broken off relations with the Soviet Union in 1938, when the purges reduced its Soviet staff from three thousand to one hundred. Finally, they clearly contributed a great deal to making Americans supportive of the idea of a second front.
The JAC kept on after the war, an incongruous organization in the midst of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign and on the threshold of the Cold War. But, if its continued existence had served to reassure some, then Mikhoels’s death took away almost any doubt that Soviet Jews were a people under siege. In a message to the secretary of state, a U.S. embassy official reported that the actor’s death “has roused a remarkably large crop of rumors in the USSR.” Ruzya, of course, had no doubt that the most frightening of the rumors—that Mikhoels was murdered by the secret police—was true. Ester, who was still months away from feeling the full extent of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, did not doubt the official version. Even if she had, she probably would have gone to the funeral anyway, disregarding the voice of caution.
JUNE 1948
“We should chat,” Konstantin Omelchenko says after he signs Ruzya’s morning report and gives it to his secretary to make the Rotaprint-machine copies for the twenty people who receive it. “You are not in a hurry, are you?”
“No, Konstanin Kirillovich.”
“Very well. This has to do with the annual attestation coming up.”
She feels her feet go rubbery and a sensation of weightlessness spread almost up to her knees. The attestation is Glavlit’s annual torture, an exam on the List, which is just that—a list of all the facts and objects, some grouped, some listed separately, that the censors cannot allow to be disclosed. There are probably more than a thousand points on the List, and, were the examining experts to make it their goal to fail someone, it could always be done. Ruzya does very well on the List—she is young, and she has a linguist’s trained memory, but if Omelchenko is bringing it up, there must be trouble.
“You generally do very well on the List, and I have no doubt that there will be no trouble this year.” Omelchenko’s words eerily echo her thoughts.
“Yes,” she manages.
“But the censor’s job, as you know, is not a mechanical application of the List, but an ideologically important post.”
She thinks she hears a tinny, false note in Omelchenko’s words, a carefully coded sign of insincerity, but louder than that she hears the threat: so many acquaintances have lost their jobs lately, and their jobs were not nearly so sensitive as hers. “Yes,” she says.
“So, I’ll get right to business.” He smiles.
He smiles. She is not fired. She smiles.
“You need to put in an application to join the Party.” He smiles again, a kindly smile in which she reads the gallant hint that, though it would be rude to mention this, she turned twenty-eight in March, which makes her three months too old now to remain a Komsomol member, and anyway, he only wants to help, for surely she understands how unusual it is for someone in such a responsible position not to be a Party member.
Does it matter that she has always wanted to stay out of the Party—well, if not always, then at least since that day in 1937 when the school Komsomol organizer asked her to become an informer? Does anything matter anymore? Just a few weeks ago, her friends Max and Lusya Akivis, along with another half dozen of their friends, were expelled from Moscow University’s mathematics faculty on the eve of their graduation exams. One of their crow
d, a most devoted Komsomol member, had asked the university Komsomol secretary to explain why the authorities seemed to be targeting the Jews. So the whole circle of friends—including Max, who was already a candidate to join the Party—was kicked out for, as their documents indicated, “actions that demean the honor of Soviet students.” The catalyst for the girl’s question had been a set of verse letters written by Ehrenburg and his close friend, the poet Margarita Aliger, which had been circulating in handwritten copies among people who trusted one another. “Not sparing our lives, we took paths deserving of legend, to hear what—that they, the Jews, defended the rear in Tashkent!” says the woman’s side of the correspondence. “We are to blame because we are the Jews,” responds Ehrenburg. Because it had all started with the poems, Max and his friends decided to try to ask Ehrenburg to intervene. “You are luckier than you can know,” the famous writer told them. “Lie low, sit quiet, ask no questions, and wait for the times to change.”
“Yes, a great honor,” mumbles Ruzya. “I want to file an application.”
She thought it was a disgrace, a distinct new step in her dishonorable cooperation with the system, but after that conversation with Omelchenko, Ruzya never doubted she had to join the Party to save herself and her child. The procedure for joining was straightforward enough: one filed an application and became a candidate, then submitted two recommendations from colleagues who were Party members, then one’s candidacy was considered at the next workplace Party meeting. If one did not become a member within a year of being granted candidate status, one was disqualified.
