by Masha Gessen
It would have been straightforward if only this had been a time when colleagues would write a recommendation for a Jew without worrying about the potential personal repercussions. “But you were late once,” one of the other censors said. “But you have used your position to bring your daughter to see our dentist,” another recalled. “That was not an honest action worthy of a Communist.” Now, this was a transparent hint. The dentist at the Central Telegraph’s clinic, which only employees were allowed to use, was a Jewish woman—and bringing a Jewish child to see her just might turn out to be part of a Jewish conspiracy.
When Ruzya’s candidacy year expired, someone—perhaps Omelchenko—bent the rules so she would not be disqualified, which would have brought automatic dismissal from her job. She became a perennial candidate and thus a potential problem for the Glavlit Party organization. To cover themselves on the record—to distance themselves from her irregular status, which was itself a violation—her Party-member colleagues made criticism of her work a fixture of all workplace Party meetings.
She never felt relieved for not being accepted into the Party. In fact, she bawled her eyes out every time she was rejected.
In a letter to the Central Committee culture chief Mikhail Suslov in June 1951, Omelchenko boasted that, since taking charge at Glavlit after the war, he had reduced the percentage of non-Party members among the censors from 5.4 to 1.6. With the total number of censors on staff hovering around sixty, that 1.6 percent would have been my grandmother.
It is worth noting that Omelchenko’s boast was written in response to a denunciation of him by one of his censors and that this denunciation was apparently related to a scandal surrounding a Jewish Glavlit staffer who had been arrested. Following his arrest, two staff members were taken to task for having once recommended him for induction to the Party. Someone clearly thought Omelchenko should be the one held responsible.
It is also worth noting, as my grandmother does nearly every time the subject of Glavlit comes up, that “Omelchenko was a very decent man,” a “good man.” What does that mean? “There were no ugly scenes at Glavlit, as there were at so many other places.” At times such as these the standards of human decency are lowered.
What would have been an ugly scene? In March 1949 the history and economics departments of the Soviet Academy of Sciences held day-and-a-half-long meetings aimed at cleansing their ranks of “rootless cosmopolitans.” Isaac Mintz, one of the leading Soviet rewriters of history, who happened, unfortunately for him, to be Jewish, was now accused of “cultivating an admiration for German historiography in 1928” and engineering “the cosmopolitization of Soviet history” together with his three Jewish students. During a break, when the preliminary results of the meeting were reported to the Central Committee, an order to add more names to the pariah list was issued. So in the afternoon session another ten or so historians were found to have sinned. Across the hall from the historians, the economists were attacking an old Bolshevik, Yevgeniy Varga, who also had the bad luck to have been born Jewish. He was now accused of miscalculating the Germans’ oil reserves on the eve of the war. One drunk speaker shouted that “the blood of Russian soldiers is on Varga’s hands!” Varga’s only son had died in the war.
At around the same time the Moscow section of the Soviet Writers’ Union held a meeting at which the Jewish poet Aleksandr Kushnerov was scheduled to denounce the JAC and agents of cosmopolitanism in the union ranks. Kushnerov proved not up to the task: when he was literally dragged to the podium, he burst into tears, unable to utter a word. He died too soon afterward to be arrested, but his wife was consigned to the Gulag.
NOVEMBER 17, 1948
A friend is the bearer of a good rumor, a rare treat these days: the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee has a job opening for a Hebrew translator; Ester should be qualified. She has to agree this is a dream job.
That, admittedly, is an adjustment if not an exaggeration. Half a year ago she was planning on the academic career for which she had been groomed ever since the university resumed functioning in 1944 and Professor Piotrovsky strong-armed her into switching to the classics department to specialize in comparative linguistics. At the time, she was heavily pregnant and none too enthusiastic about doubling her workload, but the professor persisted. She excelled in her new field. Her thesis on Plato’s dialogues should have served as her ticket to graduate school. But Piotrovsky warned her a few days before her thesis defense that something might go wrong. Her defense turned into one of those “ugly scenes,” with the committee split evenly between the old classics professors, with little to lose, proposing a mark of “excellent,” and the young ones, in favor of “good.” Finally, a young instructor who knew nothing of the thesis was yanked from her lecture to cast a tiebreaking vote in favor of “good,” and that was the end of graduate-school dreams.
Well, not exactly. There was a glimmer of hope a month or so later, when one of the department’s old men, Professor Radtsik, alerted Ester to a graduate-school vacancy in classics at the City Pedagogical Institute. A less prestigious institution than the university, this one should have welcomed a graduate with all “excellent’s” on her exams, even if she had merely a “good” thesis. She got “excellent” on all four of her entrance exams and considered herself, briefly, a graduate student—until she was summoned by the rector, one Shegolev. The middle-aged burly man wasted no time on formalities, ignoring even her “hello,” and spitting out what sounded like a rehearsed statement: “Comrade Gessen, I want to tell you that I am the boss at this school, and I make the decisions about whom I want to have as graduate students. I don’t need you here, and I am not admitting you to graduate school. I would advise you against filing complaints, which will do you no good. Good-bye.”
She realized she was lucky to have been admitted as an undergraduate before the war, before all this began: her professors, who did not have to take the blame for having admitted her, had been free to teach her. So until she graduated she had been shielded in a sense from the anti-cosmopolitan campaign and, like most people who live in a place and time of great danger, she had secretly suspected she personally was immune to the worst of it.
Unlike her friend from the Bialystok gymnasium, Baruch Kaplan, a chemistry star who must have applied to nine different graduate schools, Ester quickly accepted the futility of further efforts and started looking for a job. She had to. Bella, suddenly discovered to be a “cosmopolitan,” had lost her own job teaching Polish to future intelligence officers, and Boris, who defended his engineering dissertation just as she was finishing her thesis, was working as an assistant professor for a pittance.
Six months have passed since she began looking—a long time to try to live on one person’s inadequate earnings—and she is seriously starting to worry that if she does not find a job soon, the four residents of this room in this communal apartment, Ester, Bella, Boris, and four-year-old Sasha, will starve.
As it is, they have not been eating well, and it shows. A few months ago a pediatrician paid a house call to Sasha, who seemed to be running a fever. Bella tried to draw the elderly Jewish doctor’s attention to the boy’s looks, an object of family pride: “Look, Doctor, his eyes show two thousand years of Jewish sorrow.” “At this age,” the pediatrician responded, “Jewish sorrow can stem only from malnutrition.”
The jobs she did not get: a Latin instructor at a teachers’ college; a cataloger of war-trophy books at the Lenin Library; a librarian at the Library of Foreign Literature; a librarian anywhere; anything at all. Most of the interviews had gone well, except for two or three occasions when she was asked how she was related to the Gessen who had served in the prerevolutionary parliament. He was a cousin of her father-in-law, she assumed, though the elder Gessen had never entertained such queries. In any case, she generally said, “We are no relation: that politician converted to Christianity, and our side of the family did not.” If the elder Gessen, who is sure she or her similarly careless mother will one day get them all arrested,
knew she answered this way, he would have a fit, and he would have a point. Then again, the outcome was always the same, regardless of the pleasantnesses of the interview: when she returned to see the personnel officer who had reviewed her application—the form always asked about ethnicity right after establishing name, surname, patronymic, and date of birth—she invariably heard that there had been a misunderstanding, there was no vacancy after all, they were sorry (or not), nothing to be done.
So the JAC job sounds like a dream because they could hardly be looking for a non-Jew—and, anyway, where would they find one who knew Hebrew, the study of which has been banned in the Soviet Union for thirty years?
NOVEMBER 18, 1948
It was such a good interview that it hardly felt like one. She half expected to see the JAC dignitaries—at least the famous poet Isaak Fefer, who took over after Mikhoels’s death—but the fairly grand, if dusty, two-story building on Kropotkin Street was half empty. Still, a manager greeted her enthusiastically, administered a simple test—interpreting as she read from an Israeli newspaper, a task whose only difficulty was the excitement: she had never seen an Israeli newspaper before. Then he had her fill out an application and, without any personnel department interview or other fuss, offered her a job with a mind-boggling salary of one hundred and fifty rubles, which would more than double the family’s income. And that, for translating Israeli papers. If there is no God, at least there is luck and possibly justice. Her new life will begin on Monday, in four days. Meanwhile, the room on Gorky Street is the site of gleeful wine-drinking, and no one, temporarily, is worried whether Sasha can fall asleep with only a curtain shielding him from the cheer.
The Central Committee order instructing the Interior Ministry to shut down the JAC, but “not to arrest anyone yet,” was signed two days later, on Saturday, November 20, 1948.
NOVEMBER 22, 1948
She recognizes the uniform worn by the young man standing guard in front of the two-story building, his bayoneted rifle held ceremoniously across his chest: he is NKVD. She knows what the seal on the door means. Still, she asks, and the soldier responds obligingly and predictably: “The Committee is no more.” It is back to the job hunt, and there is no hope.
Owing to the demented precision of the most powerful conspiracy theorist on Earth, the major events of Stalin’s war on the Jews took place on the same date in different years.
On January 13, 1948, Mikhoels was murdered.
On January 13, 1949, the wave of arrests of JAC board members began with the detention of fifty-nine-year-old historian Iosif Yuzefovich and fifty-seven-year-old medical doctor Boris Shimeliovich. The JAC itself had been shut down in November 1948 on orders from the Soviet of Ministers; Fefer, the poet David Gofshtein, the actor Veniamin Zuskin, who headed the Jewish Theater after Mikhoels’s death, and Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, had all been arrested in the fall; before the end of January 1949, the remaining high-profile JAC activists were detained. Zhemchuzhina would disappear; the rest of the JAC detainees would become the accused in perhaps the most convoluted of all Stalinist trials. All were interrogated and tortured into the spring, and all confessed to having engaged in espionage—posthumously implicating Mikhoels as well. Before a trial could begin, though, they reneged on their confessions, and the investigation had to be reopened. Instead of the show trial that was probably meant to have taken place in 1949, they were finally tried in a closed session from May to July 1952. Thirteen—that is, all but two of the accused—were executed on August 12, 1952. Historians have come to call it “Stalin’s last execution.”
But since the JAC trial had to be held in secret—because the accused refused to cooperate—the chronology of the Jewish purges was the stuff of between-the-lines hints and whispered news of yet another Jewish writer or Jewish doctor or simply Jewish acquaintance arrested. Every Jew in the Soviet Union wrote her own history of the last years of Stalinist terror; every Jew had her own day when she felt she was personally a target, when she lost sleep and hope, and when she first thought her life might be worth more than her principles.
DECEMBER 22, 1948
How many ways are there to arrest a person? They can come in the middle of the night, take the elevator or the stairs, conduct a search or not, and lead you away to a car or a bread truck. They can find you at home, at the dacha, or in the hospital. They can bring you back and take you away again. Or they can even just telephone.
When the call came for Ester, she realized that she was someone for whom just a telephone call would be sufficient. Why would they bother sending a car for someone who could hardly get away—any attempt to escape would leave her son and her mother as hostages. The person on the phone told her to report to the building at Dzerzhinsky Square at ten in the morning. That leaves her about twenty hours for the good-byes and the packing: a sweater, a change of underwear, a bar of soap, a cupful of sugar carefully wrapped in paper, and some dried bread in the same sort of packaging. She and Bella take turns crying and comforting each other. In the intervals, Ester worries about the future. Yes, Boris promises he will take care of Sasha. No, of course he will not abandon her mother. He turns his back to her and busies himself with Ester’s bag, crumpling the paper loudly.
Ester knows she brought this upon herself with that telegram to Warsaw two years ago, but she will not mention it for fear of her father-in-law’s wrath, which would for once be well founded. The Gessens are in and out of their adjacent room, her father-in-law frowning, her mother-in-law crying, her sister-in-law pestering the child until he, too, is on the verge of tears. There will be no sleep tonight, only the constant shuffling of fear.
After this most sleepless of nights, Ester does not even think about the absurdity of her actions: she is actually delivering herself to prison. She moves in a fog, aided by the vagueness of Moscow light on a winter morning, and she is on the metro, then out of it at the other end of Gorky Street and walking uphill to the unconscionably large secret-police building squatting behind him. She wanders among the brass number plaques until she finds the right entrance and pushes the heavy oak door, almost falling in to hand her passport and her bag over to a young man wearing the same uniform as the soldier in front of the JAC a month ago.
This soldier ruffles in her bag and raises a cracked-lip smile: “Girl, these sorts of bags belong next door!” He chuckles. “That’s all right, though, I’ll keep it safe for you here—you can pick it up when you go out.”
Ester reminds herself that this means nothing. A friend of a friend was jailed, interrogated for days or weeks, refused to sign a confession, and then the investigator told him there had been a mistake and he would be released; he accompanied Yasha to the door of his apartment but caught his hand just as Yasha was about to ring the doorbell. “Just one more little thing,” he said. “Sign these.” And when Yasha did not sign the confession again, he was taken back to jail.
The young man is talking on one of those faceless telephones that connect directly to one of the important offices.
“Someone will be here in a minute to take you to Major Ivanova.” He smiles again, hanging up.
Major Ivanova, up three floors in the elevator, then down the hall, down a quarter-flight of stairs, then another long corridor—Ester will never find her way out of here, even if she is free to go—is a woman of about forty whose most memorable feature is her uniform, its skirt precisely knee-length and its jacket a bit too tight in the chest.
“Hello,” she says. “Sit down.”
Ester sits down, hugging her elbows, partly for fear that this is not what it looks like, partly for fear that it is just a business conversation—though God only knows what the business could be. She is certainly not hugging herself because she feels cold—she is dressed warmly and hideously: for jail.
“We have a proposition for you,” Ivanova begins with a sentence noxiously reminiscent of Major Gurov. “We would like to offer you a job. Tea?”
“No, thank you.”
“You
mean ‘no, thank you’ to tea, I hope. Tell me if you change your mind. We would like to offer you a job as a Hebrew translator.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You see, with the formation of the State of Israel, we have a lot of this sort of work. And no one to do it. Your name came up in connection with the case of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.”
“Oh!” This is the first thing all morning that has made sense.
“Now, before you say anything, I want to tell you about the job. You will have a flexible schedule: there really isn’t enough to keep you here all day long, and there is no point in just sitting around, you understand? So you will come to work in the mornings and leave as soon as you are done. The salary is two hundred a month—that’s better than you would have had at the Jewish committee, as I understand it. We’ll start you out as a lieutenant, and if all goes well, you’ll make captain before you retire. We have retirement benefits—oh, but it’s too early for you to be interested in that. Now you talk.”
“I’d like to think about it and give you an answer tomorrow.”
“All right.”
“I’ll come at the same time tomorrow, yes? Now, if I may, I would like to get home.”
“Oh, I understand.” Major Ivanova laughs. “Your family must have been scared when we asked you to come.”
“They are still scared. I want to go home and tell them I am all right.”
“Well, then, until tomorrow.” Major Ivanova smiles again, indicating that they are allies who have risen above petty fears of arrest.
