A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel

by Levin, Edmund

  She started off well enough, though, the words pouring out of her in a steady and forceful stream. After the judge’s usual opening question, her testimony fills seven columns of small print in the transcript, save for one brief interruption. As with her physical appearance, descriptions of her voice are contradictory—it was said to sound both “metallic” and “melodic,” with an unusual range, hitting high notes and then descending so low the sounds seemed to growl from deep in her chest. (One correspondent compared her to the famed mezzo-soprano Anastasia Vialtseva, beloved for her virtuoso renditions of gypsy songs.)

  She spoke well, but perhaps too well, too fluidly. To one correspondent, she seemed to speak “as if she were running away.” She described the key scene vividly—how Beilis and the other Jews ran after the children at the brick factory, how Zhenya barely escaped, leaving Andrei behind. It was all very compelling, but suspiciously well-performed for a secondhand account. (She was supposedly only relating Zhenya’s story, after all.). It struck one reporter that only two kinds of people describe scenes so vividly: eyewitnesses and liars.

  Cheberyak recounted her story of the trip with the journalist Stepan Brazul to Kharkov in December 1911 and how Arnold Margolin, or one of his confederates, offered her the enormous sum of forty thousand rubles to confess to Andrei’s murder, and how she would be spirited out of the country or defended by the best lawyers in the land who would secure her acquittal. Nearly as important for the prosecution was another story she told: how she had sent Zhenya to buy milk from Beilis not long before Andrei disappeared, and how the boy supposedly returned, pale with fear, saying two Jews dressed in strange black garments had run after him, but he had gotten away. One of the Jews was old, the other tall and young. According to Cheberyak, her son said one looked like the hay and straw dealer, Shneyerson, the supposed Hasid of the noble line, and the other could have been Shneyerson’s father. (When Shneyerson testified, he turned out to be a rather surly, self-confident, and clean-shaven young man who did not at all look the part of a nefarious Hasid.)

  After the prosecution was done, Gruzenberg began an orderly cross-examination, addressing this potentially most dangerous witness with no hint of confrontation in his voice and in an almost soothing tone. Vera Cheberyak was an impressive witness as long as no one asked her any real questions. Gruzenberg began with a very simple one.

  “Were you questioned many times by the investigators?”

  “Yes, many times,” she said, though she couldn’t remember how many.

  From that one exchange everything followed. Gruzenberg was leading her step by step until she stood over a trapdoor.

  So she had been questioned a number of times. When, Gruzenberg asked her, had she first told the authorities Zhenya’s story about Jews grabbing Andrei at the factory? She insisted that she had first told investigating magistrate Fenenko the story in June 1911, even though there was no record of that.

  But in that deposition of June 24, he calmly asked, “did you not tell the investigator that Zhenya did not go [out with Andrusha to play]?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  “And didn’t the investigator question you again, in July?” Gruzenberg asked. In fact, he asked, hadn’t the investigator questioned her several more times?

  Again: “I don’t remember.”

  Gruzenberg then asked the judge to corroborate the dates on which Vera had been questioned by Investigator Fenenko. After some shuffling of papers, the judge responded: “On April 22, June 24, July 11, July 26, and December 3, 1911.” Gruzenberg interrupted, “Excuse me, your honor, but she was also questioned September 13.”

  “Absolutely correct,” the judge said, “September 13,” making a total of six times.

  Then Gruzenberg had the judge confirm the devastating fact: in every one of her six depositions in 1911, Vera Cheberyak had said that Andrei had come to ask Zhenya to go out and play but Zhenya had refused. The records showed that the first time she asserted the two boys had gone out to the Zaitsev factory and that Beilis had chased after them was in her deposition of July 10, 1912, fourteen months after the murder. It seemed no coincidence that her new story came only a few weeks after Brazul had accused her of being involved in the crime.

  But had she ever mentioned Mendel Beilis in any of those depositions in 1911?

  The record showed she did do so once, on July 26, four days after they had both been arrested simultaneously. (It will be recalled that prosecutors at first seriously considered charging them as a tandem, but Vera Cheberyak was released two weeks later.) She had told investigators that, come to think of it, there was reason to suspect the Jewish clerk. She herself had no firsthand information, she said, but Andrei’s aunt Natalia had told her she had had a dream in which Andrei was stabbed to death by Jews!

  Did the witness remember telling the investigator this rather odd story, which notably made no mention of Zhenya, clay grinders, or Jews with black beards? “It seems maybe I did,” Cheberyak said, “but I don’t remember exactly.”

  The trapdoor had been sprung. Taking his turn at questioning the witness, Karabchevsky made sure Cheberyak would find no way to climb back out. His cross-examinations, unlike his flowery summations, were elegantly simple. Her husband, Vasily, had testified that Zhenya had told him about the Jews who had chased and grabbed him and Andrei at the Zaitsev factory immediately after it happened, on March 12, 1911. Zhenya had supposedly run in panting and in terror. Did her husband tell her about that? Yes, she said. But she didn’t react in any way, share it with anyone? “I didn’t pay it any attention,” she responded. “I didn’t attach any significance to it.”

  Karabchevsky wisely refrained from following up, letting the absurdity of the answer speak for itself. Even the simplest peasant juror would wonder: How could any mother possibly be so indifferent to the attempted kidnapping of her own child and the disappearance of his friend?

  It would be unfair to Vera Cheberyak to allow her disastrous performance to impair her reputation as a virtuoso liar. The courtroom was not her natural habitat, and she had simply told too many contradictory stories over too long a period of time, all of which were in writing, with every page of every deposition signed by her. She had no explanations for her shifting accounts, other than saying “That’s what Zhenya told me” at a particular time, or “I don’t remember.”

  The public may have felt cheated at the diminished and intimidated Cheberyak it had witnessed. But it got a glimpse of the real Vera Cheberyak two days later, when she was put into the eye-to-eye confrontation with the boy Nazary Zarutsky, whom she had allegedly tried to coach in the waiting room. The boy confirmed the earlier witness’s story that Cheberyak had told him to say he had been with Andrei and Zhenya, even though it was not true. “Look me in the eyes. How dare you lie!” Cheberyak shrieked.

  “The boy suddenly shrank,” a reporter wrote. “His face, small like an apple, winked and twitched in fright.” Finally the crowd could see the woman who dominated, who bullied, who terrorized. The defense was about to erupt in an objection, but Judge Boldyrev beat them to it. However favorable he was toward the prosecution, this display was too much for him. “Don’t you dare intimidate the witness!” he barked at Cheberyak.

  In one of his daily reports to St. Petersburg, a secret police agent inexplicably struck an optimistic note about this damning turn of events. “Although the testimony of Cheberyak herself is of dubious reliability,” he wrote, “the chances for the prosecution have slightly increased.” But civil prosecutor Alexei Shmakov scribbled down a harsher verdict in his notebook: “She has given herself away, the lying bitch. And that is all there is to it.”

  10

  “We Have Seen the Killer”

  The eleventh day of the Mendel Beilis trial began unusually late, at twelve thirty in the afternoon, giving the jurors a welcome break. This session promised to feature two exotic witnesses subpoenaed by the prosecution—a pair of Jews from Western Europe hinted to be two of the “men with
black beards”—unindicted accomplices in Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder. However, the essential player in the day’s proceedings was not a witness or even a human being, but Mendel Beilis’s cow. The trial, peculiar from the outset, was growing even stranger.

  The cow, of course, could not testify for herself, but she had already been testified about in such detail that she had become a compelling, even pivotal character. She had been acquired by Beilis to provide milk for the family along with some excess he could sell to bring in a few rubles. She had fallen into a ravine and broken her leg. The leg had apparently healed (the extensive testimony on this score is, frankly, contradictory), but she became a money-losing burden to her owner. With the approaching winter, feed had become too expensive and Beilis insisted he had sold her off in September 1910 to pay off his debts. The prosecution sought to prove that assertion was a lie.

  The astounding amount of time spent debating the fate of a cow was due entirely to Vera Cheberyak. She had claimed that, shortly before the murder, she had sent her son, Zhenya, to buy milk from Beilis and he reported that there he had seen two Jews, dressed “strangely” in long black garments. The prosecution asserted that these men were likely accomplices of Beilis in killing the boy. The story’s credibility hinged on the bovine’s whereabouts in March 1911. The prosecution was obsessed with proving the cow had still been part of the Beilis household.

  The testimony was revolving more and more around Cheberyak—to bolster her credibility in accusing Beilis, prove her a liar or even culpable in Andrei’s death, or clear her of any involvement. As she sat in court day after day, her hat feathers fluttering, she increasingly overshadowed the defendant whose presence was becoming, as one observer remarked, “an annoying formality.” Even tangential matters related back to her, as was the case here.

  The dispute over the cow started fittingly with a Mrs. Bykov, whose name derives from the Russian word for bull. The persistent questioning—“Mrs. Bull, what do you know about the cow”—caused some amusement. What she knew was that the Beilises did not have a cow by early 1911. In fact, she remembered having helped out Beilis’s wife, Esther, by buying milk for her.

  State prosecutor Oskar Vipper was not pleased with her testimony. “What do you think happened to Beilis’s cow?”

  “They probably sold it.”

  “Was there ever a case when a cow of his died?”

  “There was.”

  “Now you say it died and earlier you said they sold it. There you go!” His sarcastic tone suggested this witness could not be trusted.

  The next to take the stand was an old man named Vyshemirsky, who had lived two doors down from Beilis on Upper Yurkovskaya Street. Beilis was glad to see this familiar face. Vyshemirsky was a cattle trader from whom Beilis had bought livestock over the years and a freelance carter who often hauled bricks from the Zaitsev factory. Vyshemirsky was someone Beilis knew well, someone he trusted. The judge started off by asking him what he knew about the case.

  “I don’t know anything. I only know from what people tell me,” Vyshemirsky answered.

  The judge then asked, “From which people?”

  Vyshemirsky took a long pause. He was someone from whom nothing unusual could be expected. But Beilis, knowing him so well, picked up on something unusual in his demeanor. He later recalled that he wondered why Vyshemirsky was taking so long to gather his thoughts, and felt a brief moment of unease.

  From whom had Vyshemirsky heard things? “From Ravich,” he answered the judge. “He told me that his wife dropped by Vera Cheberyak’s and she saw a body there around the same time as the boy was killed.”

  The story that Vyshemirsky said he had heard from his friend Amerik Ravich caused an immediate uproar. A body in Vera Cheberyak’s apartment? Where had this tale come from? It was nowhere mentioned in the reams of preliminary depositions. Outraged and suspicious, the prosecution demanded to know if this man’s testimony was truly a surprise to the defense. The defense insisted that it was indeed.

  Adele Ravich had supposedly seen the body, wrapped in a carpet, in the Cheberyaks’ bathtub. Her husband confided the story to Vyshemirsky as the couple prepared to leave the country. Amerik Ravich said Vera was afraid the authorities would get him and his wife to talk about what they knew—and so she gave them the money for tickets to America.

  While “the body in the carpet” seized the public’s imagination, it curiously did not much affect the trial. A Kiev Opinion reporter half-seriously suggested that Vyshemirsky’s story was not nearly inventive enough to galvanize a trial in which the bizarre had become routine. “In any normal trial, it would have brought the proceedings to a halt, occasioned a reassessment,” he wrote, but under the circumstances, both sides treated the revelation as a nuisance. Vyshemirsky—a plainspoken and reluctant witness—did appear to be telling the truth about what Ravich had told him. But had Ravich, or his wife, fabricated the story? The couple had indeed suddenly left for America the previous year.

  Both sides willingly left the witness’s sensational story behind, and the questioning veered back toward the more comfortable territory of the cow and its whereabouts in March 1911. To civil prosecutor Zamyslovsky’s final question, “Was the cow black or spotted?” the witness pled ignorance.

  The testimony about the cow was the prelude to the appearance of the two Jews from abroad, Yakov Etinger and Samuel Landau. The prosecution had strongly intimated that “Etinger and Landau”—they were invariably referred to in tandem—had been the two “strangely dressed” Jews that Zhenya had supposedly seen on the milk run to the Beilis household.

  Landau, who was in his late twenties, was a cousin of Mark Zaitsev’s, son of Jonah, the founder of the family brick business that employed Beilis. Etinger, in his early thirties, was Zaitsev’s brother-in-law. Landau lived in Germany and Etinger in Austria-Hungary.

  The pro-Beilis spectators greeted their appearance in the courtroom with a soft chorus of satisfied laughter: Could any pair have been more comically miscast for their supposed roles? These fashionably dressed young men were impossible to imagine as black-mantled, fanatical Hasids of the “noble” line, as the prosecution asserted. They were Jewish nobility but only in the sense of having been born into great wealth. Etinger, who knew no Russian and had to speak in German through an interpreter, was a landowner and merchant. Landau composed operettas. A commentator in Kiev Opinion wrote that the two men would be at home “on Paris boulevards, at a table with cigars in their mouths, flowers in their buttonholes, sipping aperitifs on the veranda at four in the afternoon.”

  Indeed, “Etinger and Landau” were quintessential, even exaggerated specimens of Western European assimilated Jews. Out of their native habitat in Kiev, they were a strange species to be gawked at. In the Russia of Nicholas II, a Jew could be thoroughly “acculturated,” like Oskar Gruzenberg, but never truly “assimilated.” Jews were so excluded from major institutions—universities, the army, the government—and prohibited from physically even inhabiting vast parts of the empire, that they could never belong to the overall society. Etinger, on the other hand, had grown up in a country where the notion that a Jew could not live wherever he wished would seem bizarre and where Jews were highly integrated into the most prestigious state institutions. The Austro-Hungarian army had twenty-five thousand Jewish officers who would soon distinguish themselves in the Great War. (In its entire history, the Russian Imperial Army produced only nine Jewish officers and one general.) As for Landau, he had come to feel more at home in Berlin than in his native Kiev, where he was officially not even permitted to stay in his own mother’s house, located in a fashionable neighborhood where Jews, with few exceptions, could not legally reside. (His mother, as the widow of a wealthy merchant, was classified as an exception, while he was not.) Upon their arrival in Kiev in December 1910, Etinger and Landau registered falsely with the police as residing in approved “Jewish” areas. Both men, in fact, stayed with their families in forbidden neighborhoods. Gruzenberg, perhaps
letting his emotions get the better of him, declared to the court that these farcical indignities were “not a comedy, but a tragedy.” Anti-Semitism was certainly a scourge in Western Europe, as it was in Russia, but such grotesque forms of state-sponsored discrimination were unthinkable in a civilized society, a point Gruzenberg left unspoken, but that was obvious enough to sophisticated spectators if not the jurors.

  In the end, Etinger and Landau’s testimony and an examination of their passports and other documents clearly showed that, while each man had indeed visited Kiev in December 1910, they had both left in January 1911, weeks before Andrei’s murder. The prosecution was undone: the two men could never have crossed paths at the incriminating time with Beilis’s controversial cow.

  Foundering, the prosecution cast about for other Etingers and Landaus. These men, perhaps, were not quite the right ones, but they had relatives. What of them? The defense objected: many Etingers and certainly endless Landaus could be produced at will. When the prosecution pointed to an Israel Landau mentioned in the court record, Gruzenberg asked that Samuel Landau be recalled to the stand.

  “Are you the son of Israel Landau?” Gruzenberg asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is your father dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did he die?”

  “1903.”

  “Where is he buried?”

  “In Kiev, in the Jewish cemetery.”

  The prosecution had been flummoxed yet again.

  The trial’s twelfth day—October 6, 1913—was extraordinarily dull. Many a ticketholder, even quite a few reporters, deserted their prized seats for hours. But the testimony was remarkable in that it actually bore directly on Mendel Beilis’s guilt or innocence. One after the other, shaggy-haired workers from the Zaitsev factory testified that operations had been in full swing on the day of Andrei Yushchinsky’s disappearance. The factory grounds had been filled with men hauling bricks, shouting, cursing, and presenting their receipts to be signed by Beilis. If Andrei had been abducted there that day, it would not just have occurred in broad daylight, but before a large audience. And the dozens of signed receipts showed that the defendant had been quite busy with his work.