The Yid

What is he doing in this cold, impoverished, barbaric land? The Moor of the World Revolution, a Yiddish-speaking Moor who killed one man and dumped three dead ones in a well.

The newly acquired status of murderer hasn’t begun to bother Lewis, and the only remorse he squeezes out of his soul that day is the remorse for feeling no remorse. While logic is commanding him to sense eternal doom, he stubbornly continues to feel hopeful, energized, free.

Are Levinson and Kogan serious about their plot to assassinate Stalin, or is this a theater game staged by infantile old men? Has Lewis really joined the plot, or the farce, or whatever it is?

Levinson and Kogan are real-life Red partisans, real guerrillas from the Civil War, yet they are nothing like the characters from Soviet war epics or the heroes Lewis imagined at the outset of his obsession with Russian Communism.

These men are profoundly disorienting. Did they fight wars in this ambiguous state of mind, between pursuit of victory and utter nonsense? How can they switch so easily from killing to absurdism, from swordplay to wordplay? With all that smoke, do they have the capacity to understand each other?

Has Lewis agreed to follow these clowns in a horrific, heroic, hilarious dive off the trapeze? He has just killed a man. Was this in self-defense, for a cause, or for a gag?

Humor plays no role in Lewis’s life. Certainly, he can never acquire the ability to treat death—especially death he caused—as a lighthearted matter.

This disconnect has nothing to do with language. He speaks Russian like a Russian and Yiddish like a Jew. Lewis understands all their humor, registers it, even plays along with it sometimes, but after receiving aggravation or pleasure from it, moves on to more important matters. Men like him learn to laugh much later in life, if at all. Lewis has only one way to find out what is real: by testing.

“It would be nice to have some help,” he suggests later on the afternoon of February 25.

“I heard that after the war, a group of religious fanatics took a trainload of their people across the border,” says Kogan. “I think they crossed it, but I know one who stayed.”

Kogan seems serious, too. That is, perhaps, a little more meaningful than Levinson’s perpetual straight face. Of course, Kogan has been around theater for so long that he may be in character as well. And the compact of their friendship seems to require Kogan to play a supporting role.

“And how, may I ask, would a Bolshevik like you know religious fanatics?” asks Levinson.

This offends Lewis. He has heard that some exotic factions of the Bund were so loyal to their mother countries that they regarded emigration as treason.

He knows that some of these zealots advocated imprisoning their brethren for speaking Hebrew, the language of the rabbis, instead of Yiddish, the language of the workingman. Could such absurd beliefs have survived this deep into the revolution, to be encountered in February 1953? Now a living, breathing answer stands before him.

“If I know my fanatics, he will tell us to go take a shit in the sea,” says Levinson.

“We have weapons,” suggests Lewis. “Three pistols. I can give him mine.”

“For what does a fanatic need a pistol?” asks Kogan. “Whom will he aim it at?”

So this unflappable man has a sense of humor, albeit indistinguishable in tone, content, and delivery from political information lectures.

“Lewis, you’ve just witnessed a moment of Bund humor,” says Levinson. “This is exceedingly rare, so savor it. I have known this man for thirty years, and in that time he hasn’t even smiled.”

In the autumn of 1927, when he was studying in Berlin, he came across a news story that mentioned a man who was almost certainly his father. The story mentioned him as an executive of a New York shipping company that was doing battle with striking dockworkers.

Kogan dropped a postcard to the company, mostly to tell the family that he was alive, that he had finished an accelerated medical course for veterans, that he had been practicing medicine in a regional clinic, and that the Commissariat of Health had sent him to get surgical training in Berlin.

Three months later, a tall young man in a fedora and a trench coat came to the hospital and asked for Dr. Aleksandr Kogan. He identified himself as Dr. Kogan’s brother.

Kogan was assisting one of the hospital’s luminaries in scraping out a tumor that originated in a child’s bone. That day, the decision was made to amputate. Kogan was present during that discussion before he went to the cafe across the street from the hospital where his brother waited.

What do you say to the brother you haven’t seen in over a decade? Vladimir was fourteen years old when they parted. Now he was twenty-four, a tall American who spoke Russian perfectly, but with a slight accent. He had graduated from Yale and was now doing something remarkably strange for an advertising company with offices in New York and Chicago.

The family had reestablished itself nicely. Being a shipping entrepreneur with money in Switzerland is a wise strategy if your goal is to ride out humanity’s greatest perils. The family lived on Park Avenue. His mother had a Steinway again (the one left behind had been commandeered by the Odessa Opera). “She can play Chopin and glance at the park,” Vladimir said, and Aleksandr was happy to hear this.

Vladimir’s job sounded vaguely interesting. Sitting in an office on Madison Avenue, he read every tidbit of information emanating from the Comintern, the Soviet bureaucracy created to stoke the flames of world revolution. Kogan had no problem with the Comintern, even when it engaged in espionage. Countries do engage in such pursuits. And, of course, he personally knew Zeitlin.

“What relevance does it have to your American life?” Kogan asked with genuine surprise.

“You would be surprised. Speaking broadly, your Comintern is about social engineering. My job is to try to find ways to adapt your experience for commercial purposes.”

“You are trying to create business out of our pursuit of the overthrow of capitalism?”

“I will be sure to bring this story to Moscow. I am sure my friends at Comintern will be amused.”

You might think that discussion of the emerging American business of public relations is a strange topic to come up at a meeting of brothers who hadn’t seen each other in a decade. Kogan realized that, of course, but Yale and the Red Army are universes apart, as are surgery and advertising. The fact that the two young men had anything to say to each other was to be accepted for what it was.

Vladimir was sent as an emissary from their parents. He had an offer: if Aleksandr wished not to return to Moscow after his training in Berlin, the family would support him as he obtained American credentials. Kogan was touched, of course, but the idea of leaving his country struck him as unthinkable.

It seemed to violate some fundamental principle—a commandment—something akin to “Thou shalt not kill” and Primum non nocere. He will not kill. He will do no harm. He will not run to the United States. He will remain in Russia, doing his part, as his young country rises from the rubble of the Civil War that he helped win.

And now, as steam engines pull cattle cars toward Moscow, as mobs of street thugs and Red Army units are being organized to carry out a coordinated action, as the prospect of public executions looms, does Dr. Kogan wish he had accepted that offer? Does he wish he were performing appendectomies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or teaching anatomy at Yale, or listening to rich patients whine on a couch somewhere on Park Avenue, or—more likely—taking care of Negroes in Harlem?

No. Kogan made his choices decades ago. Whatever comes, he is where he wants to be.

When she stops at the dacha, Kima looks like she has been running. Lewis surmises that she has important news to report.

The cautious stares Kima exchanges with the stranger—Moisey Semyonovich—betray an instantly formed feeling of mistrust.

“Kima Yefimovna, this is our comrade, Moisey Semyonovich Rabinovich.” Kogan makes his usual formal introduction as Kima stands uncomfortably by the door.

The balding, middle-aged man with a measured, procuratorial demeanor has silently extinguished the enthusiasm of the young woman excited by her role as the bearer of urgent news.

Moisey Semyonovich slowly sets down his glass of tea, raises himself briefly out of a chair, and nods in Kima’s direction, a probing elder asserting rank over a young comrade.

“What is this? An interrogation?” asks Kima, retreating into the tense demeanor that for her is never far away.

“Her father’s last name was Zeitlin,” says Kogan. “You knew him. Yefimchik.”

“Let me guess, you think he was a traitor, too,” says Levinson, seizing the opportunity to stick in a needle.

“Because he went with the Bolsheviks in 1906, when your Bund took a turn with the Mensheviks?” asks Kogan. “So how does this make him a traitor? He did in 1906 what a lot of others have done since. You, for example, don’t go around advertising your belonging to the Bund.”

“He doesn’t?” says Levinson. “Why, just the other day I saw him in the Bund parade, marching on Gorky Street.”

Levinson is now in the middle of the room, goose-stepping in place, pretending to catch imaginary bouquets of flowers, blowing kisses to the adoring crowd.

“The Bund saves Mother Russia from her legendary, monumental idiocy! And, listen here, Lewis, the loudspeakers on rooftops are blaring ‘Di Shvue,’ the anthem of the Bund. Let’s see if I can…”

(Brothers and sisters in labor and fight,

Those scattered far and wide,

Assemble, assemble—the banner stands poised.)

“Shut up, komandir!” shouts Kogan as Kima turns around and starts to open the door.

Alas, Levinson seems unable to stop short of completing the verse:

“Zi flatert fun tsorn, fun blut iz zi royt.

A shvue, a shvue af lebn un toyt.”

(It flutters with woe, with blood it is red!

We swear. A life-and-death oath we swear.)

“Kimochka didn’t come here to watch your Bundist parade, you idiot!” shouts Kogan as Kima closes the door from the outside. “Now I have to convince her to come back.”

As Kogan leaves coatless to try to convince Kima to return, Moisey Semyonovich takes a sip of tea and, without a trace of either insult or amusement, says to Levinson, “Solomonchik, you of all people should know that I don’t respond to provocations.”

* * *

After she is convinced to return, Kima reports that earlier that morning, one Nadezhda Andreyevna Khromova had stopped by the GORPO cellar to redeem the bottles emptied by herself and her husband, a regional militia commander, Lieutenant Mikhail Petrovich Khromov.

The number of bottles—seventeen—strikes Kima as unusual. It suggests that the lieutenant has spent nearly his entire monthly salary on vodka.

“Rodnya s’yekhalas’,” Nadezhda Andreyevna volunteered an explanation. Family came to visit.

Then, without a pause, her breath still smelling of alcohol, she whispered: “Zhidov to nashikh skoro ne budet. Tyu-tyu. A v domakh ikh budet zhit’ Russkiy narod.” Our Jews will soon be gone. Bye-bye. And their houses will be occupied by Russian people.

“Chto, nachalos’?” asked Kima. Has it begun?

“Pochti chto,” replied Nadezhda Andreyevna. Almost.

With the understanding that the young Russian woman employed in bottle redemption could be trusted with such information, she proceeded to explain that Lieutenant Khromov was having a difficult time preparing the lists of Jews and half-bloods.

It’s not hard to see why half-bloods would be a problem. In their identity papers, nationality can be listed as, say, Russian.

Even in the case of half-bloods whose fathers have Jewish names, the situation is far from clear. What if their fathers are half-bloods as well? Should quarter-bloods be on the list? Should octoroons be given a pass? And what about half-bloods listed as Russian under Russian names? They can evade detection, unless other criteria for ascertaining nationality are introduced. Are such criteria possible? Can such criteria be sensitive, specific, and reproducible?

These questions are so vexing that Nadezhda Andreyevna apparently doesn’t consider that the Slavic-looking woman before her could be, in fact, a half-blood.

* * *

Also, Kima reports that two days ago, the night guard Oleg Butusov fell into the path of an oncoming train; an unlocked, empty Black Maria is permanently parked near the kolkhoz market; and two elderly Jewish women were murdered over the previous two nights. The victims were tortured with hot metal and hanged.

“This is a grim picture, overall,” says Kogan. “But, remember, these events can be unconnected. I have doubts about the significance of the lists. This may be an unfounded rumor. The Black Maria at the kolkhoz market probably holds no special meaning. What if it broke down? Butusov’s death was accidental, and the two murders, though tragic, were most likely the result of simple robbery.”

“Kimochka, you needn’t worry,” says Kogan.

Kimochka, you needn’t worry … “They are trying to protect her, the old goats,” Lewis thinks. “Do they not realize that if the plot is uncovered, which it surely will be, everyone with even the most cursory connection to the plotters will face the firing squad?”

Lewis realizes that by comparison with the Doctors’ Plot, an international Jewish conspiracy that is currently the top-priority state security case on Lubyanka, the Levinson plot may seem insignificant.

Yet, even before they conspired to assassinate Comrade Stalin, the participants of the Levinson plot spilled more blood than the doctors, who spilled none.

The murder of Lieutenant Sadykov and his men constitutes a terrorist act, as defined in Article 58-8 of the USSR Criminal Code: “The perpetration of terrorist acts, directed against representatives of Soviet authority or activists of revolutionary workers and peasants organizations, and participation in the performance of such acts, even by persons not belonging to a counterrevolutionary organization…”

Since Levinson, Kogan, and Lewis act as a group organized for the purpose of carrying out said plot, theirs is, in fact, a “counterrevolutionary organization,” defined in Article 58-11 as “any type of organizational activity, directed toward the preparation or carrying out of crimes indicated in this Article, and likewise participation in an organization, formed for the preparation or carrying out of one of the crimes indicated…” The appearance of the American citizen Friederich Robertovich Lewis and the Bundist-Menshevik Moisey Semyonovich Rabinovich in their midst gives the conspiracy a more ominous politico-historical sweep.

Since members of the conspiracy carried out an armed attack on officers of the organs of state security, their plot constitutes “an armed uprising” under Article 58-2: “armed uprising or incursion with counterrevolutionary purposes on Soviet territory by armed bands…”

Even Kent and Tarzan can be regarded as individuals who are aware of the group’s counterrevolutionary activities and therefore subject to prosecution under Article 58-12: “failure to denounce a counterrevolutionary crime…”

There will be no trial. Lewis’s new motherland has liberated itself from the notion that convicts are entitled to an appearance of an investigation and an appearance of due process of law. There are show trials; there are secret trials; there are deportations of entire ethnic populations, such as Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and young Lithuanian men. Now, an entirely different form of extra-legal repression is starting to emerge. This is mob rule. Unburdened by civilization, it is tribal.

No, Lewis will not play Levinson and Kogan’s hypocritical game of protecting the young lady from the madness of their time.

“Perhaps we should monitor systematically what kind of railroad cars are going toward Moscow and what kind of railroad cars are leaving,” he suggests.

Kima looks up with surprise.

Lewis continues. “We shouldn’t worry about all railroad cars.”

Kogan nods, and most people would have stopped at this point, but Lewis thinks and speaks methodically and therefore needs to complete his idea.

“We shouldn’t worry about tank cars or open platforms. In other words, we should examine the composition of trains going in and out.”

Kogan shakes his head. This is frustrating, but nothing can be done.

LEWIS: If trains bound for Moscow are predominantly pulling cattle cars, and if trains going out are predominantly composed of tank cars and platforms, we may be in for some trouble.

LEVINSON: The spare lines, too.

LEWIS: We could check them out. If there are freight trains standing off the main tracks, it’s a bad sign. And if they are made up exclusively of cattle cars, our situation is even worse.

KOGAN: This doesn’t rule out a fluke. I’d have a greater degree of certainty if we could consider the train depots.

LEWIS: That’s right. If we see nothing but cattle cars, and no tank cars, and no platforms, we are … What’s the Yiddish word …

KOGAN: What’s the English word?

LEWIS: Fucked.

MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: Farflokhtn?

LEWIS: Sounds right.

KIMA: I don’t know Yiddish. What is it in Russian?

KOGAN: Nam khudo.

The goat is protecting her from profane language, too, Lewis concludes.

KIMA: I’ll go to the depot.

KOGAN: I’ll go with you.

LEWIS: As will I.

LEVINSON: No, Kogan, let her take Lewis. He’s younger and faster, and he’s been cooped up too long.

KIMA: Tonight.

LEVINSON: Tomorrow. Tonight, we visit a friend.

* * *

Late in the evening of February 25, the members of the conspiracy walk out into the blizzard. Their destination is the house of Meyer Kuznets, a seventy-nine-year-old follower of a religious leader based in Brooklyn, New York.

According to a Malakhovka rumor carefully circulated only among the most reliable people, seven years earlier, together with other religious Jews, all of Kuznets’s family vanished from Leningrad. The younger Kuznetses took a westward-bound train and now resided beside their leader.

Is it possible that at that time the Iron Curtain had a hole large enough for a train to pass through? Did every Hasid on that train have false papers? How were these documents made? By whom? Did the Hasidim have protection from above? Was it Kaganovich? Molotov? Beria?

In 1947, secret police grilled Kuznets, but the old man spoke in riddles, and in response to threats, wove tales of inspiration. It is said that during a daylong session, he tricked a captain of state security into acknowledging native command of Yiddish.

* * *

On their two-kilometer journey alongside the railroad tracks, Lewis, Levinsion, Moisey Semyonovich, and Kogan encounter a train pulling cattle cars toward Moscow. Lewis sees no platforms and no tank cars.

“They are having a big agricultural fair, Kogan,” says Levinson. “Prize-winning goats from Kazakhstan! Sheep from Abkhazia! Bulls from Ukraine!”

Kogan, Lewis, and Moisey Semyonovich walk in silence.

“Kogan, listen, I said goats,” Levinson tries again. “You thought your family was killed by Hitler? Not true! They are being brought to Moscow, to the agricultural fair! My family was mostly people. They are dead. Kogan, you are lucky to be a goat! Did you hear me?”

“Don’t respond to his provocations,” advises Moisey Semyonovich.

Kogan doesn’t require advice.

He is busy with calculations.

What is the Jewish population of the USSR? About 2.2 million. It’s possible to deport them. Hitler killed about three times this number. Of course, he did this over seven years, building an infrastructure for transportation and liquidation.

How many people can you squeeze into one cattle car? About sixty, if you don’t care how many of them are still breathing upon arrival. A train pulling fifty cattle cars can move three thousand people. Let’s say you are trying to move four hundred thousand people from Moscow alone. (This is Kogan’s best estimate.)

You need about 130 of these trains, if you pack them tightly, no luggage. The trains have to stand ready, because the deportation will have to be carried out quickly, while the pogroms continue to spread across the country.

You round up the majority of obvious Jews immediately and mop up the secret Jews later. You get them to the stations, have them waiting under guard.

Assuming absolute efficiency, you’d need about 730 such trains to transport the entire Jewish population to Port Nakhodka, the railhead of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Kogan’s rough calculations don’t include cars for the guards, who would keep the deported Jews in the trains while making at least some effort to hold back the marauding mobs.

Of course, things will get muddled in the provinces. You will be running trains from one regional center to another, wasting coal, causing tie-ups. And, inevitably, some trains will be captured by the mobs, their passengers slaughtered.

How do you supply this number of deportees with water? Food? What about sanitation? Are the transit prisons large enough to accommodate them along the way? Will the system overload? Will it collapse? What will they do with the dying and the dead? Throw the corpses into the taiga, to fatten up the wolves? And what about those who survive?

And then comes the biggest obstacle of all: the rails take prisoners only as far as Port Nakhodka. If Kolyma is the destination, the rest of the journey will have to be done by barges, which carry a thousand or so prisoners at a time. Have new barges been built? If not, the concentration of deportees will become so heavy that selections for liquidation could be required.

Excessive calculation was Hitler’s principal miscalculation. This operation will be carried out the Soviet way: improvised, cheap, vicious.

KOGAN: Levinson, you do know who will conduct the roundups?

LEVINSON: Red Army.

KOGAN: Our Red Army? We fought for this?

LEVINSON: What did we fight for?

KOGAN: Can you remember?

MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: I fought for the cultural autonomy of the Jewish people, and I would again.

LEVINSON: Lewis, he is a Martian.

MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: Another failed provocation, Solomon.

KOGAN: Speaking only for myself, I don’t know what I fought for. It must have been the spirit of the times. The wind of history.

LEVINSON: The wind of history?

KOGAN: Yes, Levinson, divine wind!

LEVINSON: You want the spirit of the times? You want divine wind?

After carrying out this time-honored setup, Kogan places a gloved hand over his nostrils. “You are farting into the blizzard, komandir.”

Shooting sideways glances at a slowly moving freight train, Lewis surrenders to deep, dull anguish. He will die here, in this dark, cold, impoverished land. In Omaha, he learned to associate death with the smell of burning houses, marauding mobs, humiliation. This will be different. There will be no hangman’s noose, no posthumous castration. Only a hail of bullets, a burst of pain, then irretrievable silence … surrender.

To chase away these images, Lewis looks back at the train. He stares intensely, to escape from his memories, from his fantasies, too. This fails to produce respite. Yet, he could swear that, for an instant, he catches a glimpse of wretched, pale faces staring at him from the slowly moving cattle cars. Are they real? Is this a flash from the past? A harbinger of the future? And why is his hand caressing the handle of the pistol that once hung on the belt of Lieutenant of State Security Narsultan Sadykov?

* * *

After the freight train crawls out of sight, three men cross the railroad tracks. Within minutes, they stand at Kuznets’s unpainted picket fence. Smoke is rising from the chimney.

Kogan knocks, then knocks again.

“Maybe he is hard of hearing,” says Levinson.

Kogan pushes the door. The doorjamb is shattered, the wood splintered.

“Reb Kuznets…,” says Kogan from the threshold.

Inside, Kuznets’s meager, principally black wardrobe is strewn about the room. The drawer of the kitchen table is opened, its contents dumped out.

A stack of firewood lies next to the stove.

Kuznets hangs head-down off a large hook on the wall. Ribs protrude through the tight skin of his slight body, and wide red stripes run from his shoulders to his belly.

“Fascists,” says Kogan, lifting Kuznets’s hand.

There is no pulse, just cold, eternal stillness.

“He’s been dead for an hour, give or take,” says Kogan. “Note the long, wide burn marks on the torso. Looks like they used a fire poker. It’s a quaint folk torture method. Drag a poker along the skin slowly.”

Atop a pile of Kuznets’s belongings, Lewis notices a thin leather belt. He bends down and pulls.

The belt is over a meter in length. Attached to its other end is a half-broken, empty leather box. Next to it, Lewis finds another, similarly mutilated box.

“Tefillin?” he asks.

Kogan nods.

“Why would anyone gut tefillin?” he asks.

“Who do you think killed him?” asks Levinson. “State Security?”

“No, they’d do it in their own lair,” says Moisey Semyonovich. “This is neighbors.”

“Why?” asks Lewis.

“They may have thought the old man had gold,” says Kogan calmly. “Or dollars. And who would catch them?”

“Maybe it has begun,” suggests Lewis.

“Maybe it has,” says Kogan, bending down to close Kuznets’s eyes.

“Levinson, do you still remember the Kaddish?”

“I do, but I don’t say it,” says Levinson.

“And you, Moisey?”

“Never.”

“Am I asking you to read Mein Kamf?” asks Kogan. “It’s for him, not for you. Shmoks … Yisgadal veyiskadash shmey rabo…”

He pauses, realizing that someone is saying the words of the prayer for the dead with him. He nods at Lewis with admiration, and the two continue:

“beolmo di vro khirusey…”

A self-described atheist, Lewis is not at all interested in Jewish religious observance. However, before the war, someone gave him a record of Robeson’s version of “Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Kaddish,” a song loosely inspired by a great Hasidic master, which contained the opening of the prayer for the dead. A few years later, after receiving a pokhoronka, a yellow scrap of paper informing him that his wife, Tatyana Abramovna Lewis, fought bravely in the Second Shock Army and was killed in the vicinity of Vereya, a colleague volunteered to transcribe the entire prayer in Russian transliteration.

The colleague was not at all religious, either.

He was a young engineer who understood instinctively that expressions of respect for the dead constituted a weapon against Fascism. Though Lewis made no effort to memorize that prayer or to learn its meaning, the unfamiliar words made a permanent home within his memory.