The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  “What he decides is up to him,” I said.

  “But I know what you’re thinking: Why is he being so stubborn, why doesn’t he take your help?”

  I said nothing.

  Valya sighed. “I suppose my family thought I was squandering my inheritance too. And now look—my lack of grand ambitions is what saved me.”

  “I don’t want him to blame me for his regrets,” I said, and realized it was true.

  “Then it’s just yourself you’re worried about.”

  “Valya, you’ve been very hospitable to my son. I want him to feel as at home…with his family.”

  “People feel at home around those who like them,” she objected.

  Maybe as a provocation, or maybe to downplay Lenny as such a prize for her Katya, or maybe because I was curious, I said, “Tell me what you like about him.” (Aside from his American passport, I wanted to add, but did not.)

  “I like that, in spite of his best efforts, he’s a decent guy. There’s not enough kindness in our world. Nine years in this country hasn’t ruined him. Now that’s something.”

  Decency. Kindness. Things that in our household were taken seriously but not dwelled on as pious notions.

  “He was a kind child,” I said, looking ahead to Valya’s driveway. “Sensitive. It used to upset him visibly when another youngster was crying. The teachers had a nickname for him in preschool: ‘the gentleman.’ Maybe, if he’d been different,” I said, “I wouldn’t have warned him about coming to do business here. His mother and I warned him a dozen times.”

  “Well, aren’t you smart for warning him,” Valya said. She stopped walking in the road. She looked impatient and exasperated. “Anybody can do that. You’re in this racket too. You warned him—so what! But you didn’t prepare him, did you?”

  —

  IN MY ROOM, I LAY on the firm bed that was too excellent even for Putin to appreciate. Outside the light had grown dim. I took a few deep, restoring breaths of the pine-scented air. The insects chirped their summer noises. On the writing table, my now charged phone was blinking its green message light.

  There was a single message, from Tom.

  “It’s me. Don’t want to rain out your dacha plans, but Kablukov is back in the city. Wants to see us tomorrow afternoon at the Sanduny Baths. Can’t imagine what might be on his mind. I’ll see you there at noon.”

  Some choice for a board meeting, I thought—the old city banya. All the better to impress us with his prison tattoos. What angle did this old enforcer plan to take now to convince us to rubber-stamp his little kickback scheme?

  It meant I would have only tonight with my son, and have to leave in the morning.

  I sat and stared for a while at the soft-focus photograph of young Alyosha—the angelic, bright-eyed boy who would evolve into the acrid, afflicted creature downstairs. A nonperson, as he said. It was making me recall a similarly posed photograph of myself that my mother had framed and kept in her room in the communal apartment. The picture had obviously been taken before her arrest. I didn’t know how she’d managed to hold on to it during her years of imprisonment, though to me it had always been an emblem of her tight grip on illusions, signifying her inability to see me for who I had become. For this reason, I kept no enlarged angelic photographs of my own children within view.

  All these years I had been certain that someday Lenny would have to return home to his family. What I had not accounted for, and what was suddenly plain to me at this dacha with its drunks and misfits, was that Lenny had a family—if family meant people who accepted you as you were.

  —

  I HEARD A KNOCKING on the door.

  “It opens,” I called.

  It was Lenny, hair moist and combed, in a clean shirt rolled to his elbows. He looked about the room uncertainly. “Did you fall asleep or something?” He looked me in the eye and turned his palms out at his sides. “Come on, everyone’s waiting. The shashlik is ready.” His lip was curled into a half-smile, which I took as a signal that, at least for the sake of the shashliks, he was willing to put down his weapons.

  “Let’s eat,” I said, putting down mine.

  Her rescue arrived in the form of a national catastrophe. The Great Patriotic War got Florence out of Moscow, out of the hands of the secret police, and once more into the bustle of consequential work that she craved.

  On the Volga River’s docks, the dusty summer evening of ’43 presents a ramming chaos of evacuees. The old river city of Samara, since renamed Kuibyshev, has become the nation’s wartime capital. Around the chipped embankment form serpentine lines for meager wartime rations of sugar, vegetable oil, kerosene, matches. The only bread available is the roughest rye. These provisions are ferried into the city on boats or brought on horse-drawn covered wagons and sold off the wagons and boats themselves. All of the trucks and automobiles have been recommissioned for the military. It has occurred to Florence that—were it not for the mounted loudspeakers on every corner, providing constant updates on the war—life in Kuibyshev might resemble the bootstrapping bustle of some nineteenth-century frontier town. Down at the bottom of the docks, where paddlewheel steamers deliver more supplies, the mosquitoes have started to swarm. The terraced hills across the Volga are ablaze with a dissolving sunset. Everyone is in a hurry to get their provisions—which this evening include salted fish and salami, on account of the recent victory in Kursk—and be indoors by sundown. At last, Florence, her copious hair tied back in a kerchief to protect it from the dust, obtains her own food parcel swaddled in newspaper, and is spat out by the same elbowing crowd that’s borne her to the front of the line. The fish feels pleasantly heavy under her arm as she squeezes past bodies of every age and variety of sweat—the musky brawl of men, the resinous stink of the old, the grapy tang wafting off the necks of young women—until she is released into the open air, then proceeds down a street littered with oily bits of newsprint, and approaches a brick doorway from which a cold cellar draft emerges to greet her. There is no light—the bulb has been screwed out—and the stairwell windows are covered with dark paper. She navigates by touch until she reaches the top floor and opens the door to the odor of burnt coffee. The first thing she sees is the table, still covered in papers, though she has asked to have it cleared tonight. At either end sit Leon and his friend Seldon Parker, Parker’s glasses reflecting the last of the evening’s saffron light.

  “I thought we were celebrating tonight. Why are you two still working?”

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” Parker says, lifting a sheet of paper like it’s a dirty undergarment. He begins to read aloud: “ ‘Hitler’s savage hordes set out to overrun the world, rob the toiling people of their last crumb of bread, kill, rape, gouge out eyes, rip off women’s breasts, disembowel, chop off heads.’ ”

  “Who wrote that one?” says Leon.

  “Our national literary treasure, Dovid Bergelson.” He reads on: “ ‘The most atrocious of all is the cruelty they practice on our Jewish brothers and sisters in all of the countries they overrun. They never tire of inventing new instruments in the forms of torture and execution….’ ” He pauses to add, “And Dovid Bergelson never tires of ways to describe them. ‘All the calamities which have ever beset our long-suffering people—both in ancient times when Nero drove Jews into circus arenas to be devoured by lions, and in the Middle Ages when Jews donning shrouds went to die at the stake or themselves applied sharp knives to the throats of their children in order to save them from a more horrible death that awaited them—all these calamities pale before Hitler’s cruelties….Day and night their blood, splattered against fences, running over the pavement, calls out to us. It flows and flows in ditches and sewers, and no Mother Rachel will rise from her grave and cry out for Justice.’ ”

  “He hasn’t left anything out, has he?” says Florence.

  “Nero’s circuses, lions, disembowelments, Mother Rachel—oh my!” Seldon clutches his hair. “Give a Jew a pen and he’ll maul you with it. Does
n’t he understand that no paper in England or America is going to print this?”

  “You can’t expect a great novelist to conform to the dictates of the Western capitalist press,” says Leon.

  “Great novelist, ha! He’s become a bigger hack than Ehrenburg.”

  “Then cut something,” says Florence, starting to clear the papers from the table herself.

  “We’re translators, not editors,” Parker says helplessly. “And if you haven’t noticed, we have a mountain of these masterpieces to finish.”

  Which, in fact, is the case. Stacked on the chairs and windowsill are piles of dispatches: articles and essays documenting Nazi atrocities against the Jews, profiles of Jewish officers and pilots, biographical sketches of scientists and engineers in the defense industry—all to be prepared for publication. But not in the Soviet papers, where they are useless and unwelcome. These communiqués must be translated into flawless English, with no ounce of poignancy lost, and made suitable for the foreign bourgeois presses: the Chicago Daily Herald, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, the Evening Standard. For all their purple prose, the aim of these articles is simple: to help the Red Army raise money in America and England. At last, Florence is doing the Important Work she has waited all her life to perform. Every morning, she and Leon—comrades-in-arms on the ideological front—walk together to the office of the SovInformBuro on Vantsek Street to translate the dispatches that have been approved by the editorial board and military censors for consumption by American and European readers.

  The theme of international friendship is stressed at every turn. The Volga, which Hitler’s troops are threatening to cut off, is referred to as “the Soviet Mississippi.” If a successful attack has employed British Hurricanes or Spitfires, or American bombers, the article is to follow this formula: First profile the heroic Soviet pilot, then go on to praise the machinery and make note of its manufacturer. If an American company has sent a donation of blood transfusion kits or portable X-rays to a Soviet field hospital, the article should first mention the brave and skillful nurses, then the ways in which the medical equipment has eased the pain of the wounded soldier; finally, the name of the company and country that sent the supplies must be noted. Every gift deserves a thank-you card. In charge of generating this mountain of propaganda are a number of anti-fascist committees—one for women, another for scientists, yet another for youths, one more for Slavs—each producing editorial content to milk a different segment of the foreign public. But it is no secret inside the offices of the SovInformBuro that the most lucrative wartime agitprop by far is being exported by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Its members are Yiddish writers, poets, and actors, some of them celebrities even beyond the Soviet Union. There is the poet Peretz Markish, wild-haired prophet of the avant-garde; David Hofshteyn, poet-elegist and compatriot of Marc Chagall; Leyb Kvitko, beloved author of children’s verse; and the novelist Dovid Bergelson, perhaps the best-known Yiddish story writer besides Babel. All of these men once left Russia to live abroad, to wander through Warsaw and Berlin, Paris and New York, London, Vienna, Palestine. Each one of them, unable to support himself with his writing in a world indifferent to the mame loshn, has since returned to the Soviet Union, lured by promises of publication and of a Yiddish renaissance funded by the government. Unbeknownst to their humble translators, each of these celebrities feels as trapped as Leon and Florence. (Markish, in a secret letter to a Warsaw friend, has written: “We don’t know what world we’re in. In this atmosphere of trying to be terribly proletarian and one hundred percent kosher, much falseness, cowardice, and vacillation have manifested themselves and it has become impossible to work.”) But now, after years of evading peacetime terror, they too have emerged into the relative safety of war. Like Florence and Leon, they have been granted a second chance.

  At the helm of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee is Solomon Mikhoels—renowned actor and director of the State Yiddish Theater. His five-foot-tall jester’s body and pugilist’s face are instantly recognized by Moscow’s audiences from his role as “the Jewish King Lear.” A little-known fact: just before war broke out, Mikhoels feared for his life, and with good reason. The NKVD had been planning to link him to the arrested Isaac Babel. But when a thief is needed, he is brought back from the gallows. Spared, for the time being, the eminent performer is entrusted with the task of squeezing dollars out of foreign Jews to fight the Nazi scourge. At the very moment when Florence is clearing away papers to set the table in honor of Leon’s twenty-ninth birthday, Solomon Mikhoels is breakfasting on a sunny veranda in Los Angeles with Charlie Chaplin, who has helped him raise money among the Jews of Hollywood.

  Months earlier, Mikhoels and the poet Itzik Feffer were put on an ocean liner bound for New York. Everywhere they went, great swarms of people gathered. At a rally at the Polo Grounds, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia greeted them as old friends while American and Soviet flags snapped in the wind. The head of their welcome committee was none other than Albert Einstein. Privately, Mikhoels and Feffer could not stand each other, but onstage, with the red carpet rolled out for them, they became blood brothers. From below, one hundred thousand American eyes watched Mikhoels carefully lift up a crystal urn filled with yellow and black dirt, but no flowers. At the raised rostrum he addressed his American brethren: “Before I came, some friends from the Moscow Theater and I bought this vase. Our soldiers filled it with some earth from Ukraine, which holds the screams of mothers and fathers, of the young boys and girls who did not live to grow up. Look at this. You will see laces from a child’s shoes, tied by little Sara who fell with her mother. Look carefully and you will see the tears of an old Jewish woman….Look closely and you will see your fathers who are crying ‘Sh’ma Israel’ and beseeching heaven for a rescuing angel….I have brought you this soil of sorrow. Throw into it some of your flowers so they will grow symbolically for our people….In spite of our enemies, we shall live.”

  Cheers burst forth from the crowd. Men in felt fedoras stood at quivering attention. Women wept into their fur stoles. They had been primed for the arrival of Mikhoels and Feffer by articles and essays in American newspapers, translated from tragic Yiddish into galvanizing English by none other than Leon Brink and Seldon Parker. Offstage, Mikhoels’s secret police escorts took note of the actor’s tear-streaked face. He was, of course, an orator of the first rank, the obvious choice for this important trip. To his left stood Itzik Feffer. In Russia he was known for his tepid, satirical verse. Among his literary comrades in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were those who thought him undeserving of being selected to accompany Mikhoels on such a glamorous voyage. Each believed he ought to have been chosen in Feffer’s place. All of them, having lived abroad, knew they would never be allowed to set foot outside the Soviet Union again. It was the shared opinion among them that Feffer’s great talent was not for poetry but for tacking with the political winds. On this score they were correct: it would be Feffer’s testimony, after the war, that would lead to their roundup and arrests. But now, standing beside Mikhoels, Feffer was taken aback by the violent affection of the crowd. The air in the open stadium smelled of corn dogs and the fusillade of camera flashes. He looked down into the audience as if into an abyss. The faces of the American Jews were hardly distinguishable from those of Russian ones. Only their eyes were different. The absence of fear in them alarmed him. He felt disturbed by their untamed goodwill, already sensing how this public ceremony of adoration would be repaid with a private ceremony of vengeance once they returned home. Feffer approached the rostrum and, speaking in Yiddish and Russian, urged their support for the heroic Red Army.

  Leon and Florence, confined to the boundaries of the country that had forcibly adopted them, did not witness any of this, though they were able to read in the foreign presses about the trip’s success. Hadassah, the Jewish National Fund, and B’nai B’rith all welcomed Mikhoels and Feffer with profound enthusiasm. Fund-raising dinners were held for them in Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. E
verywhere they went, Jews opened their purses. At an event in Chicago, so many people rushed the stage that it collapsed under Mikhoels’s feet. He would complete his tour on crutches.

  Beneath this froth of giving was a cataract of genuine feeling, a common pulse tapped by Soviet writers who, for a decade or more, had been prohibited from any open talk of Jewish unity or Jewish suffering. The fight against fascism had loosened their shackles—or, rather, made their proclamations a matter of military necessity. “I grew up in a Russian city,” wrote Ilya Ehrenburg, the most prominent journalist of his time, and Stalin’s own court Jew. “My mother tongue is Russian. I am a Russian writer. Like all Russians, I am now defending my homeland. But the Nazis have reminded me of something else: my mother’s name was Hannah. I am a Jew. I say this proudly. Hitler hates us more than anyone else, and this makes us proud.”

  And what about Florence and Leon—were they immune to the force of these once-forbidden sentiments? For Florence, watching Leon translate dispatches day and night was no less startling than noting the changes in her own body. Leon’s identity as a Jew was maturing from a nomadic wanderlust born in the tenements to a full-on national consciousness. Years later she would wonder if the Biblical echoes in Markish’s poems were responsible for her husband’s surreptitious attendance at the Moscow Choral Synagogue on the eve of Yom Kippur, if the reports of Jewish soldiers fighting bravely in Stalingrad were what nursed his budding interest in the mechanics of shortwave radio, by which he would follow the secret transmissions broadcasting the struggles of a new state being formed in the desert.

  But all that is in the future. For now, Florence finishes clearing the table of papers and lays out on chipped enamel dishes her bounty of salted fish, kielbasa, and black bread. The men are less than helpful in setting the table, lost in talk of the recent military turnaround at Kursk. If the bloody triumph at Stalingrad was mainly an accident of climate (the same brutal Russian winter that had stymied Napoleon’s armies a century earlier), then the strategic offensive on the Eastern Front this summer has been more reliable proof of the Red Army’s mettle. The tide of war has turned. “It won’t be long,” says Leon, “before all the fighting is over.”