The Birobidzhan Affair: A Novel

by Marek Halter

  Marina gently objected, “Perhaps it’s an American flaw. Don’t they like seeing their actresses close up, because of Hollywood?”

  She smiled to take the sting out of her gibe. After a brief pause, Levine relaxed and made a joke himself.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. We all know that the Americans are a pretty degenerate bunch, don’t we?”

  He snatched up the paper and studied her picture, although he already knew it by heart, then screwed the Birobidjanskaya Zvezda into a ball and hurled it into the wings.

  “Our photographer isn’t up to much, it has to be said. You’re much more beautiful than that, believe me.”

  Marina’s shawl had slipped again. Levine delicately pulled it back around her shoulders. This time, his gesture was more like a caress. When he invited her into his warm office for a cup of tea, he was back to his old self, the handsome Metvei Levine, sure of himself and his power.

  Rousing from her reverie, Marina heard Nadia say, “Mr. Doctor Apron isn’t always here, at the new hospital. He disappears off into the taiga when the mood takes him, even in all this snow. He goes to treat the sick in villages everyone else has forgotten about and comes back with bags of food. People are so happy to see him. He wants to take a full inventory of the diseases in the region, from the river forming the border to the hills of Londoko along the railway line. Apparently, it would mean the hospital could plan treatments in advance and vaccinate people against marsh fevers and mosquito-borne diseases, as he explained to the Committee. Grandma Lipa thinks it’s a hoot. She says there’s only one disease that matters all along the Amur, and he’ll never manage to treat it all by himself.”

  Nadia’s high spirits were beginning to rub off on Marina.

  “He managed to get a truck out of the Party Secretariat. … Last summer, he went to Khabarovsk and came back with one, a practically brand new ZIS. You should have seen Metvei’s face! Zotchenska was fuming. Usually you have to wait months, even for a tractor. Old Klitenit and the others were sure that Mr. Doctor Apron had stolen it from a kolkhoz somewhere. ‘Where did you get that from, Yankee?’ they cried. ‘Where did you steal it from?’ And he said, ‘Not stolen, comrades, not stolen, all okay with administration. Donated to Jewish hospital in Birobidzhan by Regional Secretariat. Official.’”

  Nadia was in fits of giggles imitating the American’s voice and accent. Imagining the scene only too well, Marina joined in.

  “Zotchenska called the Party Secretariat in Khabarovsk. They told her, ‘Everything’s in order, Comrade Commissar. We agreed to allocate a ZIS 51 truck, number umpteen hundred and such-and-such, to your new hospital by decision of the Secretariat, signed by Comrade Secretary Priobine. Congratulations!’”

  “And how did he manage it?”

  Nadia blushed and bit her lip.

  “I don’t know if it’s true. The girls at the dispensary told me all that … ”

  “Nadia … ”

  “Apparently, this Priobine woman, the party secretary for the region, has been even worse than Zotchenska since war broke out. She has to have any half-decent-looking man, and when she saw Mr. Doctor … ”

  “But he’s American.”

  “Yes, and so was the money in his wallet. It seems there was a lot of it. ‘A Jewish emigrant’s contribution to the war effort!’ Priobine said.”

  Nadia couldn’t speak for laughing. There was no need for her to say more in any case. Marina had heard similar stories dozens of times in Moscow.

  One evening shortly afterward, while making dinner with Bielke and Grandma Lipa, Marina announced that she needed to learn Yiddish as soon as possible. She had to find someone who was willing to teach her.

  “I have to pick it up fast. I want to be good enough to act out parts in Yiddish by spring.”

  The two women poked fun at her. She was going to have to give it longer than that. Yiddish wasn’t a language you could learn overnight.

  Marina persisted, “Levine promised me I would be onstage in time for the Birobidzhan festival on May seventh. I can hardly say my lines in Russian.”

  Bielke gave a bitter sigh.

  “Not so long ago, nobody would even have dreamt of suggesting you utter a single word in Russian, now it’s the opposite. The Committee and the party will be pleased to hear you perform in Russian. As you know, Yiddish is not our official language anymore.”

  “Theatre is different!” Marina protested. “I didn’t come here to perform in Russian. That would be ludicrous.”

  Bielke and Grandma Lipa looked at her in silence. Bielke dipped her hands in the water, then wiped them off. Old Lipa went back to kneading her bowl of flour and goose fat with tepid water between her deformed fingers. Marina could guess what they were thinking.

  She was still a newcomer, that woman from Moscow. Levine and the politruk had given her leave to stay in Birobidzhan, although the borders were closed to new immigrants. They had assigned her to the shared dacha without giving its other occupants any say in the matter. Bielke and Grandma Lipa weren’t romantic adolescents like Nadia. Life had taught them to be cautious. They had nothing against Marina, but they didn’t trust her. If Marina turned out to be one of the leather coat brigade’s informers, they wouldn’t be surprised. That’s just the way things were. Marina would have been the same in their shoes. Everyone had long been suspicious of everybody else in the land of the Revolution. Trust had to be earned, if it was to exist at all.

  At times like these, Marina was tormented by her actual lie. She would have given anything to be able to confess the truth to Bielke and old Lipa. “I came here to hide. I’m not a real Jew, but I promise to do my best to become one!”

  Instead, she just blushed and, trying to stick as close to the truth as possible, said, “Solomon Mikhoels didn’t send me here to be a non-Yiddish-speaking Jew. I promised him I’d learn the language.”

  Grandma Lipa nodded and gave an amused little cough. She scraped off the dough caked between her fingers before speaking.

  “Why don’t you ask the other actors to help you? I’ve known them for as long as I can remember. They’ve grown up with Yiddish and live and breathe the language. You won’t find better teachers than them. I’m sure they’d be only too happy to help you.”

  “I was hoping they would, but it’s not possible. They’re still not back from Khabarovsk.”

  “Oh really? Isn’t their tour finished by now? Have they been away since the New Year? What are they thinking, stopping out there for so long? Don’t they want to come back?”

  “We could help her,” Bielke said softly, sitting down beside Lipa.

  Her eyes were shining with unshed tears. She dabbed at her eyelids with a damp tea towel.

  “Moshe would have been a very good teacher,” she murmured. “But you’ll do just as well, Grandma Lipa.”

  Old Lipa grunted but didn’t reply. Her eyes fastened on Marina. Only the gray-green of her irises glinted through her puffy crumpled eyelids. Age seemed to have condensed them into two marbles that were at once solid and liquid, sometimes colder than ice, sometimes capable of a young girl’s tenderness. She pursed her lips doubtfully before going back to work without a word, adding flakes of fish and finely chopped onion to her dough. Bielke didn’t insist. Marina saw that she too needed a few moments of quiet.

  For a good few minutes, all three of them rolled their balls of gefilte in their palms.

  Suddenly Grandma Lipa burst out, “What we’re doing here is ‘baking with fat.’ You can learn that for a start. And you mix the fish in front of you into fish patties called gefilte fish. I come from Poland—and thank God He didn’t let me stay to see what’s going on there now—but in the good old days, when I was a girl in Poland, my mother would use carp fillet and the gefilte fish were twice as big as these. Yes, and there was a time when we would do the same here in Birobidzhan. We knew what tsdoke, charity, was back then. We all felt duty-bound to help each other, and we got a lot out of it. Jews were coming in from far and wide. The
old would rub shoulders with the young, and we all used to learn from one another! Some folks spoke Yiddish, others could barely speak a word of it, or else we didn’t all have the same words for things. I say tsdoke, whereas others would call it rakhmones, ‘pity,’ you see, but it’s more or less the same thing, so you can learn both words. We’ll start tomorrow, but I’m not a teacher, I don’t have their patience. You’re going to have to work at it.”

  In the evening, Bielke told the others about Grandma Lipa’s decision. The vodka was brought out to celebrate the occasion, and Marina had her first lesson the very next day. She spent days learning the Hebrew alphabet and the many stupendously difficult ways of pronouncing the letters, until she was reciting them in her sleep.

  She practiced pronouncing new phrases and expressions at the theater. When she thought she knew the alphabet well enough, she tried to decipher an old story by Sholem Aleichem as she might have a score of music. Her attempt sent the cleaners who had crept into the auditorium to listen to her into fits of giggles. That evening, she took a collection of stories back to the dacha and asked Grandma Lipa to read them to her.

  “Why? It’s much too soon. You won’t understand a word.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You can tell me what happens in the stories afterward. I want to hear the music of the phrases. That’s what I need to learn first, the music of the Yiddish language. And you sing it so very well, Grandma Lipa!”

  That was true. Old Lipa read the stories with breathtaking sparkle, animation, and sincerity. While she was reading, her old face relived every age and emotion. Her deformed hand whisked through the air, emphasizing the various surprises, fears, and mysteries. Apparently, there was no need to understand the meaning of the words to be carried away by the force of the stories. It was one of the finest lessons in acting that Marina had ever had in her whole career.

  At the beginning of February, Marina and old Lipa were sitting side by side at the kitchen table, going over the pronunciation of a list of words, when Nadia burst in, her face purple from the morning cold.

  “Marinotchka! They’re here. They arrived this morning! Metvei sent me to fetch you. They want to see you!”

  “Calm down, my girl,” Lipa grumbled. “Who’s arrived? The Japanese?”

  “Oh, Grandma Lipa … ! The actors! Metvei’s troupe. They’re back from Khabarovsk.”

  They had taken advantage of a convoy of caterpillar trucks bringing a change of guards for the Manchurian border. Levine was waiting for Marina next to the trunks full of costumes and props left cluttering up the foyer. He led her to the greenroom.

  “Don’t be too hard on them, Marina Andreyeva. It won’t be the most vibrant troupe you’ve ever come across, that’s for sure. They’re no spring chickens and have been traveling for most of the night.”

  Nevertheless, it still came as a shock to Marina when Levine opened the door and four grumpy old faces turned to look at her.

  “Metvei! Where have you been?”

  “What have you done with our trunks?”

  “You have to let us rest, Metvei. You can’t imagine what it’s like in those trucks. … ”

  Although the room was stiflingly hot, the women were still wearing their threadbare fur coats. Their feet were tucked up in calf-high wool slippers, and their heads and cheeks were still hidden behind several layers of brightly colored, flowery headscarves. They were huddled around a blue-and-green earthenware stove, which took up a whole corner of the room. The walls were covered with a hodgepodge of posters and photos of productions, except for one section where a sepia-tone print of Stalin had pride of place. Like an icon in a mortuary, it was framed and half-veiled by old red silk drapes reminiscent of a stage curtain.

  An electric samovar was steaming on a table. The only male actor in the troupe was stooping over it making tea. He was huge and must have been approaching sixty. His frizzy hair was springing out from under a purple velvet skullcap, forming a bushy crown of translucent snow. He was wrapped in a long, faded blue, quilted robe riddled with frayed embroidery. Like all the furnishings in the greenroom, be it the rugs, chairs, cushions, pedestal tables, or even the multicolored tea glasses, his robe must have been an old prop.

  For a few seconds, Marina felt like she had gone onstage in the middle of an unfamiliar play. She noticed that Levine was laughing. He was enjoying her surprise. The actresses cast brief dismissive glances at her before sidling up to Levine. Two of them looked like twins. You could only tell them apart by their hairstyles and clothes. The third woman, a petite blonde in heavy makeup with a birdlike body, was pushing fifty. All three of them started talking at once.

  “Oh Metvei, Metvei! What a journey. … ”

  “What possessed you to ask us to do such a thing?”

  “Five hours in unheated trucks … ”

  “And in the middle of the night. Why did it have to be in the middle of the night? They didn’t even bother to explain. … ”

  “Those poor boys couldn’t get a word out, in any case. Young as they were, their teeth were chattering every bit as much as ours. … ”

  “Vera wanted the handsome lieutenants to warm her up, but they were even more frozen than she was!”

  “That’s the last time, Comrade Director. Don’t ever ask us to go through that again. It’s out of the question.”

  “We’re not budging until spring, Metvei, that’s for certain.”

  “Especially since we’d have been quite happy to stay in Khabarovsk. We felt very much at home there.”

  “And you should have seen the audiences, my dear! We could have gone on performing for the rest of the month. Khabarovsk is not Birobidzhan, not at all. They haven’t lost their appetite for entertainment out there.”

  “You can see for yourself. We’ve brought you a whole selection of tsaytungen, newspapers. Just wait until you read the articles. … ”

  “Sha, sha! Shush, shush, ladies, please, let’s have a bit of hush! Here we are, here we are. This’ll warm you up …. ”

  The old actor reduced them to silence with glasses of steaming hot tea. He swiveled around to face Marina, as if she had just come out of the wings, and held out his hands.

  “And who do we have here, may I ask? Have we quite forgotten our manners, ladies? Let’s have some heflekheyt, some manners, please. … What are you waiting for, Metvei? Aren’t you going to introduce us? Am I right in believing that this is our new star?”

  The actresses stared at Marina, sipping at their tea, while the actor pressed her hands in his, introducing himself before Levine had the chance to do the honors.

  “I’m Yaroslav Peretz Sobilenski. My mother never could decide whether to call me Yaroslav or Peretz, and I couldn’t either in the end. But I always tell people they can choose. Most people tend to opt for Yaroslav rather than Peretz. That’s what Russian custom does for you, I suppose.”

  Levine introduced the women: Vera Koplevna, Guita Koplevna, and Anna Bikerman. Vera and Guita were sisters, of course.

  “But not twins. Everyone thinks we’re twins, but we’re not at all. Vera is two years older than me. She’s as proud as anything because she thinks she looks younger than she is. The opposite is true, alas, but we all like to have our illusions.”

  There were peals of laughter. With a twinkling smile, Anna Bikerman gave Marina’s arm a squeeze.

  “Up to now, I’ve been the nearest thing to a young starlet that our Comrade Director has had in his troupe. Be on your guard. He’s forgotten what it’s like to be around beautiful women.”

  Levine laughed to cover his embarrassment and attempted to launch into a little speech, but Vera Koplevna wouldn’t let him.

  “No speeches please, Metvei. We’re too tired and everything that our new comrade needs to know can be summed up in ten sentences. Anna, my sister Guita, and I have been acting together for twenty-five years. Our decision to come here to work for MAT in Birobidzhan was a joint one. That was ten years ago now. We’ve been through a lot, good and not so g
ood. There was a time when you couldn’t hear yourself think in this room for all the actresses and actors squawking away like parrots. And the old man beside you might not look like much now, but forty years ago he was quite a crowd puller. His evenings of Yiddish fables in Warsaw and Berdychiv used to draw audiences of two thousand. Yaroslav never blows his own trumpet, so I’m blowing it for him. He worked alongside Granovski and Mikhoels in the first Moscow Art Theatre. If you genuinely want to learn the art of Yiddish theatre, you won’t find a better teacher than our Yaroslav.”

  She beamed at Marina and winked at her sister, who burst out laughing.

  “You see, Metvei, all in ten sentences!”

  Yaroslav said to Marina, “As you can see, we’re very good at putting out propaganda about ourselves. Vera is talking about a time—”

  Anna interrupted him.

  “This tea is foul, Yaroslav. … Have you made any plans to celebrate the occasion, Comrade Director?”

  “I thought you wanted to rest, Anna. This evening we can—”

  The door to the greenroom flew open.

  “Metvei!”

  Masha Zotchenska barged in, snow still stuck to the soles of her boots, her hair plastered to her fiery cheeks. Pushing everyone else out of the way, she threw her arms round Levine’s neck.

  “Metvei, oh, Metvei! It’s over! We’ve won! The Red Army has won! The fascists have been defeated at Stalingrad!”

  Zotchenska was in tears. She was clinging to Levine, sobbing and covering his face with kisses. Marina stepped back to let old Yaroslav pry Levine free from Zotchenska. Guita’s tinkling laughter could be heard amid the exclamations.

  Levine pushed Zotchenska away, begging her to compose herself. “Masha, Masha, please!”

  Vera finally managed to calm her down, while Levine tried to make eye contact with Marina. Between sobs of joy, Zotchenska eventually answered Yaroslav’s and Anna’s questions.

  News of victory had reached them early that morning, but they hadn’t dared believe it. They were wary of getting their hopes up only to have them dashed. A boy from the post office had come to report to Klitenit that he had picked up a program on the radio. They had spent hours on the telephone waiting for confirmation from Khabarovsk. The Party Secretariat had eventually confirmed the story. Its secretary, Priobine, had called Masha in person. They were crying so hard with joy into their handsets that they had eventually had to cut their conversation short. But it was true. It was done! The Krauts had been conquered at Stalingrad. The Red Army had sprung a trap on them. Von Paulus had been taken prisoner along with ninety thousand Wehrmacht soldiers. That had been three days ago, maybe even four. It always took longer for news to reach the far east of Siberia.