haunting stories and lullabies: “Party Foes Held by Nazis Decline,” NYT, April 15, 1934, E2. In addition, Morris Janowitz notes that a traditional prayer wishing to be good had been transformed into one that translates (rather awkwardly) as: “Dear God, make me dumb/so I will not to Dachau come.” “German Reactions to Nazi Atrocities,” The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 52, no. 2 (September 1946), 141–146.
11 “‘Siberias’ of the German revolution”: “Party Foes Held by Nazis Decline,” NYT, April 15, 1934, E2; “preventive custody”: “Anti-Nazi Feeling Grows in Bavaria,” NYT, Nov. 11, 1933, 8.
12 “German Fugitives Tell of Atrocities at Hands of Nazis,” NYT, March 20, 1933, 1.
13 Maar, Michael, Speak, Nabokov (2010), 24–5.
14 Schiff, 67; Tim, Annette, The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin (2010), 88.
15 AFLP, 199.
16 was in Berlin for the festivities: Johnston, Robert Harold, New Mecca, New Babylon: Paris and the Russian Exiles 1920–45 (1988), 110; should not speak: Schiff, 68; BBRY, 403.
17 “Educated among monkeys”: BBRY, 400; “completely Jewified”: Shrayer, Maxim D., “Jewish questions in Nabokov’s art and life,” Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives, 90n7.
18 BBRY, 400; unpleasant prospect: on his way back to France, Bunin had been strip-searched by the Gestapo, made to swallow castor oil, and detained until the laxative had done its work, just to prove that he was not smuggling hidden jewels. AFLP, 195.
19 “Nazi Violence,” editorial in NYT, March 12, 1933, E4.
20 Lenin had borrowed Chernyshevsky’s title What Is To Be Done? for a key political treatise. And the Paris Socialist Revolutionaries had named their journal Contemporary Annals in part as a tribute to Chernyshevsky’s own Contemporary.
21 GIFT, 275.
22 “half-crushed by years of penal servitude”: GIFT, 228; who slept on a bed of nails: Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, and Michael Katz, What Is To Be Done? (1989), 288; “sometimes weeps and sobs”: GIFT, 288.
23 BBRY, 405.
24 Ibid., 403.
25 Ibid., 407.
26 Schiff, 69; BBRY, 407.
27 served as a translator: AFLP, 199; a hidden cache of weapons: “Nazis Hunt Arms in Einstein Home,” NYT, March 21, 1933, 10; idiocies of “liberalistic” university education: “In the liberalistic era, the professor who became important and famous was the one whose theories were least comprehensible, Herr Frank asserted. Only this, he added, could account for the cult like (sic) that reared around Dr. Albert Einstein.” “Reich Professors Warned by Nazis,” NYT, Oct. 6, 1934, 4.
28 ITAB, 114.
29 transcribing the speeches: AFLP, 199–200; they claimed to be surprised: Schiff, 67.
30 SM, 286–7; BBAY, 423.
31 AFLP, 195.
32 Michael Maar notes the spare power of Victor Klemperer’s diary of life under the Nazis in 1942, in which Klemperer lists thirty-one prohibitions—among them buying cigars, possessing fishing licenses, owning typewriters, and using lending libraries. Klemperer notes that they are all nothing compared to “home invasion, abuse, prison, concentration camps and violent death,” but the meanness of the restrictions amplified their power and sometimes seemed as significant as the violence. See Maar’s “Tagebücher: warum schreibt man sie, warum liest man sie?,” Schriftenreihe der Vontobel Stiftung, 2012.
33 Marvin, Carolyn, “Avery Brundage and American participation in the 1936 Olympic Games,” The Journal of American Studies vol. 16 (1982), 82–3. Brundage would later host Leni Riefenstahl when she came to America to try to market her film of Hitler’s Olympics.
34 The earlier effort by Junghans to collaborate with Langston Hughes and the Soviet film company Meschrabpom had ended in international disaster. The group of educated, sophisticated African Americans who came with Hughes from America to help make a film about capitalist racism did not at all fit the Soviets’ expectations of what oppressed black American workers should look like—they were too young, too fair-skinned, and too intellectual. And as Junghans realized to his shock during screen tests for Black and White, most of them were completely unable to sing Negro spirituals.
Junghans tried to revise the script that he had been handed, but even with his revisions, Hughes dismissed the idea of the proletariat (or in other drafts, the Red Army) coming to the rescue of black steelworkers in Alabama as “not even plausible fantasy.” Everyone involved with the film meant well, Hughes believed, but they had no workable conception of racism in America. See Rampersad’s The Life of Langston Hughes as well as Meredith Roman’s “Forging Freedom: Speaking Soviet Anti-Racism,” Critique, vol. 39, no. 3 (August 2011).
After the Olympic project, Junghans collaborated on pro-Fascist movies about the Spanish Civil War and Die Grosse Zeit, a tribute to the “Great Age” begun under Hitler.
35 “Reich Reclaiming Huge Moor Region,” NYT, Dec 25, 1936, 1.
36 Ibid.
37 For more on the labor camps of Southwest Africa—and for a wide-ranging history of the evolution of concentration camps across the twentieth century—see Kotek et al., Le Siècle des Camps: Détention, concentration, extermination—cent ans de mal radical (2000).
38 Mindful of the suffering of the poor, a group of American writers, including novelist John Dos Passos and New York critic Edmund Wilson, had signed a letter in 1932 supporting the Communist Party in the United States. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 156–157.
39 Duranty’s name, apartment, and words are mentioned several times in Wil son’s diary The Thirties.
40 Reef, Catherine, E. E. Cummings: A Poet’s Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006), 79.
41 Red Army banquet and theater performances: Dabney, Lewis, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (2005), 209.
42 felt like a prison: Dabney, 211; “moral top of the world”: Taylor, 217.
43 Night of the Long Knives: Don Levine, Isaac, “Soviet ‘Purge’ Condemned,” NYT letter to the editor, December 12, 1934, 22; might fade overtime: Dabney, 201–2.
44 “can’t make an omelette”: Taylor, 185; “Judas Trotsky”: History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course (1948), 324; “no one left to purge”: The speaker is Vice Chairman of the Soviet State Planning Commission Valery Obolensky-Ossinsky, from “66 Are Executed by Soviet, Accused of Terrorist Plots,” NYT, Dec. 6, 1934, 1.
45 flying to Oslo: Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, 152; twenty minutes: Conquest, 421.
46 coveted paycheck vanished: Schiff, 74; chance windfall: BBRY, 429; Schiff, 75.
47 Schiff, 77.
CHAPTER SEVEN: PURGATORY
1 everyday: Schiff, 78.
2 a reputation: Schiff, 87; Nabokov stopped in: Schiff, 86; became lovers: BBRY, 433.
3 money … they did not have: BBRY, 434.
4 Psoriasis entry from PubMedHealth at the U.S. National Library of Medicine: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001470/
5 BBRY, 434.
6 to raise money for the trip: BBRY, 435; alienated members: Schiff, 83.
7 AFLP, 228; Schiff, 83.
8 bad checks: “Ex-Prince Declares He Can Beat Roulette,” NYT, July 23, 1926, 13; would soon leave him: Schiff, 100; she was living in a hotel: Schiff, 83 and 100.
9 Schiff, 85 and 90. Véra told Nabokov’s first biographer the former, and the latter is drawn from Nabokov’s letters at the time.
10 Nicholas’ life played out the alternate scenario of Vladimir’s 1937 drama: after his wife divorced him for his infidelity, he remarried, to a former student of his. The marriage lasted seven years, more or less, until his second wife filed for divorcé on the grounds of desertion. He would have five wives in all. Nicholas Nabokov’s FBI file.
11 Schiff, 85.
12 The same month, Nabokov wrote to Samuil Rosov, a Tenishev classmate who had tracked him down. In response to a letter with reminiscences of their friendship and Nabokov’s kindness to him as a boy, Nabokov sent a warm three-page mis
sive recalling the class bully, a teacher driven to weeping by their classmates, a yogurt treat they used to eat with aluminum spoons, and the ride down Nevsky Prospect during which he first under stood that sex was sometimes for sale. Nabokov suggested that there were two kinds of people in the world, those who remember and those who do not. AFLP, 125–6.
13 a colleague of Fondaminsky’s: Vadim Rudnev.
14 BBRY, 441–43.
15 Ibid., 443.
16 the press bureau itself: Denny, Harold, “Soviet ‘Cleansing’ Sweeps through All Strata of Life,” NYT, September 13, 1937, 1; had to settle for cooks and nurses: Denny, 1; sausage stuffed with strychnine: “Thirty-one Are Executed,” NYT, October 5, 1937, 10.
17 Scammell, Michael, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic (2009), 158–9.
18 “Coughlin In Error, Kerensky Asserts,” NYT, November 29, 1938, 20. Kerensky pointed out that not a single Jew had been present in the first Provisional Government. Coughlin had millions of weekly listeners at the time and was in the process of republishing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in serial form in his own newspaper, Social Justice (USHMM: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007244).
19 One article compared the chaos to G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, a nightmare novel in which the police are anarchists and anarchists are police. “Purge of Red Army Hinted in Removal of Four Generals,” NYT, June 10, 1937, 1.
20 knew enough to see through the show trials: Scammell, 94–95. Ironically, in his last year of university studies at Rostov State University, Solzhenitsyn trans formed the student newspapers, jolting them into relevance, and received a prestigious Stalin scholarship.
21 “Better Hitler Than Blum”: Haas, Mark, The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics (2007), 130; “a subtle Talmudist”: Judt, Tony, The Burden of Responsibility (2007), 76; the Kerensky of France: Trotsky, Leon, “Whither France? The Decisive Stage,” June 5, 1936.
22 Blum had resigned: Blum, who had been inspired to enter politics by the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus trial, had maintained an uneasy alliance with the Soviet government despite the news of purges coming out of Russia, but took umbrage when a Soviet finance minister was assassinated in Paris just days before he was to make public revelations about the show trials. Faced with fiscal challenges and attacks from the far right and his own party, Blum was urged to launch a socialist revolution in France, but surrendered power according to the rules and conditions under which he had been given it. See “Foreign News: Stalin, Navachine and Blum,” Time magazine, February 8, 1937.
André Gide detailed Soviet human rights abuses: Gide’s reversal would not change Nabokov’s impression of his writing; he later labeled Gide one of his three most-detested writers (reported in the Wellesley College News, mentioned in BBAY, 122).
a group of writers: Together they formed the American Committee for the Defense of Léon Trotsky. Holding on to the shreds of their earlier revolutionary idealism, the inquiry spawned by the Committee was dedicated to proving Trotsky’s innocence in the Soviet plots attributed to him. Committee members met in Mexico with Trotsky himself. Despite its tendency to caress the exiled revolutionary, the commission managed to gather definitive proof that central pieces of evidence against Soviet party leaders facing execution had been fabricated. A hotel where a key conspiracy was said to have had been hatched turned out to have been torn down years before the supposed rendezvous. A clandestine airplane trip to Norway to meet with Trotsky had landed at an airfield that had been out of service for months at the time of the flight. A report hundreds of pages in length debunked the evidence in the show trials as fraudulent.
23 SM, 272.
24 BBRY, 480.
25 “Nazis to Answer ‘Eternal Road,’” NYT, February 14, 1937, 35.
26 a book: Der Ewige Jude, Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachfolger GmbH, 1937; exhibition was condemned: “Boycott of Jews Reviving in Reich,” NYT, December 29, 1937, 6.
27 Shrayer, Maxim D. “Jewish Questions,” Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives, 86.
28 Sachsenhausen would soon hold Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor who defended Jews and publicly denounced Nazi rule.
29 “Hitler Is Pleased to Get Rid of Foes,” NYT, March 27, 1938, 25.
30 McCormick, Anne O’Hare, “Europe,” NYT, July 4, 1938, 12.
31 Newton, Verne, FDR and the Holocaust (1996), 131–4.
32 “assimilable immigrants”: “Reich Again Urged To Assist éMigréS,” NYT, July 30, 1938, 5; fleeing Austrian Jews: “Cold Pogrom in Vienna,” NYT, July 9, 1938, 12.
33 After the conference that fall, Switzerland and Germany worked out a border arrangement whereby all Jews in German territories would have a red “J” stamped on their passport. Any bearer of a J-stamped passport would be denied access to the Swiss border, while Germans considered Aryans could travel freely back and forth without any special visa (see the “J Stamp” entry from Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, 363).
34 shot German Embassy staffer Ernst vom Rath: A little over a week earlier, Grynszpan’s father, a Polish Jew, had been directed to report to a local police station in Hanover, Germany. From there, he had been held overnight and forc ibly deported to Poland with thousands of other men. See Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke (2008), 94; Jews would be punished: “Reich Embassy Aide in Paris Shot To Avenge Expulsions by the Nazis,” NYT, November 8, 1938, 1.
35 USHMM: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005201
36 Schiff, 100.
37 USHMM: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005539
38 essential awkwardness … had never vanished: Elena Nabokov, in Grossman’s “The Gay Nabokov”; marriage to her had damaged Vladimir: Schiff quotes Sergei writing to Nabokov’s ex-fiancée that if she had married Vladimir, “He would never have turned out so badly” (99); would have been in dire straits: Schiff, 99.
39 A prize-winning novel called Silbermann by Jacques de la Cretelle published in 1922 plumbed French anti-Semitism. A problematic presentation of the issue, it was nonetheless lauded for its humanity at the time and went on to be named one of the best novels of the first half of the twentieth century in 1950 by Le Figaro. The Silbermann of the story, savaged by French anti-Semitism and a trial against his father, goes to America to work for his uncle’s business.
40 60 percent of Americans were opposed: Newton, Verne, FDR and the Holocaust, (1996), 57; without ever receiving a full vote: Introduced in February 1939, the Wagner-Rogers refugee aid bill was sponsored in the United States Senate by Senator Robert F. Wagner (D-N.Y.). Anti-Semitism on the part of State Depart ment officials also appears to have been part of the reason for the “failure to admit more refugees” under existing quotas (http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007698).
41 BBRY, 506.
42 Shrayer, “Jewish Questions,” 76.
43 Grossman, “The Gay Nabokov.”
44 Paragraph 175 was the section of the German code that dealt with homosexual behavior. V. D. Nabokov had supported Hirschfeld’s battle against this part of the code more than a decade before (Dragunoiu, 177).
45 Few stories of homosexual prisoners have been preserved, because they continued to be prosecuted under Paragraph 175 (the law the Nazis had strengthened) even after the war. Karl Gorath was arrested in 1939 and sent to Neuengamme and later to Auschwitz, and survived: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/idcard.php?ModuleId=10006529.
heightened the risk: USHMM, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005261.
46 The Hour of Decision and The Great Age.
47 three British movies from recentyears: The three movies were The Rothschilds, Jew Süss, and The Wandering Jew. Friedlander, Saul, The Years of Extermina tion: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939–1944, 20–23. All three targeted films were features, and in two of them the anti-Nazi German film star Conrad Veidt played the lead.
A
fter fleeing Germany with his Jewish wife in the early 1930s, Veidt had immediately set about attacking anti-Semitism in film. Interestingly, the “Eternal Road” exhibition that had spurred the original Nazi Eternal Jew exhibition in 1937 had been put on by Max Reinhardt, the other German superstar who had abandoned his country to speak out against Nazi policies. The Nazis were apparently sensitive to the power of movie stars to generate bad press.
In one of the last scenes of The Wandering Jew, Veidt delivers a haunting monologue rebuking his monstrous Inquisitors. Acknowledging his own sin against Christ, he declares that their hatred and ignorance have nonetheless rendered them unfit to judge him.
48 Friedlander, 21–2.
49 Erich Stoll, Hans Winterfeld, and Heinz Kluth worked for Junghans on Youth of the World in addition to being cinematographers for The Eternal Jew.
50 He was also contributing to the right-wing nationalist newspaper Aux Ecoutes, and worked in a minor capacity in the French film industry. He appears to have extended a helping hand to the FBI through the French government, giving them notice that a Nazi agent and friend of Hermann Goering would be heading to New York. (Carl Junghans internment file, USNA.)
51 One from Bunin: VNSL, 30; Gaiton-Marullo, Thomas, Ivan Bunin: the twilight of émigré Russia (2002), 69 and 203; circus clown: For an in-depth look at Bunin and Nabokov, see Maxim D. Shrayer’s “Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan Bunin: A Reconstruction,” 339–411; willing to help: By now, Bunin’s name was firmly associated with sympathy for Jews. Parisian anti-Semites from the paper Renaissance called him the “kike father.” Gaiton-Marullo, 210.
Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov Page 42