Jacob's Ladder

45 With Mikhoels

(1945–1948)

They were the same age, Jacob Ossetsky and Solomon Vovsi, but Jacob entered the Commercial Institute a year earlier. Jacob’s friend invited him to a literary evening where this very Solomon was reading a long and unintelligible poem in Yiddish to a group of admirers. Jacob remembered his striking outward appearance, which verged on the grotesque, and his artistic expressiveness and passion. This was in 1911, and by 1912 neither of them was at the Institute any longer.

Many years later, in 1925, when they had already moved to Moscow, Jacob and Marusya chanced to be at a play in the Moscow State Yiddish Theater. By that time, Marusya had parted with the theater for good, but her youthful dreams about a career as an actress still rankled her.

Marusya was agitated about the play, A Night at the Old Market. On the one hand, she liked the tradition of farce, but the story about corpses that come to life was unpalatable to her. She had become disenchanted with mysticism at that point, and had also outgrown her theatrical past and rejected “disengaged” art. She sought a political meaning in everything, and it disturbed her that this otherwise compelling play had no ideological underpinning. The language itself, Yiddish, called up associations with bourgeois nationalism. The content of the play was flimsy, even trifling, but even so the play was magnificent. Professionally, the direction and set design were of the highest order. The acting was stunning—the delivery of the lines was sharp and light, with remarkable concordance of intonation, the movements were beautifully choreographed, and the music was superb.

In short, Marusya suffered from artistic-ideological discomfort; nor could Jacob fully enjoy the play. He kept feeling he knew the actor in one of the main roles. He snatched the program from Marusya’s hand, but couldn’t make out in the darkness the name of this marvelous jester who combined provincial humor, which was directed at himself, and the manner of the Italian piazzas, which at the same time made fun of the public.

As soon as the lights went up after the first act, Jacob looked at the program to see the name of the actor.

“Marusya, do you know Mikhoels? His face is so familiar, I’m sure I know him from somewhere. He’s extraordinarily talented.”

“Yes, he is,” Marusya said sourly, as though Mikhoels had deprived her of her calling. “It’s a stage name. His real name is Vovsi.”

“Ah, Vovsi! Now I remember. He studied at the Commercial Institute with me, in Kiev. Then he disappeared.”

“Jacob, you and I are the ones who disappeared. Vovsi never went anywhere. He’s made a name for himself; they’ve begun writing about him. Often.”

“You didn’t like him? I think he was superb.”

“This play, this spectacle, is for philistines, Jacob. Look around you—all you can see are Jewish dentists.”

Here Jacob realized that he had made a blunder and touched a sore spot in Marusya. But at that very moment, someone took him by the arm from behind. He turned around. It was a doctor he had visited for a consultation a year before. A dermatologist, though, not a dentist.

“Well, what do you think of Mikhoels? He’s my cousin! What a pair! Mikhoels and Suskin!”

“Abel Isaakovich, meet my wife, Marusya. Marusya—Dr. Dobkin, a dermatologist.”

Marusya could hardly contain her laughter, but she managed to get out: “Oh, I thought you were a dentist!” And they all went to the buffet together.

There was an endless ovation at the end of the play. Then they stood in line at the cloakroom with Abel and his wife, and when the audience had almost dispersed, and Abel’s wife was struggling with her gray felt boots, which she couldn’t get to buckle all the way up, Mikhoels—small of stature, with a large head—emerged from a side door. He was looking for someone, and when he saw Abel, he came up to him, patted him on the back, and kissed him. Then he looked at Jacob, who hadn’t taken his eyes off him, and smiled inquiringly.

“Jacob Ossetsky, right? Ah, how grateful I am to you! You know, in your younger years, it’s very important when people give you pointed criticism.”

“I don’t remember offering any criticism at all. Now I feel I should apologize…”

“No, there’s nothing to apologize for. At the time, you expressed yourself with great civility. I’ll remind you: ‘Clearly, a great talent—just not in the realm of poetry!’” And Mikhoels guffawed, turning his homely face, with its protruding lower lip and flattened nose, toward the others. “It was a terrible poem! Let’s go. We’re having a small party tonight. I’d like to invite you.”

Then a tall woman, somewhat advanced in years, appeared. Mikhoels followed behind her to the cloakroom, and all of them, in a large group, peeling off the winter coats they had already pulled on, fell in line behind him.

After that, they met up with one another on occasion—outside, by the Nikitsky Gates, sometimes at the conservatory, or for concerts at the Gnesin Institute of Music. The Moscow they inhabited was quite circumscribed. At their last prewar meeting, not long before Jacob’s first arrest, they met by chance on Malaya Bronnaya. They shook hands, and Mikhoels invited Jacob to a play.

“Maybe this evening? The Court Is in Session, by Dobrushin. A contemporary play.”

This was in 1930, and Jacob had never seen the play. A few months later he was arrested, and he observed the subject of the play not from the point of view of the audience, but from the defendant’s dock.

The next chance meeting took place fifteen years later, after the war, in 1945. By this time, Jacob’s long peregrinations through the provinces had already ended. The best years of his life were under way: freedom, books, music, pleasant proximity to film, while teaching statistics in the Economics Department at the Institute of Cinematography.

On that day, Mikhoels had a business meeting at the Institute, where he had been offered the opportunity to teach an acting workshop. They ran into each other in the cafeteria. Mikhoels embraced Jacob like an old friend. Then they ate pea soup—the cafeteria had already run out of the main course—and had some tea with bread.

Mikhoels’s face was homely, but his hands looked as if they had been sculpted by the Lord God Himself. Jacob couldn’t take his eyes off the large supple fingers clasping the dim glass of tea. The conversation was lively and touched upon the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had interested Jacob for a long time already. Mikhoels, seeing the lively interest his interlocutor took in the matter, suggested he visit him to discuss it further. They exchanged phone numbers.

Jacob was a bit abashed by Mikhoels’s hail-fellow-well-met attitude toward him, which didn’t correspond to their long, but no more than nodding, acquaintance. But he found an explanation for this cordiality—and Mikhoels confirmed his surmise in later meetings. During the fifteen years that had passed since they last saw each other, before the war, so many people had disappeared, gone missing, died of starvation, or perished at the front that every familiar face seemed to belong to someone newly returned from the land of the dead.

Thus began a rather intense interaction. Ossetsky was interesting to Mikhoels. The actor did not often socialize with people who were so scholastically inclined, with such erudition and finely honed logic. In addition, during his years of exile, Jacob had learned the art of reading newspapers. Through the structure of the phrases, the subordinate clauses, even through the punctuation marks, Jacob knew how to excavate the subtext, the implicit message, the undisclosed intentions and latent tendencies. Mikhoels sensed this.

It was a transitional period, vacillating and uncertain. Things that had seemed clear-cut and comprehensible somehow grew turbid and blurry. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee had done a great service to the homeland during the war when, in ’43, even before the opening of the second front, it completed its tour through America, Canada, and Mexico, collecting money for equipping the Red Army. Now, however, after the victory over fascism, the committee was faced with a new, vaguely defined task—to demonstrate to the world the pro-Israeli and at the same time anti-British policy of the Soviet Union with regard to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Mikhoels very delicately described the situation the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was in today, more complex than it had been during the war, before the opening of the second front. He had already caught indirect signals that the people at the very top were dissatisfied with the activities of the committee. Jacob reacted immediately and, with the precision of formulation characteristic of him, put into words exactly what was filling Mikhoels with alarm: the deep discrepancy between the logic of the external and internal policies.

“Yes, yes, something of that nature,” Mikhoels said, nodding.

“With Europe, things are more or less clear. The new borders have essentially been determined. But there is a global geographic map, and new borders are being formed there, too. Now the real question is: Who will Palestine belong to after the war—the Arabs, and the British who back them, or the Jews, and the Soviet Union, which in turn supports them? And will the Jewish state be patterned on a socialist or, better yet, a communist model? This is a very thorny issue. On the one hand, Zionism, as a variety of nationalism, is a bourgeois current or trend; on the other hand, European Jewry is completely permeated with the spirit of communism.” This was how Jacob outlined the situation to Mikhoels, who listened attentively, his head cocked to one side, like a bird.

Mikhoels, who had received many letters from Jews, in particular from those who had fought on the front line, expressing a readiness to fight to conquer Palestine for the Jews, suspected as much. How should he answer them? He was in a quandary. He understood that Israel was not the same as Spain. And he didn’t pick up any clear signals from the government on this issue.

“I don’t think Soviet Jews will be allowed to leave for Palestine,” Jacob ventured to say.

He is certainly well versed in this political mathematics, Mikhoels concluded. And, before long, he enjoined Jacob to write overviews of the Western press on the Palestinian question for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Jacob would work under contract as a consultant.

For Jacob, this agreement meant not only supplementary income but also the satisfaction of interesting reading, a new domain of knowledge, and deeper understanding of all these burning issues. In postwar Europe, there were hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been spared extermination, who wandered around from pillar to post, dreaming of their own state. They were not allowed into Palestine. Their fate was an insignificant chip in the game of the victorious powers, which had not yet completed the postwar division of the world, its borders, cultural values, oil, grain, water, and air.

Jacob agreed to take the job, with the caveat that, along with his examination of what was happening currently, it would be necessary for him to assess the Palestinian political situation at least from the time of the Balfour Declaration. This historical context was indispensable.

Mikhoels agreed, and immediately gave Jacob a book by Richard Williams-Thompson that had just been published in London, titled The Palestine Problem.

This was how Jacob began his work with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

His greatest difficulty in the job was the limited—in effect, closed to nonspecialists—access to the American and British press. The sources that Jacob used at first were generally accessible—newspapers published in “fraternal” countries, or communist publications from Western countries. But, in spite of his skills in squeezing the necessary information from newspapers, he still lacked comprehensive source material.

He recalled the now-distant past when he had had a reliable personal source for Western newspapers—the Englishwoman Ivy Litvinov, wife of the former people’s commissar for international relations. Their acquaintance dated back to the end of the 1920s, when the Litvinovs’ daughter, Tanya, and Jacob’s son, Genrikh, were in the same class in school. Later, Jacob even took English lessons from Ivy. In those days, he often took home with him a pile of newspapers from the Litvinovs’ house. This is how he learned the particular language of newspapers, which differed from the literary English he was acquainted with.

But his contact with Ivy Litvinov, as with many other former friends and colleagues, had been broken long ago. He passed by the government residence where the Litvinovs had lived before the war fairly often, but he wasn’t sure whether they still lived there. From newspaper notices, he gathered that Litvinov had been dismissed from his post. In other words, he had fallen into disgrace. But disgrace has many gradations, from quiet retirement to quiet annihilation. Jacob, of course, could not have known that the renowned people’s commissar, onetime close collaborator of Lenin, lived full-time at his dacha and kept a handgun under his pillow, awaiting arrest. No, he would never again get any English newspapers from Ivy Litvinov. But he had great need of them.

During those days, there were only a handful of places in Moscow where one could find the British and American press, and they all required a special permit, the right of access to special collections. Mikhoels set to work and managed to get hold of such a privilege for Jacob. A month later, Ossetsky, as a consultant for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, received permission to work in the library of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Once a week, on Tuesdays at 9:00 a.m., he went to the library—a seven-minute walk from his house—and spent two hours there, poring over the week-old papers. Then he went home to drink tea and muse over the new information.

The most difficult task for Jacob was the first report he had to write. He submitted it at the beginning of 1946. He had to find just the right language and tone of exposition. As a result, he developed a new genre of scholarly narrative, a blend of political analysis, historical research, and essay. This was his favorite threefold form: the present, the past, and a possible scenario for the future.

Life, which had heretofore contorted its aspect into a grimace, now began to smile upon Jacob. After many years of hardship and ordeals in the provincial towns, doing the practical work of an economist that did not inspire him with any enthusiasm, he was finally able to write and undertake the scholarly work that was closest to his heart and his inclinations. His efforts to get a residence permit in Moscow finally paid off—he was able to register at his sister Eva’s place. He lived with her family, had a strong friendship with his brother-in-law, and was close to his two nephews. Exile and war were behind them now, and things were so good that even his trusty foe eczema left him in peace. The only thing that cast a shadow over his life was his long-lost wife and his estranged son, who had married and now had a child of his own, whom Jacob had never met.

Jacob managed to accomplish a great deal—in part through the commissioned work he was doing. But such was his cast of mind; he didn’t know how to limit himself, how to draw boundaries. He threw himself into new interests as they arose, and they arose before he had exhausted all the possibilities of the old ones. Abandoning yesterday’s, he took up tomorrow’s—research on Palestine, its history and projects for a future that remained uncertain. He was particularly interested in the history of Palestine after its exit from the Ottoman Empire. This period, after Great Britain had received a mandate to govern Palestine, had been thoroughly explored in English publications after the First World War. These took the form of memoirs and political, archaeological, and cultural studies that were available to the public in several large libraries. It was precisely at this time that he produced an overview of the political forces in the region for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, analyzing the various parties involved: socialists, communists, workers, Arabs, Jews, nationalists, and internationalists. At the same time, he examined the labor movement. The picture was frighteningly diverse and replete with explosive compounds and combinations.

At a certain moment, Jacob felt an urgent need to learn yet another language—Hebrew. So he set about mastering it. Now he recalled with gratitude his late father, who had hired a tutor to teach Jacob the languages of Jewish culture, Hebrew and Yiddish. This modest foundation was enough to allow him fairly quickly to begin reading publications in the ancient, but rapidly adopted and renewed, language of the future Palestine. Now a rather detailed picture of Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East was taking shape in his mind. He believed that the best resolution of the situation would be the creation of a single Arab-Jewish state, without the division of Palestine. This was the outcome preferred by Zionists of both socialist and communist persuasion. But, in the final analysis, the future of Israel would be decided by only one person, who was sitting in the Kremlin.

Ossetsky’s reports were sent from the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to Stern, an adviser in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and on up the ladder. The final destination was the table of the Soviet working group of the United Nations. In the spring of 1947, Arab-Jewish tensions had become so sharp that the question of creating a Palestinian state was in urgent need of resolution.

Jacob worked like one possessed. As usual, he formulated a work plan for the week, the month, the year. He adhered to this schedule, and was distraught when circumstances prevented him from carrying it out. His two years of collaboration with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee finally bore fruit: Jacob was already laying plans for a future book on the history and geography of this region. He signed a contract with a publisher.

He did not abandon his scholarly research on demographics, either. He always had a reserve of ideas, enough for several years in advance. Jacob delivered his final report to the secretary of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Heifetz. Mikhoels was absent from Moscow, on tour, for almost all of December 1947.

The tragedy occurred on January 12, 1948. According to the official version, Mikhoels was hit by a car in Minsk. He had been there for several days to meet with the directors and actors of the Belorussian Jewish Theater. The entire Jewish community, depleted in numbers a hundredfold after the war, flocked to him. They performed Tevye the Dairyman in his honor, regaled him at concerts, fêted him in restaurants, and invited him to actors’ residential dormitories. They adored him, showered him with adulation, and surrounded him with a protective human wall, from which he broke out only once, on the eve of his return to Moscow. Golubov, the Moscow theater critic who was accompanying Mikhoels on the tour, kept pressing him to come with him to visit his Minsk friend, but Mikhoels was so busy the entire week that he didn’t manage to make the visit until the last evening of his stay in Minsk. He never returned to his hotel. They found his body early in the morning on the 13th, with many fractures and a crushed skull.

Jacob found out about this accident on the following day, over the radio. The funeral took place several days later. So many people attended the funeral that Jacob had to wait an hour to reach the coffin to pay his last respects. The head of the deceased was mutilated, but his face was recognizable—bluish gray and stony. Next to him, on a small table, lay his broken spectacles.

Jacob left the theater where the body was lying in state. It was frosty, and the light was extinguished quickly, as in the theater. From Malaya Bronnaya, he turned automatically in the direction of his former home, on Povarskaya. Then he brought himself up short, turned around, and walked along the boulevards to Ostozhenka. The past never disappears; it only sinks into the depths. Most likely, the memory is submerged in some deep layers of the cerebral cortex, where it slumbers. Jacob had no doubt that it was a political murder, an assassination. What was Mikhoels thinking about, what did he remember, when they killed him?

Give up everything, abandon it all, and go to the provinces—to teach children music theory, or piano, or clarinet, to read Dickens, to learn Italian and read Dante … If I have time …