The Yid

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Though I was born six years after Stalin’s death, I have multiple connections to this story.

I owe much to my father, Boris Goldberg, a journalist and a poet. In mid-August 1959, in Malakhovka, he took me across the street to meet the man who translated King Lear into Yiddish. Shmuel Halkin had returned from the camps a sick man. An entry in my father’s diary describes this meeting in considerable detail. Knowing that the author of Kinig Lir and I literally, physically intersected on this earth established a powerful link to these fantastic events.

My grandfather — Moisey Semyonovich Rabinovich — provided another link. He told war stories, both real and imagined. In reality, he was an artilleryman in the Civil War and a pharmacist at front-line hospitals during World War II. The fantasies he created for my benefit made him a partisan and a commando. I remember those stories well. In many ways, this novel is an homage to his storytelling. The “fierce Rabinovich” in this book is based on the fictional character he created.

Thanks to my grandfather, I met many men like him, war heroes — old men by the time our paths crossed. Carrying rolled-up copies of Krasnaya Zvezda, the Red Army newspaper, in their pockets, they traded war stories in Russian and Yiddish. I listened.

A leap of fiction brings with it the privilege to blend history with fantasy. I am intimately familiar with Levinson’s communal flat in the center of Moscow. I spent the first twelve years of my life there. I let Levinson have the room which in reality my parents and I shared. While Levinson didn’t live in that apartment, two of the characters — the aforementioned Moisey Semyonovich Rabinovich, who, in fact, was the manager of Drugstore Number Twelve, and Ol’ga Fyodorovna Zabranskaya — indeed lived there.

Ol’ga Fyodorovna was a proper elderly lady who befriended my mother, and I have repaid her kindness by making her a heroine of this story. A few of the trinkets Ol’ga Fyodorovna gave my mother are in my house in Washington.

The Malakhovka dacha where bodies are dumped — Zapadnaya Number Four — belonged to my grandmother.

The idea for this novel came to me when I was around ten.

German Grigoryevich Pervov, the father of my friend Alyoshka Pervov, pointed to an apartment building entryway at Chaplygin Street and said: “This is where in 1944 they arrested a Jewess for killing a Russian girl and putting her blood in the matzos.” Then he described watching this woman’s arrest. I returned home — a few blocks away — and told my parents, who then told me about anti-Semitic mythology.

This evil myth shook me to the core. Of course, I believe that some hapless woman was led away in handcuffs. I can accept the notion that she had committed murder (such things happen). The exact address is 15 Chaplygin Street. If anyone knows what actually occurred, I urge you to find a way to get in touch with me or a journalist of your choice. I would consider it an honor to unite this woman with her true story. Many of my colleagues would, too. More than anything, that distant event gave me the appreciation of the power of an urban legend.

My aunt Ulyana Iosifovna Dobrushina, who grew up in an illustrious Jewish theater family, told me about her encounters with Solomon Mikhoels, the giant in the background of this novel. She gave me books about the Moscow State Jewish Theater. GOSET was one of the great theaters of Europe, and my aunt was a link to its glory.

I didn’t invent Levinson. I took him from the pages of Aleksandr Fadeyev’s Soviet classic novella Razgrom—translation: Defeat—which takes place in the Ural hills during the civil war. In these pages, I give Levinson a different first name and imagine his later life. I imagine him as an inflexible autodidact who stumbles into theater. A sad clown. Conveniently, I let him keep the sword that belonged to his prototype. I didn’t invent Commissar Yefim Zeitlin, either. He was a cousin of my grandfather’s, and one of the founders of the Comintern for Youth, known under the acronym KIM. Yefim was executed circa 1938. His daughter Kima is entirely fictional. I have no idea whether Yefim was ever a member of the Jewish Bund, or for that matter a Bund sympathizer. He is now.

I could never have made up Kent and Tarzan, the two thugs in this book. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. As a young reporter, my father traveled to a penal colony for young criminals and interviewed some of the boys there. Though the book he wrote was never published, a draft survived emigration, and I used it to breathe life into Kent and Tarzan. The name Kent really did exist in the Soviet underworld, as did the verb skentovatsya, to bekent (or, better, conkent).

My daughter Katherine Pavlovna Goldberg, now a costume designer for stage and screen, walked me through history of theater and the intricacies (and perils) of method acting. Without her brilliant notes — given to me on a memorable hike in Vermont — this book would have fallen flat. My daughter Sarah Pavlovna Goldberg, a gifted young writer who, on the threshold of going to college, seems to gravitate to comedy, inspired some of the more irreverent lines.

Many of my friends enriched this narrative. Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who as a septa- and octogenarian became the leader of opposition to Putin’s regime, helped me re-experience my country, its culture, and its democratic tradition. Lyuda is a teacher, a coauthor, and a friend. She was there, in 1953, struggling with profound doubts. Of course, I was full of admiration for the democratic, “Westernizer” wing of the Russian intelligentsia. I met Lyuda during her immigration period in the United States. Thanks to our collaboration, I gained insight into our common roots.

My Russian friends tend to be in their eighties.

Janusz Bardach, whose prison memoir—Man Is Wolf to Man—I had the honor to review in The New York Times, helped me a great deal as well. After my review appeared in the Times, Janusz and I became friends. Our conversations, which occurred more than daily for years, fuel this narrative. Another witness of that time, Inna Semyonovna Baser, told me what she knew about monstrous events that were brewing in 1953. As a young woman, she knew about the lists of Jews, and she knew about the cattle cars that were coming from outer reaches of the USSR. A gifted editor and a friend, Inna gave me excellent notes.

Jerome Groopman, a brilliant physician-writer, encouraged me to keep this manuscript alive, providing suggestions and helping design the medical component of Stalin’s demise. Dudley Hudspeth, a cardio-thoracic surgeon, helped me design the episodes involving acute trauma. The case report of Arkashka Kaplan’s surgery was penned by Dudley. Otis Brawley, Steven Hirschfeld, Michael Friedman, Derek Raghavan, Richard Liebeskind, Doron Junger, Svetlana Dolina, Tom Grubisich, Patricia Lochmuller, David Stephen, and Beth Lieberman read this manuscript in various stages and offered encouragement and advice.

I wrote the Yiddish sections of this book myself, and my friend Lee Goldberg helped me correct it, struggling on my behalf with the juicy expressions, including the word in the punch line. In translation of Akhmatova’s poetry, I defer to Judith Hemschemeyer. The translation of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov is by Antony Wood, from The Uncensored Boris Godunov by Chester Dunning (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).

My literary agent, Josh Getzler, took me on as a novelist rather than a writer of nonfiction. Despite many failed rounds of submissions of my novels, Josh didn’t tell me to go away and delete his contact information from my computer. He persevered, believing that this project would ultimately result in a published novel. His talented junior colleague Danielle Burby helped me pace this narrative, pulling me out of many a proverbial snowdrift.

It’s a pleasure to work with James Meader, my editor at Picador. James is one of those rare editors who understand how novels are structured and — more important — why they are written. His notes enabled me to unlock the unrealized potential of the characters I thought I knew well. Isabella Alimonti cheerfully kept the project on track even as the rest of us stumbled in the fog of multitasking.

Finally, this novel belongs as much to Susan Coll, a fellow dark humorist, as it does to me. Soon after our first date, Susan looked over my storeroom of unpublished novels, zeroed in on The Yid, and told me how to make this story fly.