Zelig: “I don’t believe in God, but I believe that the Communist ideal is sacred. I hope the same goes for you.”
Pavel didn’t answer.
June 22, 1941.
Hitler’s armies launch an all-out offensive against the Soviet Union. After a series of defeats, the Red Army needs men and equipment. Some prisoners are freed, and some of the deported are brought back from Siberia. Zelig is to enter the infantry, whereas Pavel, found to be medically unfit, is appointed to the Department of Transportation.
Desperate, Zelig urges Pavel to try again to convince the authorities of his family tie in the USSR.
“They won’t believe us,” says Pavel.
“It’s still worth a try. What have we got to lose?”
Zelig introduced himself to a lieutenant. “Excuse me, but I think that if you’re willing to listen to me, you’ll see that I have something important to tell you.”
“I’m listening,” says the officer. “Be brief.”
“My comrade Pavel’s cousin works in the Kremlin,” he said, standing at attention.
“Speak. I’m listening.”
“He works with one of Stalin’s close collaborators.”
“And what’s this cousin’s name?”
“Meirovitch. He works with Lazar Kaganovich.”
The officer gave a start.
“Bring in your friend!”
A few minutes later, Pavel introduced himself.
“I want to hear it from you,” the officer said, staring at Pavel. “Is it true—you have a friend in the Kremlin?”
Trying to control his trembling, Pavel said yes, it’s true.
The officer rose nervously. “Why didn’t you tell us this earlier?”
Zelig, standing at the door, coughed gently, trying to intervene.
“We tried,” says Zelig.
The lieutenant ignored him. “Pavel, do you realize what you’re saying? Do you know that Lazar Kaganovich is among the most loyal confidants of Comrade Stalin?”
“I didn’t make anything up.”
Forty-eight hours later, Pavel was on his way to Moscow.
Shaltiel tries to remember how and when Pavel broke with his Communist past, reimmersed himself in his ancestral faith, retook his Jewish name Pinhas.
Did Pavel’s break date from his memorable impromptu visit to the Moscow synagogue on the day of Rosh Hashanah? The visit had shaken him, that’s for sure. But it hadn’t caused a definitive rupture. Something else had been necessary for his life to change.
Shaltiel was present when Pavel confided in his father. He had come from Jerusalem to take part in the family celebration. It was on a Saturday afternoon, of course, at home.
Pavel and his father were meeting for the first time since the war. After the requisite small talk, there was a silence. Pinhas spoke up: “I’m thinking about Davarowsk and Moscow—they seemed so far from each other. Much farther than Moscow from Jerusalem.”
“Explain what you mean,” said Haskel.
“I mean, to paraphrase the great Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, that from wherever he sets off, the Jew always returns to Jerusalem.” Then Pinhas started describing what he called one of the saddest episodes in his life.
“When disillusion had taken me under its wing, I talked to Leon Meirovitch about Davarowsk. He cried. He cried for the living and the dead, for his family that he would never see again. He, the staunch, die-hard Communist, entrenched in his ideology, who swore only by Marx and Lenin, Stalin and Kaganovich, cried his heart out. I quietly stood in a corner of his office. I felt indiscreet, ill at ease. ‘I’ve betrayed them,’ he whispered. ‘I betrayed my poor parents and their relatives. I made them suffer when I deserted their home and tradition. I substituted my faith for theirs. I believed in a future that refuted theirs, now I realize I was on the wrong track, a track that doesn’t lead to the liberation of nations but to their enslavement. It doesn’t lead to the land where our people would find sovereignty, serenity and the happiness promised by the prophets of pure socialism. It leads to the camps where freezing temperatures kill the body and despair demeans the spirit. Revolutions are too bloody. Give a banner to a people and they will make it red, drenching it in their own blood and those of their martyrs, the blood of their enemies, real and imagined, as well as their victims. I have lived and fought under a delusion, for a delusion. And now it’s too late to start over.’ ”
A short time later, when he arrived in Jerusalem, clandestinely helped by his cousin to escape the Soviet Union, in spite of his age, Haskel’s eldest son went to sit on the benches of a yeshiva. This was so Pinhas could delve more deeply into Pavel’s remorse.
Shaltiel recalls that Paritus had given him a brief lecture on mystical madness. Is it a powerful and implacable rebellion against linear or discursive thought? What does it seek, except to push tradition and heritage to the bottom of the abyss? Is it the rejection of what seems stable, well-founded, precise, necessary and inevitable? Finally, it is the victory of words, Paritus had said, words that find meaning in the heart.
And God is always there. He questions when He is questioned. His very silence questions. How should He be answered? Does the mystic stop being a mystic, or simply stop being, when He says no to him?
Me, I tell children about the old age that awaits them. I remind old people of their receding past.
Is it my destiny? It’s my passion, I admit it. Even when I don’t speak, my silence is still haunted by speech.
God himself needed to express Himself in order to undertake His oeuvre, which, afterward, would become that of men.
Facing the recesses of time and the traps of memory, entangled in pain, hope or speech, he sometimes falters, floats, trembles. Memory will always be something other than an aggregate of words, well or badly strung together. When man feels the need to throw himself into the fray, his speech changes into action.
For the good of all, I say: Be careful, the brutality of the world must not be more powerful or attractive than love and friendship. Celebrate speech instead of scorning it; elevate it to the level of prayer so that up there, the Judge of men will give men an appetite for serenity.
Life is a tale. When I was a child, this is what everyone told me; as an adult I repeated it. Sometimes it starts well and ends badly; at other times, it presages misfortune but brings jubilation.
But who is the storyteller? Who uses words in order to fill the imagination of the one who is listening to him?
It is of speech that I wish to talk, of speech that tosses the waves and moves with the mountain wind. Speech does not deny silence and does not replace it; it amplifies silence, just as silence, in turn, deepens speech.
Speech offers a sanctuary to silence, and silence protects it like a sanctuary.
Making a man reconcile life and conscience, truth and love, is a much more complex and brutal task than awakening the body to reality and the soul to fervor. Only rarely does one build on cleared, bare ground. But watch out—a building erected through speech on rotten soil is in danger of collapse at any time along with its content.
Speech gently caresses the hands of the sleeping child and slaps the face of the criminal. Speech demands a voice in order to live, in order to become a noose or a caress. Sometimes it scales the peaks at full speed; at other times it inches forward slowly, staggering, crawling. It is speech that helps the sick part with the living; and then again, it is also speech that makes death retreat.
During a brief respite, before dawn, Luigi, looking tired, takes advantage of the Arab’s absence to remove Shaltiel’s handcuffs and lets him rub his hands to get his blood circulating again.
“Since you say you’re a storyteller,” he said, “tell me a story. It will keep me awake.”
“You’re an odd one,” he says. “Here I am suffering because of you, getting ready to die at your hands, and you’re interested in hearing a story?”
“If it’s a good story, with a bit of luck, you’ll live an extra day,” says Luigi.
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“I don’t believe you,” Shaltiel says.
“Just talk,” says Luigi. “What do you have to lose?”
“Okay,” says Shaltiel. “A story will divert me too.
“Once upon a time,” he began, “there was a blind king who was desperate for light in order to admire the stars. He turned to his most illustrious advisers—physicians, philosophers, artists—and promised ten thousand gold coins to the person who would help him escape the darkness, if only for an instant.
“One of them handed him a miracle-making flask inherited from his great-grandfather; another brought him a mirror that reflected hidden and invisible things; a third prayed for him, in vain. The king could see nothing.
“He was giving up hope when an old beggar introduced himself and said in a very low voice, ‘Your Majesty, for a very long time I was like you, blind to the world that surrounded me. The beautiful blossoming trees, the rays of the sun, the merchants at the fair, the courtiers clustering around the wealthy—I didn’t see these things. Then, in my peregrinations throughout the kingdom, I met a young woman of such radiant beauty that her gaze lit mine. Would you like me to introduce her to you? She is far away, but I know where to find her.’
“ ‘Of course I’d like to meet her,’ said the king. ‘Go get her quickly.’
“He ordered that the beggar be provided with the speediest horse-drawn coach. The old man returned a month later, empty-handed and sad.
“ ‘I’m sorry, Your Majesty, I arrived too late. The beautiful young woman died in a mountain accident. The entire village where she lived is in tears.’
“Downcast, the king began to cry as well.
“ ‘Is this the first time you’re shedding tears?’ asked the old beggar.
“ ‘Yes,’ said the king. ‘The very first time.’
“ ‘So you’ve never seen your starving subjects, their sick children, the unfortunate languishing in jail?’
“ ‘No, never,’ said the king.
“ ‘Well, Your Majesty, now you know what human suffering is. You’re not blind; it’s that you have a heart of stone. You became indifferent to pain, poverty and the misfortune of your subjects. You forgot that each one of them—each of us—is a universe that deserves your attention and compassion. Look up into my eyes and tell yourself that my gaze contains the light that shone in the eyes of the beautiful young woman who has passed away.’
“A minute later, the king saw him and embraced him. And the entire kingdom celebrated the old beggar’s wisdom.”
“And what’s the moral of this story?” the Italian asked. “Am I supposed to guess it?”
Shaltiel took his time too before answering.
“I think you’ve already guessed it.”
And, at that moment, for the first time, Shaltiel began to feel a glimmer of hope.
Shaltiel’s father was right. The powerful world of Jewish history also manifests itself on the individual level. Yes, Pavel had an uncle at the Kremlin. Yes, his uncle worked with Lazar Kaganovich.
Pavel spent several weeks in a detention center in a Moscow suburb. The conditions there were more tolerable than in a GPU prison. All the prisoners were waiting for their cases to be settled. There was tension because the Socialist homeland was at war. The front was moving closer. The Red Army was losing thousands of men every day. Cities were falling with breathtaking speed. The entire country was mobilizing, arming itself. Long-standing political prisoners and new offenders volunteered to fight under the red banner. Officers were freed from the Gulag to fight.
One morning, they came for Pavel. An officer, at his desk, looked through a thick file and checked his identity. The officer gestured to his assistant with a conspiratorial look and, without a word, the latter invited the former prisoner to follow him. Outside, a military car was waiting. They were on the road for three hours, driving through obstacles and barricades, and going through checkpoints where his escort had to show documents to suspicious inspectors and scrupulous soldiers. Not one word was exchanged in the car. Pavel wondered where he was being taken and for what reason. He didn’t dare ask a question.
On arriving at the Kremlin, the escorting officer remained outside and another officer took over, after submitting Pavel to cross-examination and a thorough frisking. They made their way through corridor after corridor until they stood in front of a huge desk cluttered with newspapers and documents. A civilian with a mustache who sat behind the desk held out his hand and smiled.
“So, my dear relative, here you are,” said Leon Meirovitch. Guessing Pavel spoke no Russian, he greeted him in Yiddish.
“So it’s true?” said Pinhas.
“What?”
“True that I have an uncle in the Kremlin?’
“Why wouldn’t it be true?”
“For a Communist like me, it’s …”
“Utopian? Please, sit down.”
Pavel complied. He gazed about: There was a huge portrait of Stalin and a photo of Stalin at a younger age, with Lenin. On the desk, another, smaller picture showed a man in his forties, with broad shoulders, a beaming face and piercing eyes. Who could it be? His uncle guessed his question and answered.
“It’s the man I work for, Lazar Kaganovich. Have you heard of him?”
“Yes. A childhood friend, a Communist Jew like me, told me wonderful things about him. Is he really so close to Stalin?”
“Yes he is. Who is this friend?”
Pavel told him about Zelig and his devotion to the party, and of all their adventures. That Zelig was being detained. “He’s the person who got me to join the party,” said Pavel.
His cousin smiled. “In that case, I owe him a debt of gratitude. If not for him, I wouldn’t have met you. I’ll look into his situation.”
They talked about relatives and friends. Leon told him the Germans were massacring Jews by the thousands. The tragedy of Babi Yar in Kiev was the most recent slaughter. In several cities and villages they had locked Jews into synagogues and set them on fire. Pavel suspected the Germans were persecuting Jews in the lands they occupied, but such atrocities were far beyond his imagination.
“And what about Davarowsk?” he asked.
“No news for the time being. The city is occupied by the Hungarians. As for you, Pavel, you’re going to stay with me. You’ll live at my house, take Russian courses and work for me. Does that suit you? You should know that our office is part of the security service. So, is it yes?”
“Yes,” said Pavel. “But may I remind you please not to forget my friend Zelig.”
“I’ve made a note of it.” (His intercession would come too late—Zelig died at the front.)
Yesterday a prisoner in the Gulag, today an employee in the Kremlin.
Thanks to his job, Pavel became closer with the Yiddish-speaking Jewish poets and writers Peretz Markish, Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister and Itzik Pfeffer, and even the great actor Solomon Mikhoels. In his position as Kaganovich’s official representative, he attended all their meetings, parties and lectures. He was introduced to Ilya Ehrenburg, the distinguished Soviet journalist, equally at home in Paris and Moscow. Markish recited his war poems to him, praising the courage of Jews in the face of disaster. Der Nister told him about the renowned Rabbi Nachman of Breslov.
After Germany was defeated, he succeeded in convincing his cousin to invite Lazar Kaganovich to come with them to see the renowned actor Solomon Mikhoels perform at the Moscow State Jewish Theater. When Kaganovich appeared in the special box reserved for the most important Kremlin personalities, a buzz went through the audience. The spectators rose and applauded him as though a great hero were standing before them.
After the performance, a dinner was organized with Mikhoels and the actors. They discussed the news from Palestine, where underground movements were resisting British oppression.
Kaganovich boasted of his friendship with Stalin. It was he who had overseen the building of the bunker for the Little Father of the People during the war; he who had been in charge
of the trains that brought food to Leningrad during the siege. Kaganovich said that Stalin personally supported the struggle for a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine, and that Molotov, the foreign minister, was going to make a speech to that effect at the United Nations. It seemed the situation of the Jews in Russia was certainly going to improve.
Lazar Kaganovich, calm, intelligent, a good listener, was friendly with Molotov and his Jewish wife, Pauline (who loved to express herself in Yiddish), and with Beria, the KGB chief. It was said that Stalin was the only person to tease Kaganovich about his Jewish origins. Others might have wanted to, but they didn’t dare.
The crowd has filled the great synagogue on Arkhipova Street, suddenly too small and narrow to accommodate it. It is Rosh Hashanah. For believers, it is the day when the Judge of peoples examines their behavior and dispenses His approval or disapproval from on high. Whose stature will be elevated and whose will be lowered? Who will live and who will die? Rosh Hashanah is devoted to meditation and prayer, in other words, to everything that belongs to the spiritual in human beings.
But this crowd is not here for that reason. It is here to welcome Jews from a faraway, sun-filled country. For the first and only time, the official representative of the new state of Israel, Mrs. Golda Meirson (changed to Meir), has decided to come to the synagogue with her circle of advisers. She comes not as a practicing Jew, but simply because she is Jewish. She wants to meet her formerly invisible brothers and sisters.
Not far away, Leon Meirovitch steps into Pavel’s office.
“Let’s take a little walk. Get some air. It’s such a beautiful day.”
Pavel nods his head approvingly.
“Today is Rosh Hashanah,” Leon says. “Did you forget?”
“No,” says Pavel, “I didn’t.”
“Before leaving Davarowsk, did you go to synagogue?”
“Yes. With my parents.”
“Even after becoming a Communist?”
“Yes, even then. First, because I didn’t want them to find out. Secondly, I love liturgical songs. I also wanted to be with my people.”