Dara Horn

   Jewish Review of Books, Summer 2015

“Let’s talk about something more cheerful. Have you heard any news about the cholera in Odessa?”

That’s the famous ending of Sholem Aleichem’s 1904 story “Hodl,” about Tevye the Dairyman’s daughter who marries a communist and follows him into exile in Siberia. The story is a heartbreaking one, ending with a forced separation between a Russian-Jewish parent and child. But the agony buried within that final joke transcended literature after Sholem Aleichem’s death—when revolutionaries like Hodl’s husband actually succeeded in creating a new Russian regime that promised its Jews lives of integrity, seduced them into compliance, and ultimately ate some of the best of them alive.

The Soviet-Jewish experience took the form of a psychological horror story, brimming with suspense, double-crossing, and twisted self-blame. Its greatest horror came in the undoing of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, a board of prominent Soviet-Jewish artists and intellectuals established by Joseph Stalin in 1942 to drum up financial support from Jews overseas for the Soviet war effort. Two of the more prominent names on the JAC’s roster were Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, and Benjamin Zuskin, the theater’s leading comic actor. After promoting these people to the skies during the war, Stalin decided these loyal Jewish communists were no longer useful and charged them all with treason. Mikhoels was murdered first, in a hit staged to look like a traffic accident. Nearly all the others, including Zuskin and several renowned Yiddish writers, were executed by firing squad on August 12, 1952.

Just as the regime accused these Jewish artists and intellectuals of being too “nationalist” (read: Jewish), our long hindsight makes it strangely tempting to read this history and accuse them of not being “nationalist” enough—that is, of being so foolishly committed to the Soviet party line that they were unable to see the writing on the wall and were thus gobsmacked by Stalin’s deadly betrayal. Many works on this subject have said as much. In Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, the indispensible English translation of transcripts from the JAC show trial, Russia scholar Joshua Rubenstein concludes his lengthy introduction with the following:

As for the defendants at the trial, it is not clear what they believed about the system they each served. Their lives darkly embodied the tragedy of Soviet Jewry. A combination of revolutionary commitment and naïve idealism had tied them to a system they could not renounce. Whatever doubts or misgivings they had, they kept to themselves, and served the Kremlin with the required enthusiasm. They were not dissidents. They were Jewish martyrs. They were also Soviet patriots. Stalin repaid their loyalty by destroying them.

This is completely true and also completely unfair. The tragedy—even the term seems unjust, with its implied blaming of the victim—was not that these Soviet-Jewish artists and intellectuals sold their souls to the devil, though many clearly did. The tragedy, for which no one can be blamed but the relevant devil, was that integrity was never an option in the first place.

Of the many varieties of anti-Semitism, or anti-Judaism, that have plagued the Jews over the centuries, two recurrent general patterns can be identified by the holidays that celebrate triumphs over them: Purim and Hanukkah. In the Purim version, exemplified by the Persian genocidal decrees in the biblical book of Esther, as well as by more recent ideologies like Nazism and today’s many versions of radical Islam, the regime’s goal is unambiguous: Kill all the Jews. In the Hanukkah version, as in the 2^nd-century B.C.E. Hellenized Seleucid regime that criminalized all expressions of Judaism, the goal is still to eliminate Jewish civilization. But in the Hanukkah version, this goal could theoretically be accomplished by simply destroying the civilization, while leaving the warm de-Judaized bodies of its former practitioners intact. For this reason, the Hanukkah version of anti-Semitism—whose appearances range from the Spanish Inquisition to the Soviet regime—often employs Jews as its agents. These “converted” Jews openly renounce whatever aspects of their Jewish identity are unacceptable to the relevant regime, proudly declare their loyalty to the ideology of the day, and loudly urge other Jews to follow them. These people are used as cover to demonstrate the good intentions of the regime—which of course isn’t anti-Semitic, but merely requires that its Jews publicly flush thousands of years of Jewish civilization down the toilet in exchange for the prize of not being treated like dirt or murdered. For a few years. Maybe.

After many episodes of Purim-style anti-Semitism on the steppes, and especially after the Holocaust, it is perhaps not surprising that so many Soviet Jews fell into the trap of not recognizing Hanukkah-style anti-Semitism when it first became apparent or of actively serving as the regime’s willing agents. In the wake of indiscriminate massacres ranging from Khmelnitzky to Petliura to Babi Yar (the latter two in their living memory), these people may well have found a certain appeal in the prospect of not being murdered, regardless of the cost.

For those artists who worked in Yiddish, the Soviet Union in its early years had the added attraction of apparently not treating them like dirt. In its quest to brainwash national minorities in the 1920s and 1930s, the regime offered unprecedented material support to Yiddish culture, paying for Yiddish-language schools, theaters, publishing houses, and more, to the extent that there were Yiddish literary critics who were actually salaried by the Soviet government. This support led the major Yiddish novelist Dovid Bergelson to publish his landmark 1926 article “Three Centers” about New York, Warsaw, and Moscow as centers of Yiddish-speaking culture, asking which city offered Yiddish writers the brightest prospects. Bergelson’s unequivocal answer was Moscow, a choice that resulted in his execution in 1952.

The reversal of Soviet-Jewish fortunes is occasionally presented as abrupt and unexpected, as in the Jewish Museum’s otherwise excellent exhibit on the Moscow State Yiddish Theater in 2009, where rooms full of beautiful Chagall murals and Yiddish films terminated suddenly in a dark room featuring a film of the funeral of the theater’s murdered director Mikhoels, with a voiceover announcing, “Theater is an ephemeral art.” (I couldn’t make this up.) But the truth is that from the beginning, Soviet support for Jewish culture came at a very particular, Hanukkah-style price: the extraction of its Judaism, down to the letters in which it was written. The regime went so far as to create a new, literally anti-Semitic Soviet orthography for Yiddish. This involved eliminating the alphabet’s variable final consonants (a mem at the end of a word looks exactly like a mem anywhere else) and making the spelling of all Semitic-origin words phonetic, so that a word like “Shabbat” (pronounced “Shabbes” in Yiddish), spelled since the Pentateuch as shin-bet-tav (“shin-beys-sav” in Yiddish), was now spelled “shin-alef-beys-ayin-somekh.”

If the goal here weren’t spelled out clearly enough, one can see the process even more vividly in the repertoire of the government-sponsored Moscow State Yiddish Theater, which could only present or adapt Yiddish plays that denounced traditional Judaism as backward, bourgeois, corrupt, or even more explicitly—as in the many productions involving ghosts and graveyard scenes—as literally dead. As its actors would be, soon enough.

Among the many scholarly tomes

on Soviet-Jewish history,

Ala Zuskin Perelman’s

The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin,

a memoir of the author’s father,

is a breath of fresh air.

Zuskin Perelman, who now lives in Israel, was only 12 years old when her father was arrested. But her book—previously published in Russian in 2002, and in Hebrew in 2006, is newly available in English in a somewhat abridged form—is pain-stakingly researched in both Russian and Yiddish sources, and she grew up completely immersed in her father’s world. Her mother was also an actor in the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, and her family lived in the same building as Mikhoels, along with many other important Soviet-Jewish artists. In addition to seeing her parents perform countless times, she also witnessed the destruction of their world: She attended Mikhoels’s state funeral; witnessed the arrest of the Yiddish writer Der Nister, whose apartment was across the hall from hers; and was present when secret police ransacked her home in conjunction with her father’s arrest.

We are accustomed by now to reading emotional memoirs of Holocaust survivors or victims written by their children, and, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we are also accustomed to clinical reports of Soviet crimes extracted from archives opened in the past 20 years.

But Zuskin Perelman’s book

 is a rare thing:

an emotional recounting,

with the benefit of hindsight,

of what it was really like to live through the nadir

of the Soviet-Jewish nightmare.

­It’s as close as we can get, anyway. Benjamin Zuskin’s own thoughts on the topic are only available from state interrogations extracted under unknown tortures. (One typical interrogation document from his three years in the notorious Lefortovo Prison announces that that day’s interrogation lasted four hours, but the transcript is only half a page long—leaving to the imagination how interrogator and interrogatee may have spent their time together. Suffice it to say that another JAC detainee didn’t make it through the trial alive.) His three years in Lefortovo began when he was arrested in 1949 in a hospital room, where he was being treated for chronic insomnia brought on by the murder of his boss and career-long acting partner Mikhoels; the secret police strapped him to a gurney and carted him to prison in his hospital gown while he was still sedated. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

       In order to truly appreciate

the loss here, one needs to know

what was lost.

And for that one needs to return to the world of Sholem Aleichem, the author of Benjamin Zuskin’s first role on the Yiddish stage, in a play fittingly titled It’s a Lie!

Benjamin Zuskin’s path to the Yiddish theater and later to the Soviet firing squad began in a shtetl comparable to those immortalized in Sholem Aleichem’s work, and part of this memoir’s beauty is the attention it lavishes on how the old world Zuskin came from animated his art. Zuskin, a religious child who was exposed to theater only through traveling Yiddish troupes and clowning relatives, experienced that world’s destruction: His native Lithuanian shtetl, Ponievezh, was among the many Jewish towns forcibly evacuated during the First World War, catapulting him and hundreds of thousands of other Jewish refugees into modernity. He landed in a secular secondary school in Penza, a Russian city with a Yiddish theater presence. In 1920, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater opened, and by 1921, Zuskin was starring alongside Mikhoels, the theater’s leading light.

In the one acting class I ever attended, I learned only one thing: Acting isn’t about pretending to be someone you aren’t, but rather about emotional communication. Zuskin, who not only starred in most theater productions but also ran the theater’s acting school, embodied that concept. His very first audition was a one-man sketch he created, consisting of nothing more than a bumbling old tailor threading a needle—without words, costumes, or props. It became so popular that he performed it to entranced crowds for years. This physical artistry, beautifully described in this memoir, animated his every role. As one critic wrote, “Even the slightest breeze and he is already air-bound.”

Zuskin specialized in playing comic figures like the Fool in King Lear—as his daughter puts it, characters who “are supposed to make you laugh, but they have an additional dimension, and they arouse poignant reflections about the cruelty of the world.” In an autobiographical essay included in the volume, Zuskin articulates this vividly. As he discusses his favorite roles, he explains that “my heart is captivated particularly by the image of the person who is derided and humiliated, but who loves life, even though he encounters obstacles placed before him through no fault of his own.” Unwittingly, Zuskin was pretending to be no one but himself.

The first half of this memoir seems to recount only triumphs, and students of Yiddish theater will find it indispensable. The theater’s repertoire in its early years was largely adapted from classic Yiddish writers such as Sholem Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, and Mendele Mokher Seforim. The memoir’s title is drawn from Zuskin’s most famous role: Senderl, the Sancho Panza figure in Mendele’s Don Quixote-inspired work Masoes Binyomin Hashlishi (Travels of Benjamin the Third), about a pair of shtetl idiots who set out for the Land of Israel and wind up walking around the block. These productions were artistically inventive, brilliantly acted, and played to packed houses both at home and on tour. Travels of Benjamin the Third, in a 1928 review typical of the play’s reception, was lauded by The New York Times as “one of the most originally conceived and beautifully executed evenings in the modern theater.”

The acclaim came at a price. Consider one of the theater’s landmark productions, I.L. Peretz’s surrealist masterpiece Bay nakht afn altn mark (At Night in the Old Marketplace), first performed in 1925. Zuskin Perelman accurately describes this dreamlike play as a “carnival of ghosts” with “a dying city and a graveyard coming to life.” Those who come back from the dead are not only misfits like drunks and prostitutes, but specific figures from shtetl life—cantors, Hasidim, synagogue beadles, and the like. Leading them all is a badkhn, or wedding jester—divided in this production into two mirror-characters played by Mikhoels and Zuskin—whose repeated chorus among the living corpses is “The dead will rise!” “Within this play there was something hidden, something with an ungraspable depth,” Zuskin Perelman writes, and then relates how 

Michael Handelzalts

Haaretz English, July 07, 2006 

I read this book with a growing sense of self-accusation. After all, I have been interested in Hebrew-Israeli theater for many years, and during all that time I ignored the parallel existence of a non-Hebrew Jewish theater that reached some spectacular peaks of artistic achievement. I had heard, of course, of the actor Solomon Mikhoels, who was killed on January 13, 1948, in a "staged" traffic accident (orchestrated by the Stalinist mechanism). But this awareness, which fell under the heading of the Jews' persecution by the communists, did not crystallize into full knowledge of the magnificent and wondrous enterprise that was the Moscow State Jewish Theater, which operated between the years of 1919 and 1949. 

Ala Zuskin Perelman's…

The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin

devoted to the life story of her actor-father,

is not only a commemorative tribute to a unique artist

and his tragic fate.

It also offers a chance to learn about this chapter

in the history of 20th-century Jewish culture... 

The accomplishments of the Moscow State Jewish Theater in the 1920s under director Alexei Granovsky were on a pair with those of the Habima theater in the same period, under the direction of Vakhtangov. The European capitals admired both theaters, each with its own distinctive qualities. Marc Chagall, for example, preferred Granovsky's aesthetics, and the murals he painted at the Moscow theater document the company and its era. In the collective Jewish-Israeli memory of those years, however, only Habima has survived, because it spoke Hebrew - although, unlike Habima, the Jewish theater in Moscow had an enthusiastic public that understood Yiddish and loved the theater for speaking in it. 

The accomplishments of the Moscow State Jewish Theater in the 1920s under director Alexander Granvosky were on a par with those of the Habima theater in the same period, under the direction of Vakhtangov. The European capitals admired both theaters, each with its own distinctive qualities. Marc Chagall, for example, preferred Granovsky's aesthetics, and the murals he painted at the Moscow theater document the company and its era. In the collective Jewish-Israeli memory of those years, however, only Habima has survived, because it spoke Hebrew - although, unlike Habima, the Jewish theater in Moscow had an enthusiastic public that understood Yiddish and loved the theater for speaking in it. 

Zuskin Perelman first published this book in Russian. The last time she saw her father alive was on December 20, 1948, when she was 12 years old. Her mother (who was Zuskin's second wife) was away from Moscow at the time, on a tour that the authorities forced upon the company even though it was a great budgetary burden to it. Zuskin, then the director of the theater (a role he was forced to take after Mikhoels' death), was supposed to be hospitalized. He had suffered several nervous breakdowns and now, after a prolonged bout of insomnia, was scheduled to undergo an anesthetic treatment at a state clinic. He hugged his daughter good-bye, left - and returned a few minutes later because he had forgotten his slippers.

For three days, the hospital reported to the daughter and her aunt that Zuskin's condition was improving. On the night between the 23rd and 24th of December, agents of the secret police came to the house, conducted a search, took some papers and locked the furniture up. At the same time, other agents collected Zuskin from the hospital despite the objections of his doctors.

His family never saw him again. His wife and daughter, having learned of the arrest, brought packages and money to the prison, not knowing whether they ever reached him. The Moscow State Jewish Theater was closed, friends and acquaintances were afraid to meet with its staff (although Ala kept going to school as though nothing had happened).

In 1953 the mother and daughter were exiled from Moscow. When they were allowed to return [a year and a half later, that is a year after Stalin's death - A. P Z], in 1955 the mother was summoned to the police station, where she was told that her husband has been fully exonerated and that all his rights, as well as the commendations he receive for his service to the revolution as an artist and actor, had been reinstated.

At the same time, she also learned that Zuskin had been interrogated in prison for four years and brought to trial (along with 15 other defendants, including authors Peretz Markish and David Bergelson) for treason against the homeland, subversive activity and transporting information to the West. No lawyer had been appointed to defend him, and he was convicted and executed by firing squad in August 1952.

Genuine shock

The fact that the mother and her daughter knew nothing about the fate of their loved one for five years, and that they learned of his death only three years after it occurred, is not an unusual situation in life under a communist regime. And still, when we learn of this, at the very end of the book, by reading a letter written by the mother, Eda Berkovskaya, to her husband's daughter from his first marriage, it comes as a genuine shock. Perhaps it was right of the author to keep this information concealed until the end. Had she revealed it at the beginning, it would have been difficult to be duly thrilled by the artistic enterprise of Zuskin the actor and of the theater in which he worked. 

Zuskin Perelman organizes her book like a five-act biographical play, with intermediary scenes in which she quotes from Zuskin's words to his KGB interrogators. This is the compelling story of a gifted man, largely self-taught, who was swept into the world of Yiddish theater and literature by the writings of Sholem Aleichem. He wanted to be an actor, but studied mine engineering instead. 

When he came to Moscow in the early 1920s, already married and a father, he studied engineering and debated whether to join Habimah or the Moscow State Jewish Theater, established at the same time. He did not consider himself worthy of belonging to both. By chance he happened to visit a friend's room, where a man he did not know asked him if he could type. He said yes and typed up some document for Mikhoels. In his final statements at his trial, on July 11, he said among other things: "I was accepted by chance into the Moscow State Jewish Theater, and this became the tragedy of my life." 

Zuskin Perelman largely accepts her father's self-perception. It did not prevent him from developing an astonishing career, despite severe doubts. Zuskin Perelman documents all of his roles, most of them played alongside Mikhoels as his vital partner (Sendrel to Benjamin the Third, from the novella by Mendele Mokher Seforim), the witch to Hotsmach, and - perhaps the high point - the fool to Mikhoels' King Lear). Even when a play did not have a role for Zuskin, the director would sometimes create one for him as Mikhoels' silent alter-ego. Descriptions found in the testimonies of spectators - yes, theater does leave behind testimonies of those who have seen it, that's the wonder of it - suggest an actor with a near-mystical ability to fly across the stage (which worked well with Granovksy's distinctly non-realist approach) and at the same time palpable, down-to-earth, Jewish.

Mikhoels and Zuskin shared the fraternity and love of partners, but also the rivalry of actors. Zuskin apparently felt that he had to shoulder the burden of the theater while Mikhoels engaged in Soviet and Jewish public activity.

Despite all his doubts and crises,

Zuskin wanted to act.

He was forced to teach actors (and indeed was a fine, devoted and demanding teacher) as well as run the theater. In 1928, after a theatrical victory tour of the European capitals, the company hoped to perform in the United States as well. The Soviet authorities would not permit it, however, and the company returned to Moscow. Granovsky himself remained in the West. 

Beginning of the end

This, really, was the beginning of the end, but the members of the Jewish theater had yet to understand it. There were indications: They were required to represent their Judaism on stage in a critical way and to adapt themselves to the Soviet realism; their Yiddish-speaking audience dwindled, but they continued to enjoy the esteem of the authorities. Zuskin appeared in movies too, and one of them, Seekers of Happiness,  became a cult favorite. The opening, written by Zuskin, shows the boat sailing down the river. Zuskin, playing Pinia, askes somedody: "How much could the ship like this cost?" What could be more Jewish on Soviet Union than that kind of question?