The mobs were led by a Russian nationalist group called the Black Hundreds, which was connected to the Czar’s secret police.
When the Black Hundreds came, his hand did not tremble. Though it had the dynamics of a seizure, the feeling was its direct opposite. The druggist’s apprentice fought his way into the thick of the mob, learning that his calling to ease suffering was counterbalanced by an extraordinary capacity to maim and kill.
Later that night, he stood on the bloodstained cobblestones in the shadow of the synagogue, feeling the dissipation of the glorious crescendos. The new sensation, whatever it was, deserved a name, he thought, and the name came to him the instant he began to seek it: gerechtikeit. Justice.
Involvement with militant Jews led Moisey Semyonovich to a wider group of young men and women committed to building a separate Jewish future within the greater social democratic world. They called themselves the Bund, short for de Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Litve, Poyln, un Rusland. Over the years, the Bundists sided with various Marxist radical factions. Since this was a Jewish radical group, everyone fought. The principles were worth fighting over. Moisey Semyonovich sided with the terrorist wing.
He was never caught, but he was the man who set the explosives that wounded a second-tier czarist official in Mogilev. He received neither blame nor credit for that action, which was just as well. The Bund didn’t formally endorse terrorism but didn’t condemn it in individual cases.
Later, Moisey Semyonovich joined the Mensheviks in their battle against the Bolsheviks. They confronted Zionism as a harmful escapist movement. Some members of the Bund — including Moisey Semyonovich — advocated imprisonment as punishment for the act of speaking Hebrew, the language of escapism (that is, the rabbis and Zionists). He was a member of a nation within a nation: progressive, Yiddish-speaking workers and peasants. Of course, he was a Marxist, and as such believed that we are defined by our relationship to ownership of the means of production, but as a practical matter, why not allow these people to identify themselves as, say, Jews? Inevitably, their national identity will wither away, but why must there be a rush to reach that day?
Moisey Semyonovich wasn’t seeking a separate, safe future for himself and his fellow Yiddishists. He threw himself into every conflict he could, and whenever fate tested him, which it did on many a death-defying charge and hopeless retreat, Moisey Semyonovich became composed, machine-like.
Too often, Jews are described as victims of historical calamities. Moisey Semyonovich was not a victim. His goal was not to survive. It was to prevail.
Alas, Bolsheviks prevailed, Mensheviks were slowly slaughtered, and the Bund was classified as a counter-revolutionary organization. It wasn’t enough to say that you were wrong and apologize for your ideological mistakes. There was no tolerance for deviation, past or present. If you apologized, you hastened your demise. Moisey Semyonovich knew that evidence that would tie him to the Bund existed somewhere on Lubyanka and yet, for some reason, the unexpected remission of his deadly political disease continued.
During the Great Patriotic War, he believed that he was at greater risk of being killed by SMERSH — the Soviet organization charged with rooting out spies — than by the Germans. He was wounded twice, and he lost much of his family.
His necrology was typical. His parents and his sister were killed in late July 1941, soon after the Nazis captured Morkiny Gorki. The Nazis deployed a classic method for the liquidation of relatively small groups of rural Jews. A long trench was dug in the forest clearing outside the village, the Jews were pushed into it, and the ditch was covered with dirt. This approach enabled the preservation of bullets for the front, as only those Jews who had the capacity to climb needed to be shot. The peasants said the ground over the ditch rose and fell for two days, as people tried to dig out or perhaps just continued to breathe.
Moisey Semyonovich had a wife and children, too. But they didn’t survive the train journey from Moscow to evacuation in Siberia. When German planes attacked their train and it stopped, his family was mowed down as they ran toward the woods.
Wounds and losses unchained Moisey Semyonovich from concerns about his life, limbs, and family, freeing him to make his machine gun into a sword of justice that meted out punishment consistent with the crime.
In February of 1953, with the newspapers declaring war on the international Jewish conspiracy, a sense of history ingrained in his bones tells Moisey Semyonovich that a scheme similar to Hitler’s Final Solution of the Jewish Question is about to be revealed. He senses that — just as was the case with the Black Hundreds in his pre-terrorist, pre-Bund days — the mobs will be deployed. The next war on the Jews will be a people’s war.
Why arrest those clueless doctors? Why this anti-Semitic frenzy? Why the outbursts of blood libel?
And why the knock on Levinson’s door instead of his? Only one explanation satisfies Moisey Semyonovich. It was a clerical error. Someone misfiled his dossier.
* * *
Walking out into the cold morning on February 25, Moisey Semyonovich turns left, toward Drugstore Number Twelve, which he manages.
He heads for the store’s stoop and, standing there, surveys the small park. A group of drunks sits uncomfortably on cold benches, waiting for stores to open. Alkashi, dokhodyagi, men on the edge between withdrawal and the next dose. Vodka, that luxury of luxuries, is out of the question for these poor devils. Most of them drink Svetlana, a cologne, or Valocordin, a stinky alcohol-based anti-anxiety drug sold without prescription. It does neither harm nor good.
Moisey Semyonovich isn’t going to the drugstore. After ascertaining that he isn’t followed, he heads toward the Kazan Station. The sun has not yet risen, and the trolleys have not yet begun to roll.
His destination is Malakhovka, the home of Dr. Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kogan.
He walks into the Kazan Station at 6 a.m., half an hour ahead of the first electric train of the morning.
* * *
As he lies beneath his sheepskin coat on his cot, staring at the light that floods the dacha, Lewis thinks of the final words of the man he murdered.
“Paul Robeson,” he repeats, trembling.
In Magnitogorsk, in 1932, Lewis was proud of having stood up to that new aristocrat.
Take my advice, Comrade Mikhoels. You go get yourself a bug-eyed, toothy Jew and paint him black.
After putting Mikhoels in his place, Lewis returned to the scaffold. He did his best thinking up there, on iced-up wooden planks, swaying with the wind, hanging on like a cat.
Why was he in Magnitogorsk? Why did he, a progressive, a revolutionary, lack a party ticket? Why hadn’t he renounced his seemingly redundant American citizenship? Why were the same questions that haunted him in the land of Jim Crow resurfacing in the context of Comintern?
He loved the idea of defining himself as a member of a class — a proletarian — and, to the extent possible, forgetting the rest. But Negro comrades in America warned him to watch out for Jews, Russians, Lithuanians, Irishmen, and WASPs. Can anyone tolerate being called a baboon while trying to teach Hegel’s dialectic to fellow enlightened workers? And what if Russian comrades of Jewish origin refer to you as an orangutan, presumably not realizing that the word is the same in English?
Perhaps this was something about America, a remnant of slavery that afflicted the Right and the Left alike, Lewis thought. Surely, this wouldn’t exist in the Soviet Union, a country where racial differences didn’t mimic America’s. Other Negro cadres were being sent to the USSR for Party work, but Lewis couldn’t get close enough to the Party, let alone rise high enough to be sent officially to the land of victorious revolution.