Finally, he joined McKee as a welder, and in a matter of months, he was bound for the land where race was purportedly negated, irrelevant. It wasn’t hard to find that job. At a time when capitalism was trudging through an economic crisis, Russia was gearing up for its great leap forward, selling meaningless treasures — melted-down gold, outmoded art — and pumping hard currency into the construction of heavy industry.
He was the first American worker in Magnitogorsk. Bunyan, an engineer, was already there, living in American City, a cluster of bungalows on the city’s edge. Another worker, a radical college-educated white youth named John Scott, would arrive six months after Lewis. Lewis’s first shelter was a tent, where sheepskins made the difference between life and death.
He learned Russian quickly and easily. After less than a year, his ability to join steel earned him the respect of his comrades, and Bunyan’s intervention made him a brigadir, the brigade leader.
So why did people like this Mikhoels seem hell-bent on treating him like a younger brother? They were embarrassingly ignorant, clumsy, and no less evil than their American counterparts. For his own sake, for the sake of the Soviet Union, Lewis was determined to stand in their way.
That night, Lewis took a circuitous route to his room in the barracks.
He stood in line to pick up a loaf of black bread, which was all that could ever be found in the cooperative store.
In line, he ran into Scott, a fellow welder, who was heading to classes at Komvuz, the Communist institute, where he studied Marxism-Leninism alongside future Party workers. A lanky graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Scott had fantasies of becoming the John Reed of the Great Leap Forward. Years later, he would write Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel, a splendid book.
“They call it the ‘nationalities question,’ right?” said Scott, chuckling at Lewis’s Comrade Jim story. “If you are a strict Marxist, it’s all about class, no nationalities, no race.”
“You can’t have your world revolution if you perpetuate that same old shit,” said Lewis.
“Comrade Jim is not much better than Nigger Jim. Is it?”
“Comrade Tom’s no good either.”
“It’s all in the name of reaching the stage of social development where there are no Negroes, no Jews. Just the proletariat, colorless, interbred, free of the prejudice of the past,” said Scott.
“And you believe this, John?”
“Less and less.”
* * *
Lewis walked into the barracks, whistling Dixie, of all things. As he inserted his key in the door, he felt a tap on his shoulder.
“I am sorry, Comrade Lewis, but I was unable to get myself painted,” said the girl in a peculiar, vaguely British accent that has evolved at the English departments at Russia’s institutions of higher learning.
“Sorry, ma’am, I can’t help you none,” said Lewis, smiling broadly and blinking in a manner the movie script surely required. “I be just a simple niggah weldah.”
“Will you invite me in?” she asked.
“To help you write a report for the Comintern?” Lewis was no longer in character.
“I don’t work for the Comintern.”
“Then whoever…”
“I don’t write reports, Comrade Lewis.”
“Then what do you write?”
“I am a literary translator,” she said. “Invite me in, please.”
“Well, come right in, ma’am,” he said, opening the door (he did have a heated room with a door) with a doorman’s sweep of the hand.
“Call me Miss Goldshtein, if you insist on formality. Tatyana Goldshtein,” she said, squeezing past him through the narrow doorway.
* * *
It should be noted that at the meeting with Mikhoels, Lewis realized that the girl in front of him was already his, and — this is even less rational — at that very instant Tatyana Goldshtein came to a corresponding realization.
This notion — this flash of insight — was a formidable puzzle to Lewis. Be it a hunch or a revelation, he shook his head in disbelief and returned to the scaffold. Not being as committed a rationalist, the girl found this occurrence less puzzling.
Let us return to the question Mikhoels posed to Lewis: “How do you like our women?”
Surely by the time Mikhoels understood that the answer was sitting to his right, he developed a craving for tea, but it was too late. The girl missed the entire conversation, except for Lewis’s triumphant finale, his teaching moment.
“To what do I owe the pleasure, Miss Goldshtein?” asked Lewis, closing the door.
“I can’t explain,” she said, and at that instant, they moved toward each other and their lips met.
After some time, she pulled away.
“I hope you don’t think that I do this all the time. I never have. Not like this,” she said, and their lips met again.
* * *
Though no official tallies of such things exist, most sexual encounters in Magnitogorsk were verticaclass="underline" in the bushes, behind the bread store, leaning against a shed. There were no trees.
The city was a construction camp, an amalgamation of barracks, tents, and prison zones. The foreigners lived better than the Russians, but Lewis didn’t have a room until Bunyan’s intervention made him a brigadir.
That night, their lovemaking was horizontal, atypically unhurried. He woke up before dawn, before the sound of the combinat horn that punctuated his life.
She would leave for Moscow later that morning.
He ran his calloused fingers through her thick, dark hair. He kissed her eyelids, first one, then the other.
“Paul Robeson,” she said, waking up. That would become her name for him.
Paul Robeson. A Russian-speaking Negro who gave his voice to the working men. A Yiddish-speaking Negro. A hero of the Left. An athlete, actor, musician, champion of the oppressed, a Red Othello. There were worse names to call a man — and in America, Lewis was called those names, as was Paul Robeson.
* * *
After seeing that responsible comrades at the Regional Committee of the Party gave him a motorcycle for the five-kilometer trip to the airstrip, Mikhoels slathered a thick layer of TeZhe cream onto his face, to prevent frostbite. In his shoes, which were more appropriate for the boulevards of Paris than for the snowdrifts of Magnitogorsk, he was at the very least guaranteed a cold.
Tatyana returned to the hotel after dawn. They had two adjoining rooms, for they had been, for quite some time, intimate.
Tatyana’s role in preparing the production of Kinig Lir was never acknowledged. She was the last person in the translation process. The Yiddish text was completed by the poet Shmuel Halkin. Halkin’s verse tended toward elegant Hebraic form. Academic translations of Lear into Russian were dead, unacceptable. Poetic translations were textually unreliable. Halkin spoke Russian, but no English or German. (There were many excellent translations of Shakespeare into German.) Mikhoels spoke German, but no English. The director, Sergei Radlov, spoke some English, but only a little Yiddish.
“Halkin had to be watched closely, in part because his excessive fondness for ‘biblical stylistics’ threatened to overwhelm other important characteristics of Shakespeare’s style,” Mikhoels wrote in one of his many essays on the subject of his own achievements.
Working from Russian translations, Halkin refused to distinguish Shakespeare’s prose from the iambic pentameter, and had to be stopped from converting the entire play into verse.
Phrase by phrase, the three men fought their way through the text, transforming King Lear into Kinig Lir, keeping what they could, sacrificing what they had to. Not even Halkin and Radlov were told that at night, Mikhoels sat down (and, yes, sometimes reclined) with a language student, and went through the play line by line, comparing the Yiddish and English texts.