In those days, the trip back from Magnitogorsk could take days, largely because the single-track railroad was chronically bottlenecked. After obtaining a mandate from Yefim Zeitlin, head of the Comintern offshoot for youth, Mikhoels commandeered a military plane to simplify his hunt for Comrade Jim.
Much is said about high party officials who used their positions for personal enrichment or for fixing problems for their friends and family. Commissar Yefim Zeitlin was not like that. Finding a military plane for Mikhoels and a collaborator was part of Zeitlin’s official duties to facilitate production of propaganda materials aimed at America’s Negro population.
* * *
The pilot, Grisha Gershenson, greeted them in Yiddish. Grisha grew up in Boston, speaking English, Yiddish, and Russian. When he emigrated to the USSR with his parents at age seventeen, he had dreams of becoming a test pilot, but instead became a glorified taxi driver on Comintern missions.
The scene he witnessed that morning figures in his unpublished memoir.
Tatyana opened an old tome of the Falstaff edition of Shakespeare. Mikhoels opened the manuscript in a yellow folder.
“Me hot zi ufgehangen,” he read. They’ve hanged her.
“It’s not in the original,” said Tatyana.
“How does it begin?”
“In English: ‘And my poor fool is hanged: no, no, no life?’”
Tatyana translated these words literally into Yiddish.
“Too much all at once,” said Mikhoels.
“Halkin gives us a simplistic declaration not rooted in the text.”
“Yes, but it gives us an image we can relate to. They’ve hanged her! And we see that she has indeed been hanged! Her body is right there. Onstage. And we think of people we knew who have been hanged, and of people who are being hanged, and of those who will be hanged. And we imagine ourselves trading places with them.”
“Yes, but you aren’t doing Shakespeare.”
“Maybe you are right. And if you are, so what? I set my stage for the audience I have. Translate what Shakespeare wrote, and the audience will think my character is insane.”
“He is.”
“Not in this scene! Here, he experiences grief, actively, painfully, slowly. Rush through it, and he’ll become what? English?”
Gershenson writes that at that point Mikhoels wiped off a tear, which the pilot attributed to the cold winds of Magnitogorsk.
“Mayn narele, mayn lets, dos lebn hot / Shoyn mer keyn vert far mir,” Mikhoels continued. My little fool, my clown / Life has no longer any value to me.
“This, too, is not in the text,” said Tatyana. “Here, he uses the diminutive suffix for fool, narele, instead of kleine nar, little fool. Then he repeats himself by calling his narele his clown, lets. We already know that Nar is a clown. That’s his job. By now we’ve seen everything but the concluding scene.”
“I like the sound of it,” said Mikhoels. “It repeats the point … narele … lets … diminutives accentuate the weight of his loss. Little is big. Big is little. I don’t know how the English feel their losses. This is for us:
“Me hot zi ufgehangen.
Mayn narele, mayn lets, dos lebn hot
Shoyn mer keyn vert far mir.”
He continued reading:
“… A ferd, a hunt,
A moyz — zey lebn oykh, un du, mayn kind,
Du otemst nit, du vest shoyn mer tsu undz
Nit umkern zikh keynmol … keynmol … keynmol.
Ikh bet aykh, Ser, tseshpilyet mir ot do.
Azoy. A dank. Ir zet? O, tut a kuk.
Di lipn ire … zet … nu … kukt zikh ayn …
“‘I feel my losses slowly, I give myself permission to dwell on them,’” Mikhoels continued.
“Like Kinig Lir,” she said.
“Like Kinig Lir.”
“And then he dies.”
“And then I die…”
Gershenson notes that Tatyana and Mikhoels were in tears by the time his plane touched down for refueling in Sverdlovsk. He attributes this to the power of Mikhoels’s first performance of the final words of Kinig Lir.
* * *
Through Tatyana, Lewis accepted a new language, another family, life beyond pigmentation.
Tatyana introduced him to Moscow: stage, directors, writers, actors. Lewis discovered — and met — Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Bulgakov. He met Zuskin, and Tanya’s uncle Solomon Levinson. He saw Kinig Lir on opening night in 1934, the two hundredth performance in 1938, and many performances in between.
In 1938, after Lewis completed training in engineering, he received a package from Magnitogorsk: a box of twelve shirts, six white and six blue, made of sturdy American cotton. Also, there was a new black tie and a note:
Make them look up to you, Mr. Lewis. It’s important. Your friend, Charles.
Soon after that, Charles Bunyan vanished without a trace. The Party and the organs of state security were purging the country of bourgeois specialists and internal wreckers. Even foreigners — especially pale-skinned foreigners — were no longer guaranteed safety.
There was no report of Bunyan’s departure via Black Maria. Even his company Ford remained in place in his driveway. The mystery of his disappearance remains unsolved.
* * *
In 1941, after the Nazis invaded, Lewis volunteered to join the army, but he was sent east instead. The blast furnaces he had helped construct were working around the clock, producing steel for the war.
Tatyana went with him, completed a nursing course, and was sent to the front. She perished with the Second Shock Army, killed in the swamps of Vereya in June of 1942, a casualty of a criminally botched attempt to break through to the besieged Leningrad.
On the morning of February 25, 1953, more than at any other time over the decade that has elapsed since he and Tatyana parted at a railroad station, Lewis longs for her. Is she leading him on another adventure beyond his horizon? Was it not Tatyana’s mad uncle who had handed Lewis the sword with which he spilled the blood of a man who called him Paul Robeson?
Outside, Lewis hears the sound of clanging sticks. Levinson and Kogan are once again conducting war games.
That morning, Kogan doesn’t fight like a goat. He is Levinson’s equal. The two spar verbally as well.
“You, Kogan, fight like a goy.”
“A goy? Explain, My Lord, how fights a goy?”
“A goy, briderlakh, aims for the chest.”
“Where should I aim?”
“A Yid has but one place to aim: the throat. Be true to what your audience expects.”
“Why do what they expect? Why not surprise them?”
“I answer with a question: Why do we kill?”
“We kill to teach.”
“How will the audience learn, unless they get the realization of their biggest fear? What do they fear, Kogan?”
“They fear ritual murder. Is this what you suggest?”
“I suggest nothing but what they fear. They write the play: a ritual murder. Or maybe just ritualistic.”