David Bezmozgis - The Free World

At dawn, as they weaved together along the cobblestones of the old city, Maxim proposed and Polina accepted. Their future seemed as assured as a future could be. Like Polina, Maxim had scored well on his exams and had his choice of prestigious factories. She would take the job at VEF, while he would take a position at the highly regarded Popov Radiotechnika. They would marry, move in with his parents, file a request with the municipal housing authority for a separate apartment, and start a family. They would embark upon productive and satisfying adult lives.

When he was not taking his walks or reading the newspapers at Club Kadima, Samuil busied himself with writing the true account of his life and times. He began with the private intention of having Alec translate and submit his biographical statement to HIAS and the American embassy. As he wrote, he clung to the guiding principle that his work would have corrective and instructive value, and in this way he granted himself license to dwell upon his personal history. For hours each day he settled conspicuously at a card table in the sitting room and demanded not to be disturbed. Nevertheless, his grandsons scampered through the room with impunity and his wife and daughter-in-law often interrupted him with their comings and goings between the bedroom and the kitchen.

To his wife’s inquiry about what he was doing, he said, I’m doing what I’m doing.

While he wrote, he could almost fool himself into believing that he was again in the company of the beloved dead. For those hours, he strongly felt their essence. The feeling evoked in him the deepest regret. It wasn’t that he wanted to join them in the grave or return to the past so much as he wished that they were still living. Had they lived, Samuil thought, things would have been different. But the best and the bravest never lasted long. This was a natural law, like gravity or the seasons, and he had seen it confirmed thousands of times at the front. As the frontoviks liked to say: Our lives are like a child’s shirt, short and covered in shit.

Aside from writing his biography, taking his walks, and reading the newspaper at Club Kadima, there was nothing else Samuil cared to do. Every day, Emma took the boys to learn Hebrew songs. At Club Kadima, a young American with a guitar led a children’s choir. Emma also went with Rosa to hear lectures, mostly by representatives of Sachnut, the Israeli agency. Rosa returned from these lectures spinning Zionist fairy tales. Only in Israel would they be able to work according to their professions. Only in Israel would they receive decent housing. Only the Israeli state would provide for their welfare. Soviet media exaggerated Israeli hardships, when in fact Israel was an immigrants’ paradise.

From time to time, Emma would try to interest him in some activity or event.

— I am worried about you, she said. Always by your lonesome.

— Do you hear me complaining?

— It’s not healthy.

He felt healthy enough. And he certainly couldn’t see how sitting for an hour listening to some pampered American strumming Hebrew songs on his guitar would be beneficial to his health. The same applied to a lecture encouraging Jewish religious practice by the resident Lubavitcher, imported kosher from Brooklyn, a pale young man with a patchy, wispy beard.

— A very intellectual and pious man, Emma said preemptively, in the rabbi’s defense.

In the end, he had surprised her by announcing that he would like to attend the screening of the American movie based on Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye der milkhiker. He had seen the postings up at Club Kadima as he was in the early stages of his biographical statement, very much at the point in his life when he would have gone with his mother and brother to see the Tevye play performed by Rogozna’s amateur Yiddish theater troupe. This was in 1919 or 1920, when he was six or seven years old. But he remembered the experience very clearly. Once a month, as a treat, his mother would take him and Reuven to the theater. The old synagogue, converted by the Jewish Section of the Communist Party into a social club and theater, was always filled to capacity. It was the only place where he could see his mother smile and hear her laugh. During the performances he watched her as much as he did the stage.

At the end of the evening, Rogozna’s principal actor, Zachar Kahn, the former ritual slaughterer, would make a point of coming up to Samuil’s mother and asking her opinion of the show. He always referred to her respectfully as “the widow Eisner.”

— If I may inquire, how did the widow Eisner enjoy the show?

He struck a memorable figure, Zachar Kahn, a tall man, almost two meters, with a black eye-patch, a slashing scar down his right cheek, and the sleeve pinned where his right arm used to be.

Before the Civil War, Zachar Kahn’s slaughterhouse had been located a few doors away from their house. Because the light in the slaughterhouse was not always adequate, he would sometimes use the Eisners’ kitchen to inspect the lungs of a cow or a sheep he had butchered. The sight of Zachar Kahn on their snowy doorstep, a giant man holding a steaming wax-paper bundle, was one of Samuil’s earliest memories. He and Reuven had both been fascinated by Zachar Kahn, and scurried around him as he unwrapped and scrutinized the glossy, brownish organs. He would let the boys draw near so that they could peer at the grotesque and otherworldly things that made life possible and which everyone — from a mouse to a man — had pumping and sloshing around in the dark hollows under his skin. Grotesque to the untrained eye, the organs were in actuality perfect in aspect and form, Zachar would explain. They were the handiwork of God Himself. If flawed, the flaw, too, was part of His design. Though if they were flawed, then the animal’s flesh could not be eaten. Lifting the lungs to his mouth, Zachar Kahn would blow to see if they would inflate.

The American movie of Tevye der milkhiker, though set in a Russian shtetl, didn’t have a single word of Russian and hardly a word of Yiddish. Americans with Semitic features had been dressed in caftans and shawls while, on stiff wooden chairs, sweating and fanning themselves in the Italian heat, a roomful of Russian Jews goggled at the screen.

— This is what the commotion is about? Samuil asked Emma.

— It’s a wonderful production, a middle-aged woman behind them offered. Believe me. This is my eighth time watching. I’d watch it another eight times. In Russia, God forbid they should ever have a Jewish character in a film. But in America they made a whole movie about us.

At the front of the auditorium, to the left of the screen, a paunchy, hirsute, mountain Jew held a microphone, and provided a simultaneous translation.

A fiddler! On the roof! Strange? Sure. But here in our little village of Anatevka every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to play a song without breaking his neck. It isn’t easy. No, it isn’t easy. So you may ask why do we stay if it’s so dangerous? Well, we stay because Anatevka is our home.

— They could only get a mountain Jew for an interpreter? an elderly man near Samuil complained. That accent. You’d think there was no one available from Moscow or Leningrad.

And how do we keep from falling and breaking our necks? That I can tell you in one word: Our traditions!

On the screen Samuil watched a lurid, fetishistic montage of Jewish symbols: a Star of David, a menorah, Hebrew letters, the worn burgundy velvet cloth covering the bimah. He looked around and saw that his wife, his daughter-in-law, and many others were entranced by it. Somewhere in America, Sholem Aleichem was spinning in his grave. The filmmakers had taken his “goodbye” and turned it into “hello.” What Sholem Aleichem had meant as an acceptance of a new reality and a critique of the outmoded ways had here been transformed into sentimental Jewish burlesque. The movie encouraged a wistfulness and a mourning for the past, but what past? The filmmakers had no idea, but Sholem Aleichem could have told them. The old man had seen enough, even if he’d left for America and died there before the worst of the horrors.