Paul Goldberg - The Yid

KOGAN: I concur, with obvious reluctance. Of course, this situation isn’t particularly significant in my case.

LEWIS: How can that be?

KOGAN: A competing life-limiting factor. Unrelated unpleasantness at the hospital. It’s complete idiocy. The Special Department wants me to make a preposterous public confession, name names, that sort of thing.

LEVINSON: Comrade Lewis, there is some chance that they will not learn about our connection. So this would be a good time for you to get back to your Siberia, dive under your desk, and pretend that nothing happened.

LEWIS: I thought of that, and I don’t believe it. It’s well known that I stay with you when I am in Moscow. Never thought I’d need to make it secret, so I didn’t.

LEVINSON: So you truly believe that you have nothing to lose? This is important.

LEWIS: Yes.

LEVINSON: I was hoping you would see it this way, because we could use you. You have a good strategic mind.

LEWIS: Use me for what?

LEVINSON: Patience! Not there yet! First, Kogan, am I to assume that you are up to trying something ambitious, something that may be our only hope?

KOGAN: Yes, you know my limitations. I don’t kill. Not anymore.

LEVINSON: Squeamish you’ve grown in your old age. Your hands will remain clean. What I do is my business.

Lewis, Kogan is a perfectionist in all of life’s endeavors. Since he has been a doctor much longer than he was a machine gunner, he may have indeed saved more lives than he has taken.

KOGAN: I hope so, Solomon. Do you believe you have reached the point where you can conclude your strategic onanism and tell us directly what your plan is?

LEVINSON: We are at that point, old goat. The plan is to escalate the process I have begun to its absolute furthest extreme. There is no point in halfway measures. They will not help us in the least. We must go for the top. The very top. Nothing less than a beheading will do.

KOGAN: Levinson, are you suggesting what I think you are suggesting?

LEVINSON: I think you understand correctly. Beheading … the top … eto odnoznachno. There is no way to misunderstand. You have to eliminate the root cause. How can I be more clear?

LEWIS: Beheading a specific individual or beheading the system ?

LEVINSON: In our country, comrade, aren’t they one and the same?

KOGAN: Whom or what do you want us to behead, Solomon?

LEVINSON: Is something wrong with my diction?

KOGAN: Is something wrong with my hearing?

LEVINSON: Does it have to be one or the other?

KOGAN: Are you saying you want us to behead our beloved Iosif Vissarionovich?

LEVINSON: What other choice do we have?

KOGAN: You want us to behead the Great Stalin? The Genius of all Times and Nations?

LEVINSON: Was I so vague that you have to pester me with questions?

KOGAN: You are insane, but did we not know that?

This can’t be serious, Lewis concludes. Yet, Levinson’s demeanor suggests that it is, in fact, completely serious. He appears to be resolute, komandir -like. Unless, of course, he is acting.

“You scare me, gentlemen,” he says.

As a Soviet engineer, Lewis is trained to identify objective difficulties. These are daunting. How do you slip past thousands of soldiers of the MGB? How do you evade tanks, cannons, guard dogs, missiles, bombs? How do you get through the layers of defenses? How can you suggest such nonsense?

“How do we scare you, Mr. Lewis?” says Kogan. “Do you fear becoming an accessory to regicide?”

Is Kogan really getting involved in this insanity? Or is this the weirdest practical joke ever staged?

“No. Not that. Why would I give a shit about regicide? You know me better than that. I am just unable to tell whether you are genuine plotters or just two idiots.”

The purpose of art is to ennoble. The purpose of shtick is to stuff you with the rich diet of self-parody and self-hatred for no purpose beyond making you open the wallet and burp.

The timing of these heroic events—1953—coincides with the integration of Jewish humor into the American mainstream.

The Yiddish language is still heard in America’s streets. Yiddish theaters are still drawing crowds, and off-color humor fueled by vaudeville, jazz, and burlesque is flourishing in the Jewish Riviera resorts of the Catskills.

Jewish humor is completing its life cycle: blossoming, rotting, becoming shtick, transitioning into English. You can talk about Rodney Dangerfield and Henny Youngman, even include the young Lenny Bruce before he got real.

The purveyors of shtick may have been literally the American cousins of Levinson and Mikhoels. They would have been cousins who speak the same language and who are somewhat (not uniformly) aware of each other’s existence. Yet, they are cousins who exist oceans apart. And, more important, they have few reasons to like each other.

In an article about his wartime visit to the United States, Mikhoels expresses deep contempt for the state of American theater.

Vulgarity is the currency of the New World that unveiled before him. Rockettes kick up their heels in shows that get neither better nor worse. The words of Shakespeare aren’t heard on Broadway. And as America’s sons are sent across the seas to die and as Europe and Asia burn, New York feasts. Mikhoels seems infected with the dark mood of his old friends, German intellectuals, as they contemplate ending their lives in rat-infested hotels in Midtown.

Forget shtick. Mikhoels expresses contempt for Broadway. “Broadway brings together everything that’s not serious about America,” he writes. “It’s the place where you find a high concentration of cafes, cabarets, and all the theaters. From the point of view of the God of Business, it’s the Boulevard of Sin. It’s where the entrepreneurs conduct their business.”

Mikhoels understood the business schema of Broadway theater: a producer, basically a businessman, leases the premises and proceeds to seek out a director who has a play. “But if that director is someone like Max Reinhardt, who doesn’t happen to have a play, he remains unemployed.”

Reinhardt, a German and Austrian director and theater educator who had been a friend of Mikhoels’s for decades, is in New York, bemoaning the need to please what was then the shorthand designation for Broadway’s target audience: “a tired businessman,” abbreviated as TBM, someone who has no use for culture or, for that matter, politics.

Reinhardt has just escaped from Fascism, yet he doesn’t want to talk about Fascism. Instead, he wants to talk about theater in America, that is, the tyranny of TBM. “American theater isn’t just a zero, it’s negative one,” Reinhardt says.

In another essay, Mikhoels describes his argument with Charlie Chaplin, who tries to convince him that his work is apolitical.

Mikhoels disagrees. The character of the Little Tramp, his travails, his efforts to survive as the machine age deals him one setback after another, is as political as it gets, he argues. And what does he make of Chaplin’s film about the rise of Adolf Hitler, The Great Dictator ?

If The Great Dictator isn’t politics, what is?

Is it surprising that Mikhoels returns to Moscow, to GOSET, the theater born to integrate its audience into the societal mainstream, to make them strive for something better, a task that often involved using humor to evoke self-awareness, often through ridicule and shame?

Whether you are a Communist, a Zionist, or both, GOSET existed to enlighten and inspire. Please note that in the early morning of February 24, 1953, with Mikhoels gone and the GOSET lights dark, Levinson turns to the Bard to illuminate the magnitude of his defiant pirouette with Finnish daggers. Ask yourself: Would the soft-bellied comics of American wealth have either the athleticism or the sense of purpose to execute such a maneuver?