Paul Goldberg - The Yid

Have you seen old Yids creaking down the street, going wherever it is they go, carrying mesh bags and, in their pockets, rolled-up newspapers? With the pigmentation of youth wiped off their faces, they still look dark, bird-like, bleached angels ready to fly to God, or the Evil One.

Such is Sadykov’s mental image of Levinson.

Lighting his third match of the night, Sadykov steps up to another door. This time, he doesn’t order the boys to kick.

He knocks three times with the knuckles of his clenched fist. There is movement behind the door, no more than what you’d expect.

“Dos bist du?” asks a raspy voice in a language that isn’t Russian.

“Poshel v pizdu,” answers one of the nineteen-year-olds in Russian.

Sadykov and the boys don’t know the meaning of the question Dos bist du? Why would they know that these words mean, “Is this you?” But, of course, the Russian words “poshel v pizdu,” translated literally as “go in the cunt” or “fuck off,” rhyme with this enigmatic question.

It’s a dialogue of sorts:

“Dos bist du?”

“Poshel v pizdu.”

It’s more than a rhyme. It’s a question and an answer.

When you are nineteen, you play with your kill. On your first operation, you get a sense of newness that you think will never go away.

You get the power to choke off another man’s freedom, even end his life. Sadykov’s first operation took him to a big four-room apartment on the Frunze Embankment; it was a colonel, a war hero.

The man was silent at first, placid, but in the middle of the search, he grabbed a Walther he had hidden in the desk drawer, placed the muzzle against his lower lip, shouted “Long live Stalin!” and pulled the trigger. He did this in front of his wife and daughter. Another crew had to be called for cleanup.

You never forget your first operation or the second, but after you get to the fifth, you realize that one man’s suffering is like another’s, and your memories start to change shape around the edges.

Sadykov is beyond the exhilaration of the job. He is almost twenty-five, and he has been doing this for over six years. He wants every operation to end before it begins. Perhaps one day he will get a transfer, perhaps to investigations.

“Otkroyte!” Sadykov knocks again. Open the door!

“Ikh farshtey. Nit dos bist du.”

The meaning of this exchange escapes Sadykov, but it merits unpacking.

Had there been a Yiddish-speaking audience present, it would have surely rolled with laughter.

Try to imagine the situation described above as a vaudeville skit:

They come to arrest an old Yid. They knock on the door.

“Is that you?” the old man asks in Yiddish.

The goons answer in juicy Russian. (The rhyme: “Dos bist du?” / “Poshel v pizdu.” )

“I see,” responds the old man. “It’s not you.”

In this scene, the audience never learns whom the old man refers to as “you,” but it’s a safe guess that he is not anticipating the arrival of Lieutenant Narsultan Sadykov and his boys.

You can imagine what the audience would do. They would emit tears and saliva. They would slap their knees. They would turn beet red from elevation of blood pressure and constriction of air supply. Alas, at 2:59 a.m. February 24, 1953, a Yiddish-speaking audience is not in attendance at 1/4 Chkalov Street, apartment forty.

* * *

The time has come for Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, a man known to friends as der komandir , to take a journey in a Black Maria.

Yet, surely you will agree that the absence of spectators makes his final, decisive performance more pure. It merges comedy, tragedy, absurdity, fantasy, reality, and— voilà —the material becomes endowed with a divine spark.

“Please wait, comrade, I will pull on my pants,” says Levinson in Russian.

Standing at that door, Sadykov realizes suddenly that Levinson is the first man who shows no trepidation upon the arrival of a Black Maria. His voice is calm.

More surprised than angered, Sadykov knocks again.

He hasn’t arrested an actor before. His past hauls include one violinist, an opera singer, two writers, three geneticists, one architect, several military officers, many engineers, and many more Party workers.

“Otkroyte,” Sadykov repeats. Open the door.

“Otkroyte-shmot-kroyte…” Levinson’s voice responds in broken Russian. “What, are you? Robber?”

“Prokuratura,” says Sadykov.

Sometimes Sadykov is instructed to say “state security,” shorthand for the Ministry of State Security, or the MGB.

Other times he says “prokuratura,” the procurator’s office. Though these entities are technically different, when Sadykov knocks on your door, it makes no practical difference which arm of the government he claims to represent.

“Prokuratura-shmok-uratura,” says the old man, and the door swings open.

Yes, in this career-crowning performance, Levinson deserves a Yiddish-speaking audience, for he has combined the word “shmok” (a limp, at best modestly sized, penis) with the word “procurator.”

Through its unforgivable failure to exist, the audience is missing a tour de force by Solomon Levinson, formerly an actor of one of the most respected theater companies in the world, the Moscow State Jewish Theater, known to Yiddish speakers under the Russian acronym GOSET.

* * *

Was Solomon Levinson a GOSET star?

No, another Solomon — Solomon Mikhoels— was the star, the face of the theater, an actor who could move from a village idiot to a Shakespearean king to a conniving, villainous contrabandist, an actor who could direct, a writer who could act, a laureate of the Stalin Prize, the Soviet Union’s unofficial ambassador of goodwill, a leader of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, a star in Moscow, and a celebrity on Second Avenue, the Yiddish Broadway.

His fans in America understood that under capitalism, every Jewish theater had to pay for itself or even produce a profit. Under Socialism, Mikhoels and his GOSET received a state subsidy. Indeed, GOSET was the only state-subsidized Yiddish theater on Earth and, presumably, in the universe.

In 1943, when Mikhoels was sent to America to raise money for the Red Army, New York Jews and leftists of various shades stumbled over each other for a place in line. Tens of thousands came to hear him speak. He returned with millions of dollars and a big, new fur coat for Comrade Stalin, its lining emblazoned with greetings from New York Jews. He met with Albert Einstein, who, at the height of 176 centimeters, towered over him like a giant. He debated the place of politics in art with Charlie Chaplin, the courageous American comedian who had dared to lampoon Hitler in the film The Great Dictator. A committee of the U.S. Senate was preparing to investigate that comedian’s effort to get America into the war. “I was saved by Pearl Harbor,” Chaplin told Mikhoels. In New York, Mikhoels met with Chaim Weizmann, the man who would become the first president of Israel. He caught up with his old friend, the German theater director Max Reinhardt, shared the podium with the New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and bowed his head at the grave of Sholem Aleichem.

Alas, for Solomon Levinson , Mikhoels was a mighty nemesis and GOSET not a happy place. If you regarded yourself as a talented actor like Levinson and if you were unfortunate enough to spend your entire career at GOSET, you couldn’t even rise to Number Two.

The Number Two slot belonged to another actor, Venyamin Zuskin. It was beyond mere favoritism. In GOSET’s established order, Zuskin had to be Number Two.