Paul Goldberg - The Yid

When Mikhoels played Benjamin in The Travels of Benjamin III , the Jewish Don Quixote, Zuskin played Senderl, his male companion in a dress, Sancho Panza in calico. When Mikhoels was Kinig Lir, his most famous role, Zuskin was his Nar. They played it like two sides of the coin, der Kinig and his Nar.

If you worked at GOSET, you worked in the shadow of Mikhoels and in the shadow of Zuskin.

What opportunity was there for Solomon Levinson to demonstrate his talent?

None. Which explains why you may not have heard of Solomon Levinson.

At the time a boy kicks the door of apartment forty, Mikhoels has been dead for five years. Killed in an “auto accident.”

Where is the truck that killed him? Find it, please. Zuskin is dead, too. No phantom truck. A bullet in the head. An execution in a Lubyanka cellar.

No Mikhoels. No Zuskin. No Kinig. No Nar. No GOSET. No audience. No stage. No subsidy. No truck. Gornisht. Nothing.

* * *

After opening what sounds like a heavy latch, the occupant of the room, presumably Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, noiselessly retreats into deep darkness.

Something about the setting — the night, the snow, the long hallway, the dark room — prompts one of the Ukrainian boys to cross himself. Not much can be made of that. He is a village boy in a big city, where many things seem menacing, evil — and where many things are. Lieutenant Sadykov walks in first, the boys behind him. He fumbles for the light switch, but it’s not next to the door, where he would expect to find it.

Sadykov lights another match. Ideally, the circumstances of every death reflect the life that precedes it. Death should be life in miniature, a microcosm. Arrest also. Sadykov hasn’t paused to verbalize this maxim, but he feels it within the depth of his being.

As flickering, living light fills the room, the silhouette of a tall, thin man appears before the heavily draped window. The man’s nose is elongated, yet proportional to his dark, deeply wrinkled face. Slowly, with considerable arthritic stiffness and with the pomp one would expect from an actor of a provincial theater, the old man bows deeply, his left hand resting on a cane, his right making a slow, ceremonious spiral on the way to the floor.

Sadykov reaches the only conclusion available to him: this man exhibits no fear, no trepidation, because he is mad.

Occasionally, when he allows himself to succumb to compassion, Sadykov believes that his passengers are better off being mad, or deathly ill, because death would spare them what lies ahead: weeks or months of interrogations, then weeks in the prison train, and, finally, felling trees or mining for gold or uranium ore somewhere in the taiga or the permafrost.

* * *

“Dear friends, welcome!” says Levinson, shooting a grin from the nadir of the bow.

Encountering unpredictable behavior is part of the job. Sadykov has seen men collapse, women tear their robes (literally tear their robes), children barricade the doors until they have to be kicked out of the way. But he has never seen a deep bow.

A clinician usually makes the diagnosis within seconds of laying his eyes on a patient. Perhaps a lieutenant of state security should be required to have similar diagnostic skills. He should be able to predict that an old man like Levinson will inevitably proceed from strange performance to muttering and singing softly in his dungeon cell.

There would be no point in subjecting him to rough interrogation, because what can a madman tell you? What art is there in beating confessions out of the demented and the frail? They will sign any protocol you place before them. They will acknowledge any political crime — plotting to vandalize the Dnepr hydroelectric power station, blowing up the smelters of Magnitogorsk, intending to change fundamental laws of physics, spying for the Grand Rabbinate of Israel and its American masters.

Sometimes, very rarely, you encounter resistance from arrestees. Suicides, too.

Sadykov has heard many a man sing “The Internationale” in the back of the Black Maria.

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation

Arise, ye wretched of the earth …

Lacking the depth of intellect required to realize that the words of the great anthem of the World Revolution beautifully describe the dignified, defiant spirit of the men and women crated in the back of his truck, Sadykov is unable to feel the mockery.

If there is one thing this job has taught him, it is to take nothing personally.

* * *

“Allow me to introduce myself: Solomon Shimonovich Levinson,” says the old man, straightening to the formidable extent of his frame. “Artist pogorelogo teatra.” Actor of a burned-down theater.

“We have an order for a search,” says Sadykov. “Turn on the light, Levinson.”

Sadykov will handle this in his usual restrained manner. If liquidation of enemies is your objective, why not accept disease, both mental and physical, as your allies? Is it not much easier to let the madmen rave until they wear themselves out?

The single bulb under a fringed silk lampshade that hangs from a wire on the ceiling in Levinson’s room is decidedly unmanly. You would expect to find it in the room of an operetta singer. Its bulb is no brighter than Sadykov’s match.

Of course, Sadykov believes in the absolute necessity of his job.

He believes in Comrade Stalin, and he believes in purging his country of internal enemies. However, he also realizes that, inevitably, mistakes are made, and some of the arrestees are probably harmless. It is unavoidable that when you need to arrest so many people, some of them will be innocent. Even with no training in statistics, not even knowing that there is such a thing as statistics, Sadykov grasps the concept of the margin of error, something you have to recognize and accept like any other fact of life.

With experience, Sadykov has developed a plethora of his own approaches to conducting an operation.

Doctors often speak of patients who taught them something about life, or helped them sharpen their methodology. People whose job it is to arrest their brethren similarly learn on the job. In one prior operation, Sadykov heard an old Bolshevik — a man who knew Lenin and Stalin and had photographs on the wall to prove it — demand a private audience with Stalin.

The old Bolshevik said something about the Party having taken a wrong turn and refused to budge when the time came. Fortunately, he lived alone, like Levinson. The old Bolshevik had been deathly pale, and Sadykov couldn’t see a way to lead him out without breaking his limbs.

To avoid unpleasantness in that situation, Sadykov had assured the old Bolshevik that an audience with Stalin was exactly what was being planned. He was being taken to the Kremlin, not to Lubyanka.

The old Bolshevik brightened up, and all the way to Lubyanka he sang in a language that he said was Georgian. By the time the Black Maria passed through the heavy iron gates, the man was in a subdued state. He muttered passively, locked in an intense conversation with an imaginary interlocutor. Sadykov heard something about London and the Fifth Congress of the Russian Socialist Democratic Party.

“Soso, didn’t I warn you about Trotsky?” he said to Sadykov when the lieutenant opened the door.

* * *

Levinson is wearing baggy, sky blue long underpants, a dark brown undershirt, a deep purple robe, and a matching ascot. (Actors of burned-down theaters have an affinity for ascots.)

He has to be in his late fifties, old enough to start to soften, yet clearly he has not. He looks muscular, angular; his movements are powerful but choppy. His imposing physique notwithstanding, Levinson looks like a clown.

“What is your name, young man?” asks Levinson, turning to Sadykov.