Paul Goldberg - The Yid

This disconnect has nothing to do with language. He speaks Russian like a Russian and Yiddish like a Jew. Lewis understands all their humor, registers it, even plays along with it sometimes, but after receiving aggravation or pleasure from it, moves on to more important matters. Men like him learn to laugh much later in life, if at all. Lewis has only one way to find out what is real: by testing.

“It would be nice to have some help,” he suggests later on the afternoon of February 25.

“From whom? Americans?” asks Levinson. “You know any?”

He looks serious. But, of course, he is an actor.

“Not anymore. Do you, gentlemen, know Zionists?”

“I knew Mikhoels,” says Levinson.

“I heard that after the war, a group of religious fanatics took a trainload of their people across the border,” says Kogan. “I think they crossed it, but I know one who stayed.”

Kogan seems serious, too. That is, perhaps, a little more meaningful than Levinson’s perpetual straight face. Of course, Kogan has been around theater for so long that he may be in character as well. And the compact of their friendship seems to require Kogan to play a supporting role.

“And how, may I ask, would a Bolshevik like you know religious fanatics?” asks Levinson.

“I live next to the Jewish cemetery. I know every Yid around.”

“Including some traitors,” Moisey Semyonovich interjects.

This offends Lewis. He has heard that some exotic factions of the Bund were so loyal to their mother countries that they regarded emigration as treason.

He knows that some of these zealots advocated imprisoning their brethren for speaking Hebrew, the language of the rabbis, instead of Yiddish, the language of the workingman. Could such absurd beliefs have survived this deep into the revolution, to be encountered in February 1953? Now a living, breathing answer stands before him.

“If I know my fanatics, he will tell us to go take a shit in the sea,” says Levinson.

“Maybe he will,” says Kogan. “But maybe we can give him a present.”

“What present do we bring to a fanatic?” asks Levinson.

“We have weapons,” suggests Lewis. “Three pistols. I can give him mine.”

“For what does a fanatic need a pistol?” asks Kogan. “Whom will he aim it at?”

“God,” says Moisey Semyonovich.

So this unflappable man has a sense of humor, albeit indistinguishable in tone, content, and delivery from political information lectures.

“Lewis, you’ve just witnessed a moment of Bund humor,” says Levinson. “This is exceedingly rare, so savor it. I have known this man for thirty years, and in that time he hasn’t even smiled.”

“Your religious friend will need a pistol when it begins,” Lewis concurs.

“And what will you use?” asks Levinson.

“I’ll use your sword.”

Intuition tells Lewis to relinquish doubt: This is indeed a plot.

* * *

Technically, Kogan knows several Americans — members of his own family.

In the autumn of 1927, when he was studying in Berlin, he came across a news story that mentioned a man who was almost certainly his father. The story mentioned him as an executive of a New York shipping company that was doing battle with striking dockworkers.

Kogan dropped a postcard to the company, mostly to tell the family that he was alive, that he had finished an accelerated medical course for veterans, that he had been practicing medicine in a regional clinic, and that the Commissariat of Health had sent him to get surgical training in Berlin.

Three months later, a tall young man in a fedora and a trench coat came to the hospital and asked for Dr. Aleksandr Kogan. He identified himself as Dr. Kogan’s brother.

Kogan was assisting one of the hospital’s luminaries in scraping out a tumor that originated in a child’s bone. That day, the decision was made to amputate. Kogan was present during that discussion before he went to the cafe across the street from the hospital where his brother waited.

What do you say to the brother you haven’t seen in over a decade? Vladimir was fourteen years old when they parted. Now he was twenty-four, a tall American who spoke Russian perfectly, but with a slight accent. He had graduated from Yale and was now doing something remarkably strange for an advertising company with offices in New York and Chicago.

The family had reestablished itself nicely. Being a shipping entrepreneur with money in Switzerland is a wise strategy if your goal is to ride out humanity’s greatest perils. The family lived on Park Avenue. His mother had a Steinway again (the one left behind had been commandeered by the Odessa Opera). “She can play Chopin and glance at the park,” Vladimir said, and Aleksandr was happy to hear this.

Vladimir’s job sounded vaguely interesting. Sitting in an office on Madison Avenue, he read every tidbit of information emanating from the Comintern, the Soviet bureaucracy created to stoke the flames of world revolution. Kogan had no problem with the Comintern, even when it engaged in espionage. Countries do engage in such pursuits. And, of course, he personally knew Zeitlin.

“What relevance does it have to your American life?” Kogan asked with genuine surprise.

“You would be surprised. Speaking broadly, your Comintern is about social engineering. My job is to try to find ways to adapt your experience for commercial purposes.”

“For businesses?”

“To engineer their relationships with the public.”

“You are trying to create business out of our pursuit of the overthrow of capitalism?”

“Exactly. That’s what I do all day every day.”

“I will be sure to bring this story to Moscow. I am sure my friends at Comintern will be amused.”

“Tell them I can get them good jobs in the advertising industry.”

You might think that discussion of the emerging American business of public relations is a strange topic to come up at a meeting of brothers who hadn’t seen each other in a decade. Kogan realized that, of course, but Yale and the Red Army are universes apart, as are surgery and advertising. The fact that the two young men had anything to say to each other was to be accepted for what it was.

Vladimir was sent as an emissary from their parents. He had an offer: if Aleksandr wished not to return to Moscow after his training in Berlin, the family would support him as he obtained American credentials. Kogan was touched, of course, but the idea of leaving his country struck him as unthinkable.

It seemed to violate some fundamental principle — a commandment — something akin to “Thou shalt not kill” and Primum non nocere. He will not kill. He will do no harm. He will not run to the United States. He will remain in Russia, doing his part, as his young country rises from the rubble of the Civil War that he helped win.

Kogan’s response to the family’s generous offer was a polite no.

And now, as steam engines pull cattle cars toward Moscow, as mobs of street thugs and Red Army units are being organized to carry out a coordinated action, as the prospect of public executions looms, does Dr. Kogan wish he had accepted that offer? Does he wish he were performing appendectomies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or teaching anatomy at Yale, or listening to rich patients whine on a couch somewhere on Park Avenue, or — more likely — taking care of Negroes in Harlem?

No. Kogan made his choices decades ago. Whatever comes, he is where he wants to be.

* * *

When she stops at the dacha, Kima looks like she has been running. Lewis surmises that she has important news to report.

The cautious stares Kima exchanges with the stranger — Moisey Semyonovich — betray an instantly formed feeling of mistrust.