"The Gates of November" - читать интересную книгу автора (Potok Chaim)

4 The Enemy Within

At about the same time that Solomon’s life as a career Communist was concluding, Volodya, having graduated from the Aviation Institute in June 1950 in the top half of his class with a master’s degree in radio electronics, began to look for a job.

He applied to factories and institutes. The standard application form contained more than one hundred questions, among them: Have you any relatives abroad? Did you or any close member of your family ever live abroad? What was the nationality of your grandparents? Were you or your parents or grandparents members of any party other than the Bolshevik Party before the Revolution? Have you ever had any doubts concerning the policies of the Communist Party?

On his internal passport, his identity card, the line that revealed his nationality read, in Russian, Evrei. Jew.

For months Volodya went searching for a job. After handing in each completed application, he would wait two or three days and then call, only to be told that his services were not needed. He applied about a dozen times. Few who turned him away made any effort to hide the reasons for his being rejected. Volodya Slepak, son of Solomon Slepak, after six years in one of the leading scientific institutes in the Soviet Union and with a master’s degree in radio engineering, was finding it impossible to get a job because during his childhood he had lived abroad, and because he was a Jew.

He told his parents often of his fruitless efforts. His mother commiserated and urged him to keep trying. His father said, “This is happening because there are many traitors and spies among Jews, especially with those who were abroad. Now our country is surrounded by enemies, we must build communism alone, and the party hasn’t the time to check everybody. So they don’t accept Jews into positions that are important to the state. Later, after careful investigation, everyone who is innocent will be given a job according to his education and knowledge.”

Volodya unhesitatingly accepted his father’s explanation. After failing for months to find work in the field of radio engineering, he took a job as a television repairman in a shop on Gorokhovsky Street in a Moscow neighborhood near the Kursky Railroad Station. The manager of the shop was a Jew.

In those days a television set cost approximately 500 rubles (five months’ salary), the equivalent of about $250. The sets were the size of a microwave oven, with a rectangular fourteen-inch black-and-white screen. The box was of polished brown wood; the pictures were of poor quality. In the 1950s there was one television station in the Soviet Union and a wait of about five months for a set. If you lived in Moscow and your set suddenly no longer worked, you brought it to one of the five or six television repair shops in the city.

The shop in which Volodya worked consisted of a hallway and two rooms, each about two hundred square feet in size, with large windows, workbenches, and shelves along the walls. Into the shop one day walked one of Volodya’s friends, who had been his classmate in the Aviation Institute, accompanied by a young woman. The friend had been visiting a woman named Rita and her cousin Masha. Rita had asked him to look at her television set, which wasn’t working. It turned out that one of the tubes needed to be replaced, but a new tube could not be found in a regular shop, said the friend, because of the shortage of television parts. There was, however, this repair shop where he knew one of the workers, who might be able to get his hands on a new tube. He could go and be back in an hour. Did Masha want to accompany him?

She wore a knitted white and black wool hat and a beige sheepskin coat. Her skin was smooth, her face roundish, her eyes brown and alert behind glasses. She was in her fourth year in the medical institute in Ryazan, a town 125 miles to the southeast, and in Moscow for the weekend to visit her family.

As soon as his old classmate had left the television repair shop with Masha and a new tube, Volodya telephoned Rita and said that he wanted to come over and visit her next Saturday, and could she also invite her cousin Masha?

That Saturday Volodya met Masha again, in Rita’s apartment. This time Masha’s aunt was present, and they all had tea. Later he said he would walk Masha home. Her family lived not too far away in an apartment building in the center of the city, near the Moscow synagogue. It was February and very cold. They walked together for several hours.

Volodya has no clear memory of what they talked about; probably, he thinks, her studies in medical school, books they had read, concerts they had attended. Vaguely he recalls an attempt to explain why he was working as a repairman-a brief, guarded remark about anti-Semitism in the field of engineering-but he is not certain whether that happened then or later in their relationship. They did not discuss Israel or politics.

Her name was Maria Rashkovsky (in Russian, Rashkovskaya); her mother’s name, Bertha. The chronicles record her fear of remembering too much. “I wish I knew more about my family than I do now,” she tells us. “But there is nobody to ask. Before, it was dangerous for children to know, they could blurt it out. After the Revolution, people tried to conceal their past, bury it as deep as they could. I remember my mother filling out application forms, many pages, gray-colored paper. She would answer the question ‘What class are you from?’ with the words ‘petty bourgeois’ or ‘lower middle class.’ That terrifying question was on the first page of every application-for an apartment, a school, a job. Also: ‘What parties did you belong to before 1917?’ ‘What views did you have?’ The applications would stick to you all your life. So my mother tried to conceal as much as she could. Many things are gone with my mother.”

Despite that, Masha’s astonishingly retentive memory is rich in specificity and abundant with details. She remembers vividly her father, Sanya. A handsome stocky man, five feet seven inches in height, brown straight hair, his face smooth, close-shaven, glistening in the morning and bluish with beard by evening. He was born in Tiraspol into an assimilated family that had abandoned Jewish observance a generation earlier. He grew up in Odessa, served in the Red Cavalry during the Civil War, and rose to the rank of captain. After the war he settled in Moscow, where he met and married Bertha. Self-educated, well read, a devotee of opera, and the life of any party. His work in a secondhand bookstore and later in a government publishing house enabled him to indulge his passion for books. He owned a collection of about eight hundred rare leather-bound books printed before the Revolution: Boccaccio, Daudet, Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Hugo, Shakespeare, Swift, Voltaire, Defoe, Maupassant, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nekrasov. He loved the books, loved the smell and feel of them. He read them, knew the provenance of each. At his place of work he was able to remember the history of every book that came into his hands: the year of publication; where and by whom published; how many editions; the number of copies printed. He taught Masha to read and write and count long before she began to attend school; the first book she read on her own, in Russian, was Little Red Riding Hood. A short-tempered man, he once found Masha bending the corner of a page to mark her place in a book and shouted, “How dare you treat a book that way? It’s so low, only uneducated people do such a thing. Do you know how many people labored to create this one book?”

Masha was born in Moscow on November 7, 1926, the ninth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Friends said to her parents, “You must name her Octyabrina in honor of the October Revolution.” People were still euphoric about the Revolution, about the future; they gave their children names like Tractor and Industriya. Her father said she should really be named after her grandmother Miriam, but there were reasons not to choose a name like that. In tsarist times the Russians had been contemptuous of the Jews; now they feared and hated them, blamed the Revolution on them, saw them as conspiring to destroy the entire Christian world. And it was true that a few thousand Jews, sickened to blinding rage by tsarist oppression, had thrown away the very last marks of their Jewishness, joined the Bolshevik Party, and helped to make the Revolution. For them and all the other new leaders of Russia, the name Miriam was too Jewish. So Sanya and Bertha Rashkovsky named the child Maria, and at home called her Musya or Manya. It was Volodya who began to call her Masha.

Masha was the firstborn; then, five years later, came a boy, named Zinovy and called Zalya; and, afterward, a second daughter, named Henrietta and called Gera.

Sanya Rashkovsky left the care of the children and the house in the hands of his wife, whose cooking was a source of enormous pleasure to him. A supper of lamb stew and chicken soup with noodles: He would wrinkle his nose at the smells, rub his hands together with delight. He loved sweets, often told Masha tales of a mountain outside Odessa, a fantasy mountain of halvah, describing it so vividly she could taste its rich, honeyed sweetness. Cut flowers dismayed him. “Flowers die the instant you cut them,” he said to Masha. “How can one gain pleasure from something that is dead?”

In the early 1930s he became ill with tuberculosis and spent the last months of his life in a sanitarium located in an evergreen forest outside Moscow. One month before he died, Masha and her mother visited him. Ten-year-old Masha could not recognize the wasted figure they said was her father. He was dying of starvation, slowly melting into death, unable to eat because of the searing pain in his intestines.

He died on January 17, 1937, and was buried three days later. Many attended the funeral. Masha watched the coffin being lowered into the ground and suddenly threw herself forward to halt its terrifying descent, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!” Her uncle pulled her back. The chronicles record her comment: “My childhood was over.”

Masha’s mother was born in a small town on the Dnieper River in the Ukraine into a family of devout Jews. Her father, barely eking out a living as a maker of leather goods-belts, saddles, bridles-was at the same time a judge in the local Jewish religious court, a man so highly respected that the Ukrainians would often appear before him, requesting that he settle their differences. During the pogroms of 1903-1905 and the Civil War, Ukrainians tried to protect the family from Cossacks. Masha’s grandmother bore across her face a long scar left by a mounted Cossack wielding a metal-tipped whip.

In the early 1930s Masha’s parents took the children on visits to the grandparents, and Masha remembers Jewish folk prints on the walls and the warm smells of special foods for Sabbaths and festivals. Her grandmother lit candles on Friday evenings; her grandfather conducted the Passover Seder. The family gathered around the big dinner table for the Sabbath. At the head sat her grandfather; next to him his mother, Baba Malka; on the other side, his wife; then his children and grandchildren. Each knew exactly his or her place at the table. Then the blessing over the wine, the washing of the hands, the blessing over the bread, the scents, the food, the Sabbath songs, the Grace After Meals. She still remembers all those visits to the grandparents. And standing in the road alone one day in front of her grandparents’ house, spinning her arms, and her grandfather calling out in Yiddish-he also spoke Ukrainian but could barely read Russian-“Hey, windmill, stop spinning your arms, you haven’t gained a gram of fat, what am I going to tell your mother?”

Her mother had left her parents’ home in the early 1920s, gone off to Moscow, lived under horrific conditions in a place called Hotel Chicago. She attended the School for Higher Education for Women, where she received a teacher’s diploma, the equivalent of a university degree, with a specialty in preschool education. The winter of 1924 was especially severe in Moscow. On the day of Lenins funeral she stood patiently in line with the tens of thousands who had come to view Lenin in his open coffin, to pay their respects to the leader of the Revolution. One of the guards near the coffin came over to her and said quietly that one side of her face looked severely frostbitten, she should tend to it immediately.

After her marriage to Sanya in January 1926, she ran one of the most successful kindergartens in Moscow, and Mashas very first memory is of sitting in her mother’s classroom at the age of three, and watching her show flash cards about Lenin and Stalin and the Revolution. She remembers one evening her father sitting in his chair reading Pravda and suddenly saying in disgust, “What sort of newspaper is this, four pages of nothing, do you know what an English newspaper has?” and her mother looking around nervously and whispering, “Sanya, be still, the walls have ears.” Masha was five. They lived in one room of a two-room apartment on Pokrovka Street near the Kremlin, directly under the slanting roof of a two-story pre-Revolution house. In the other, smaller room were two elderly men, factory workers. She remembers the fear on her mother’s face when she said that: “The walls have ears.”

The school authorities asked her mother to join the party, and she talked about it with her husband, who said that if she joined she would need to attend meetings and would have less time with the children, so she declined the invitation. Years later she told Masha that by not joining, she had probably saved herself, because had she joined she would have risen in the ranks, and all the high party members among her colleagues were arrested and shot.

The links to her family in the Ukraine wore thin through the thirties. Her father’s leather shop was taken over by Communists, and in 1939 he died of a heart attack. The rest of the family disappeared into the storm of war.

In the early months of the war, with the German Army advancing upon Moscow, the city was at first chaotic, mobs of drunken and hysterical people roaming the streets looking for German spies, and then the streets were suddenly still, no traffic, no pedestrians, and nobody knowing what to do or where to run, and long lines at the bread stores. Masha waiting in a line one morning heard people say, “What are Jews doing here?” She was certain that if there were no bread or flour in the city the next day, all the Jews in Moscow would be killed. She waited in the cold for three hours, and someone pushed her out of the line and said, “Go to Palestine for bread.” She ran home, weeping.

That October the family was evacuated from Moscow. A terrifying journey in a crowded freight car, one of more than ninety attached to two engines operated by men who seemed not to know their destination and took them at first south to the Caucasus and then east to the Urals, through vast fields and forests, the war sometimes nearby, the thump and crunch of artillery and German aircraft overhead.

After six weeks of travel the train deposited them in the exotic world of Tashkent, the capital city of Uzbekistan in Central Asia, where they lived for a while in a shack. It was winter, the rainy season, and very cold. In a bazaar one morning they watched as soldiers loaded onto a truck the corpses of starved children recently arrived from the Ukraine, and some minutes later a hungry boy was beaten to death before their eyes by a raging crowd for stealing an apple from a stall. Masha’s mother decided they would not remain in Tashkent, and they traveled south and lived in a village not far from the border of Afghanistan. There they survived the winter through the grit and wits of Masha’s mother, who seemed to understand how to deal with the local people, bartered clothes for food, worked at odd jobs with Masha, who was fifteen years old, on a collective farm for a daily payment of a loaf of bread each, and nursed Masha’s sister through the measles that took the lives of all the other refugee children stricken with it.

In the summer of 1942 they returned to Moscow-after months of a nightmarish journey on slow trains teeming with refugees, after bouts of serious illness along the way, after Masha and her little brother had been separated from their mother and sister as their train pulled out and left them behind, and they spent a week hopping rides on freight trains and army trucks, making their way to Moscow without papers or money, and found their mother in the apartment, beside herself with grief over her two lost children and overwhelmed with joy at the sight of them.

Masha discovered to her dismay that much of her father’s precious library of leather-bound books had been stolen, some of it sold for food, some of it burned for warmth. The two elderly men who were their neighbors in the communal apartment stared at them icily when Masha’s mother asked about the books. What did she think was more important in wartime, her husbands books or Russian lives?

They had been away from the city a long time and needed a new residence permit in order to obtain ration cards for food. There was no certainty the permit would be given them. Masha’s mother said to her, “You have to come with me to the militia station; you will bring me luck. You have that luck; it’s within you.” Masha did not understand. They went to the local precinct and were given their residence permit and papers to fill out. Her mother took her everywhere she needed to go to get the papers approved. She began to call Masha “my little amulet.” Whenever she had to go somewhere on a serious errand, she would say to Masha, “Come with me; you 11 bring me luck.”

In 1943 they moved to another building because the walls of the old apartment, weakened by German bombing, began to crumble. The new apartment was enormous, with one sink, one toilet, nine rooms, nine families, about thirty people in all, among them ten children; nine tables in the kitchen, each with a kerosene burner; cooking, laundry, gossip, arguments in the kitchen, children running about; buckets, pails, clothes, a bicycle hanging from a wall, boxes filled with books. Quiet only when everyone slept.

In Uzbekistan, Masha had not attended school and missed her seventh and eighth grades. When they returned to Moscow, she studied on her own, took the examination for ninth grade, and passed. Along with other young people, she became a member of Komsomol. In their first apartment her parents had spoken to each other in Yiddish and with the children in Russian; her mother sang songs and told stories in Yiddish and Russian. Now, in this apartment and on the street, the Rashkovsky family spoke only Russian. In school and around the neighborhood Masha had Jewish and Gentile friends. She distanced herself from anyone known to be even remotely anti-Semitic; she avoided trouble; she never spoke to anyone about politics.

After high school she began to attend the Institute of Historical Archives because it was nearest her home, and at the end of her first semester she told her mother that she wanted to leave school, she was bored. Her mother said, “If that’s the case, then either you will study to become a doctor or you will go to work in a factory.” Her mother thought that the practice of medicine would be good for a woman.

That was in 1947, before the kindling of Stalinist-style anti-Semitism. To attend medical school then, you needed to have graduated from high school and passed examinations in chemistry, physics, and Russian language. During the summer of 1947 Masha did whatever preparatory study was necessary and had no difficulty gaining acceptance into medical school.

There followed two years of lectures and class work and memorization. And sessions in Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, political economy, history of the Communist Party, dialectical materialism, historical materialism, little of which, according to the family chronicles, the medical students took seriously. They brought their notes to the examinations and immediately afterward forgot what they had memorized.

Masha’s parents had observed no religious traditions; her mother did not light Sabbath candles. When Masha met Volodya, she was as indifferent to religion as he was. They considered themselves citizens of the Soviet Union, with the word “Jew” appearing routinely as a mark of identity after the word “nationality” on their internal passports.

Masha was able to leave the medical institute in Ryazan for Moscow only on weekends. The fifth time she and Volodya met, he brought her to the apartment on Gorky Street and introduced her to his parents. Volodya’s sister, Rosa, no longer lived there; she had received her master’s degree in philology from Moscow University in 1948 and was married that same year. To Volodya’s parents, Masha seemed bright, engaging, thoroughly Russian, and suitable for their son. That was in the early spring of 1951.

They went out together nine times in all before Volodya proposed marriage. Masha accepted. The marriage took place on the seventh of that June, a civil ceremony in the municipal registration office. Afterward there was a small party for them in the apartment of Masha’s family and another later in the Slepak apartment on Gorky Street.

The next day Masha left Moscow to begin her summer internship in a hospital in the small town of Lebedyan in Ryazanskaya Province, about 220 miles southeast of Moscow. She returned in late August, moved into Volodya’s room in the Slepak apartment, then went back to the medical institute in Ryazan to continue her studies and soon discovered that she was pregnant.

She did not want to have the baby in Ryazan and decided to apply to the Ministry of Health for a transfer to a medical institute in Moscow. She and Volodya proceeded, with much effort, to tread their way through the bureaucracy and the paperwork: numerous applications; documents that confirmed their marriage; papers from Masha’s physician verifying her pregnancy; an affidavit concerning Volodya’s workplace and position.

On weekends she traveled to Moscow to be with Volodya in his little room with a balcony facing Gorky Street.

Weeks passed while Masha’s request for transfer slowly wound its way through the bureaucracy. Finally, to her joy, the request was approved. At the end of the semester, after passing her exams, she was transferred to the Second Moscow Medical Institute. That May she entered the local maternity hospital on Stanislavsky Street to deliver her baby. Hours of difficult labor, during which she remained largely unattended, reduced her to utter exhaustion and an ominous silence. The medical staff then labored long and hard to save her and the baby. She gave birth to a son, who was given the name Alexander and the nickname Sanya, after her father. Some weeks later Masha Slepak returned to the medical institute.

All was tranquil in the Slepak household on Gorky Street during the summer and fall of 1952: Masha, in her final year of medical school; Volodya, working as a senior engineer in the Electro-Vacuum Factory in Moscow, a job he had obtained when the manager had chosen to ignore the fact that he was a Jew, because skilled specialists were now needed if the Soviet Union was to overtake the West in radar technology; and Solomon, the Old Bolshevik, approaching his sixtieth year and at peace with himself despite a recently diagnosed heart condition, his grandson embodying for him a sense of continuity and accomplishment, his lifelong dream of a new order to a great extent fulfilled. Adding to his feeling of personal achievement must have been the enormous satisfaction of having witnessed, in 1949, the termination of the Civil War in China and the creation of the Communist Chinese People’s Republic, under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung.

Then, suddenly, in November 1952, Stalin ordered the arrest of his personal physician, A. N. Vinogradov. Arrested, too, were others on the medical staff in the Kremlin hospital-clinic that serviced the ruling class of the Soviet Union. The stunning accusation: involvement in a plot to poison the entire leadership of the country.

Masha Slepak, attending her final year at the Second Moscow Medical Institute and, as part of her studies, working in Moscow City Hospital Number 4 as an intern, knew many of the arrested doctors. On an evening in November, after a day at the hospital, she returned to the apartment in a state of great agitation. She took Volodya aside and spoke to him. Then they went into the room of his parents.

Fanya Slepak was out. Solomon Slepak sat alone, reading.

“I just came from a meeting in my hospital,” Masha said.

Solomon looked up from his newspaper.

“It was terrible,” Masha said.

Solomon asked what had happened.

Masha said, “It was a meeting of the staff. Almost every day the authorities of the hospital organize such a meeting. All the students and doctors and professors must attend. Each time a party activist comes to the stage, and right after his speech they put on a Jewish doctor, who talks against Jewish traitors and the Jewish conspiracy and Jewish professors who are poisoners.”

Solomon said calmly, “It’s true that among Jews, and especially Jewish doctors, there are traitors.”

Masha said, “But many of the professors who were arrested are my teachers. I know them. They’re honest people.”

“Perhaps they are,” said Solomon.

“They can’t be traitors or spies.”

“Perhaps they are entirely innocent.”

“Then how can they be arrested?” asked Masha.

Solomon explained patiently. “The class struggle is now in its fiercest and most dangerous stage. Look at us, we are surrounded by capitalist enemies. Isn’t it better to arrest and prosecute a hundred innocent people and catch among them one spy than to let the spy go free?”

“I can’t accept that,” Volodya suddenly said.

“‘Whenever you cut down trees, chips will fly in all directions.’

“Solomon Slepak quoted the old Russian proverb.

“I will never accept such a philosophy,” said Volodya.

“You understand very little,” said Solomon, his voice rising. “I understand enough.”

“What do you understand?”

“I understand enough to know that I will never join your party!”

For Solomon Slepak, the Communist Party possessed the power of a church, the authority of an order, the force of a communion of faith. It had given him self-respect, a dream to strive for, a strong and revered leader. One imagines his raging thoughts: your party! Such disrespect and ingratitude! And what dangerous talk. Your party! His face flushed, Solomon shouted at his son, “You understand nothing!”

“I understand plenty,” said Volodya.

“I risked my life fighting for your future, and you are talking to me this way!”

“I understand there is too much blood on your hands,” replied Volodya. “That I understand!”

Volodya and Masha left the room. Minutes later Volodya saw his father enter the kitchen and pour some of his cardiac medicine into a glass and with trembling hands raise it to his lips and drink it down.

In July of that year, 1952, twenty-five distinguished Jewish writers and public figures had been put on trial, and in August many were summarily executed, among them David Bergelson, Binyamin Zuskin, Peretz Markish. Also shot was the poet Itzik Fefer, Stalin’s passionate admirer. All charged with being spies, Zionists, traitors.

Then, according to many sources, a young radiologist named Lidia Timashuk, who was an informer for the secret police, wrote to Stalin accusing certain doctors of plotting to assassinate him and others through poison and improper medical treatment. No one seems to know why she wrote that letter, if indeed there ever was a letter; it may have been concocted by the secret police from an earlier report she had sent concerning her suspicions about the doctors who treated party leader Andrei Zhdanov when he suffered a serious and subsequently fatal heart attack in August 1948. In any event, that November a number of leading Kremlin doctors were abruptly arrested, directed to confess, beaten when they refused, ordered to name other conspirators in the plot.

On January 13, 1953, a portentous article appeared in Pravda, announcing the arrest of nine doctors-six of them with obviously Jewish names, and purportedly connected with the Joint Distribution Committee, the philanthropic organization founded during the First World War to aid Russian Jews and, according to Pravda, a known arm of American intelligence. The three remaining doctors were said to be British agents. All the Soviet people, proclaimed Pravda, now condemned those nine doctors, who had confessed to having poisoned Andrei Zhdanov in 1948 and before him Alexander Shcherbakov, a secretary of the Central Committee; condemned, too, were their foreign masters and “the well-known Jewish bourgeois nationalist, Mikhoels.” Western agents were everywhere, the paper warned, even inside the heart of the Soviet Union. It was necessary to be vigilant against sabotage and to be wary of Jews, whose links with Western powers enabled them to take on the work of imperialist spies and collaborators; it was necessary to crush such “loathsome vermin,” destroy the “enemies of the people.”

For bravely exposing the insidious doctors and helping alert the country to the Jewish “enemy within,” Lidia Timashuk was awarded the coveted Order of Lenin.

Rumors proliferated: Jews were putting poison into medicines, infiltrating vacation areas and homes of the aged to carry out nefarious schemes, establishing nests of Zionist spies in the government and in universities. On buses and in classrooms people shouted at Jews, “You poisoners! You poisoned all our great leaders!” Russians stopped going to their Jewish doctors. In many regions of the country, demonstrations took place against Jews. Mid-twentieth-century industrial Russia had resurrected the medieval image of the Jew as demonic poisoner.

As in the past, it was not only the Jews who were the targets of Stalin’s denunciatory campaign. Old Mensheviks, Trotskyites, various Soviet minorities, writers, and artists influenced by the West, Russian intellectuals from economists to physicians, anyone suspected of even marginal contact with foreigners-the people were urged to denounce them all.

By and large, workers remained untouched; they were the audience for the denunciations, not the target. For all others there was in the air the terrifying probability of yet another mass purge of the party. The final act of an old and ailing despot, who saw enemies everywhere, found delight in the subservience and humiliation of others, preferred loyalty out of fear rather than conviction, and raged at the advancing years that were slowly sapping his strength, reducing his powers of concentration, inexorably forcing him to loosen his hold on the vast apparatus of government. One more cleansing of the party, decisive and shattering. But first, he had to solve once and for all time his problem with the overbearing, cerebral, stubborn Soviet Jews.

Masha read with deep apprehension the newspaper reports of the arrested doctors-surgeons, internists, neurologists, pediatricians-all accused of having murdered patients during surgery or prescribing poison as medication. Because she knew many of the doctors personally or by reputation, she was able to persuade Volodya that those named were innocent. They began to sense the start of a vast organized campaign against Soviet Jewry. What better way to direct the anger of all the Soviet people against the Jews than to reveal them as agents of an international conspiracy to murder the country’s leaders? But to what end? What lay behind the anti-Semitic campaign? What did Stalin have planned for the Jews?

On a number of occasions they tried to discuss the matter with Solomon Slepak, but the talk would inevitably degenerate into loud arguments. At times, in the midst of a heated flurry of words, Solomon would abruptly glance at his wristwatch, announce that he had to meet someone, and rush from the apartment. Masha and Volodya ceased talking to him about the doctors.

Day after day, in the pages of Izvestia, Trud, Pravda, and the popular satirical magazine Krokodil, appeared savage lampoons of Jews and a torrent of furious articles attacking the “despicable gang of killer doctors.” Anti-Semitic hysteria increased, distended to proportions never before known in the Soviet Union. The entire nation was being readied for pogroms, a bloodbath.

Then new rumors swept through the bitter-cold winter air of Moscow. Secret meetings were taking piace in the Kremlin. A carefully prepared scenario was being arranged by Stalin for the Jews. Versions of his plans floated about like insidious poisons. One version-later confirmed by MGB Major Alexei Rybin, who was present at two meetings where the details were worked out-had it that there was soon to be a public trial of the doctors, who would all be found guilty and sentenced to be hanged from scaffolds on Red Square. Then, as the sentences were about to be carried out, the prisoners would be torn away by a raging crowd and lynched, despite the heroic efforts of the guards. Nationwide pogroms would then follow, the Soviet people venting uncontrollable rage against the Jews. Added to these rumors were accounts about barracks being constructed in Siberia on a stupendous scale that made sense only in the face of an impending mass deportation of Jews; about the appearance of freight trains in marshaling yards near Moscow; about lists of Jews being prepared in police precincts. Jews in the major cities of Soviet Russia would be given two hours to pack, allowed one bag per person. All who perished on the tortuous journey were to be thrown from the trains into the frozen fields and forests in the thirty-below-zero air of the Siberian winter.

Chilling confirmation of these rumors came by chance to Masha Slepak. At six o’clock one morning a Russian woman named Nadezhda Naumovna, an old and close friend of Masha’s mother, showed up suddenly in the mother’s apartment. She had been orphaned in her early years and taken in by a Jewish family in the city of Gomel in White Russia. Her Yiddish was fluent. She lived in Davidkovo, a village very near Moscow that has since been swallowed by the western part of the city and no longer exists. Agitatedly she told Masha’s mother what she had witnessed that night, a clear, moonlit night: Trucks suddenly appearing and rumbling up to the houses where Jews lived, and people emerging from the houses with children and small bundles and climbing into the trucks. And the trucks rumbling away. And silence. In the morning all the Jews of Davidkovo were gone.

The frightened woman finished her tale and quickly left. Masha’s mother immediately called Masha and asked her to come to the apartment, where she told her daughter what she had just heard. Masha related it to Volodya. Both saw the events of the night as a rehearsal for things yet to come. They said nothing to Solomon, who, they felt certain, would have called it a wild and baseless story, a slander against the party.

The truth was, however, that the deportation of the Jews, when it was finally to take place, would not be concealed from public view. On the contrary, it would be accomplished in the open-as a magnanimous act by Stalin, as the only possible way of saving the Jews from the wrath of the people, and in the wake of an urgent, importuning letter to the editor of Pravda signed by leading Soviet Jews. We Jews who live in the Soviet Union, the letter would say, are privileged to enjoy fully all the rights guaranteed by our constitution. We participate willingly as workers in the factories and institutions and scientific institutes of our land. But a militant bourgeois nationalism has infected the entire Soviet Jewish people. And in order for that people to atone properly for its murderous doctors and corrupt nationalist sentiments, in order for it to be protected from the righteous wrath of the Soviet people, the Jews whose signatures appear on this letter ask Comrade Stalin to send the Jews of the Soviet Union to the farthest corner of the land for reeducation.

The letter was composed by historian Isaak Mintz and philosopher Mark Mitin, along with the Pravda journalist Yakov Khavinson. Perhaps they believed their act might save them from being added to the lists of deportees. In the offices of Pravda, Khavinson and another staff member, David Zaslavsky, Jews slavishly obedient to Stalin, worked the switchboard, contacting Jews all over the country and requesting that they come to Moscow to sign the letter that was to save Soviet Jewry.

Many yielded and signed; many, despite the clear personal danger, refused. Outlines of the letter were later traced from memory by some who were asked to sign it; the letter itself has yet to be found in the Kremlin archives. It would have had to be approved by Stalin, but most likely did not go through the normal bureaucratic chain that required its being registered and numbered at each level, hence is not in its proper file. No doubt it will surface one day.

During the time signatures to the letter were being collected, Solomon Slepak, loyal Bolshevik and chairman of the house committee of the apartment building in which he lived, walked one day into the building office. In the Soviet Union all apartment houses belonged to the state; in each there was an office responsible for the building’s plumbing, electrical network, gas, heating, rent collection. Salaried government clerks ran those offices, aided by house committees of volunteers, who were usually pensioners. The clerks were in close contact with the local militia, who in turn reported to the security police. Inside the office that day, Solomon Slepak found himself looking at a list of the Jewish residents in the building. His name was on the list.

All through the night of February 28-March 1, 1953, Stalin caroused in the Kremlin with his closest comrades: Georgi Malenkov, Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, and Nicholas Bulganin. He was in a good mood and became quite drunk. The party ended at six o clock in the morning. He summoned no one all that day, and thus his apartment door remained closed. In the early hours of the second of March his maid entered and found him collapsed on the floor. Guards immediately summoned Beria. Soon Malenkov arrived, followed by the others of the inner group. They remained a long time, gathered around the sofa on which Stalin had been placed. Then they left-without calling a doctor.

The next day they returned with a doctor, who diagnosed a stroke. Stalin lay bereft of speech and partially paralyzed. They stood around, watching him die.

He lay there for three and a half days, in agony, slowly strangling to death, his face turning black.

He died on March 5, 1953. Three days later his death was announced over the radio.

Solomon Slepak was stunned and wept openly. Even in the labor camps, many cried. What would now be the future of the Motherland? Masha and Volodya admit that they were frightened. Who would rule the country, hold it together?

Volodya made his way to the Hall of Columns near Red Square, where the coffin with Stalin’s body had been placed for public viewing. People poured from side streets onto Petrovsky Boulevard. A solid jam on Pushkin Square. Gorky Street closed off. A tumultuous crush of humanity moving slowly toward the Hall of Columns at the House of the Trade Unions. The despot lay dead in his coffin, walrus mustache looking stiffly waxed, heavy-lidded eyes forever closed. An armed soldier stood guard nearby Stalin dead! How astonishingly small and helpless he appeared now, slightly ludicrous even, unseemly, with his dyed red hair and pocked face. The uniformed corpse lay wreathed in flowers; lavish bouquets encased the coffin.

On March 9 the body was borne to the mausoleum on Red Square by his son, Vassily, a chronic alcoholic, and by Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev, Molotov, and Voroshilov. The mummified corpse was placed alongside the figure of Lenin. On the streets men and women wept, even though he may have sent their loved ones to a labor camp. Many privately celebrated his death, but most feared that someonen worse might soon rule-the dreaded Beria, perhaps. In Moscow from time to time the vast crowds grew suddenly frenzied, and distant screams could be heard as many among the mourners were crushed to death. Even when dead, Stalin took life. Some murmured that had he been able to, he would have taken all of Russia with him to the grave.

The despot had died around the holiday of Purim, when Jews celebrate the deliverance of an ancient Persian Jewish community from annihilation at the hands of a minister of state named Haman. No one in the Slepak family, however, knew enough about anything Jewish to make such a connection.

On April 4, one month after the death of Stalin, came an announcement over the radio concerning the “Doctors’ Plot”: “The people guilty of perverting the inquiry have been arrested and summoned to trial to bear the responsibility for their criminal guilt.” And, added the announcer, the Order of Lenin was being taken away from the chief prosecution witness, Dr. Lidia Timashuk.

April 4 was the third day of Passover, the festival that marks the Israelites’ deliverance from slavery in Egypt, an occasion no doubt overlooked by Solomon Slepak, who by that time must have read in Pravda that those accused in the “Doctors’ Plot” had been imprisoned “without any lawful basis” and were being released. A Pravda editorial declared Solomon Mikhoels innocent and referred to him as “an upright communal worker.”

Some years later Volodya wondered aloud in the presence of his father if there had ever been a deportation list of the Jews in their apartment building during the time of the “Doctors’ Plot.” His father would not respond. Masha said that she had heard of the lists and that each apartment house had one. Volodya said to his father, “How was it possible you didn’t know, you were the chairman of the house committee?” Masha said to Solomon, “You must have known.” Solomon then admitted to having seen the list in the apartment building’s office. Volodya said, “You saw the list and you said nothing to us?” Solomon glanced at his wristwatch. Volodya said, “Were you on the list?” Solomon said, “Yes, I was on the list.” Volodya said, “You had to be crazy to help them do this against yourself.” Solomon got to his feet and walked out of the room without another word.

Behind the thick walls of the Kremlin, a raging war of succession was being fought among the contentious heirs of Stalin: Malenkov, Beria, Molotov, Khrushchev. In Asia the Korean War was still dragging on. Along the western border Soviet satellite states were growing restive with the end of Stalinist rule.

At first Malenkov and Beria and Khrushchev appeared to be ruling together, an ungainly troika: Malenkov as chief of state, Beria as head of security, and Khrushchev as apparent leader of the party. Then, at the end of June 1953, after strikes and demonstrations in Czechoslovakia and a surprise workers’ uprising in East Berlin, Beria, whose job it was to anticipate such events, seemed to vanish, his name stricken from the Pravda list of the party hierarchy present one night at the Bolshoi Theater. In July the Korean War came to a negotiated end. In September, Khrushchev gained the position of general secretary of the party. And on Christmas Day 1953 there appeared in Pravda the announcement that Beria and seven of his closest collaborators had been brought to trial and shot earlier that month. Sometime afterward the Great Soviet Encyclopedia asked its subscribers to remove with a razor the article on Beria and his photograph and to replace it with an entry on the Bering Sea.

By then Solomon Slepak and his son rarely talked about politics. But the family chronicles add, in Volodya’s voice, that had his father been asked to explain the demise of Beria, he would have responded with an exultant “You see how honest the party is, how it cleans its own house. Beria, not Stalin, must have caused the doctors to be arrested. Beria, that imperialist agent, was all the time deceiving Stalin.”

In 1954 the MGB, Ministry of State Security, which had replaced the NKVD in 1946, was reorganized and renamed the KGB, Committee for State Security. One year later Malenkov, whose economic policies had proved disastrous, was abruptly removed from his position and replaced by Nicholas Bulganin. He and Khrushchev now ruled the Soviet Union.

In the labor camps lived close to ten million prisoners. Slowly they began to be released, and their reputations and pensions were restored. The “crimes” of many who had perished were erased from the record, and their families sent back from exile.

The danger to the physical existence of Soviet Jewry appeared to have ended. In 1959, following eleven years of silence for Yiddish books, three works in Yiddish suddenly appeared, the selected writings of the greatest of the Yiddish writers in the tsarist period: Mendele Mocher Seforim, I. L. Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem. Books in Yiddish by surviving writers were published sporadically during the years that followed, but no Jewish institution or school was reestablished, no professional theater returned to life.

On Gorky Street the Slepak family seemed to be enjoying a comfortable and serene Soviet life.

Little Sanya Slepak attended Special English School Number 31 on Stanislavsky Street, one block from where he lived. The school, which was designated as an English school in 1963 (there were other schools that specialized in French and Spanish), serviced many of the children and grandchildren of the Soviet ruling class. It was named after the Scottish poet Robert Burns and had a brother school in Glasgow, named after the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. It had an excellent faculty and began the teaching of English in the second grade rather than in the fifth, as was typical of regular schools. It gave more hours to English than did other schools and possessed the most up-to-date language-teaching equipment. English was studied in small groups, five or six students to a teacher; some subjects, such as geography and history, were taught entirely in English.

Why, one might ask, was English so eagerly sought and openly taught among the Soviet elite at a time when public policy at the highest levels was so belligerently opposed to foreign cultural influences? In fact, the school was a training ground for children of the elite, their beginning preparation for contact with the world outside the Motherland, where the international language was English. About one-third of the students were from families in the diplomatic corps and would end up in English-language institutes or the Institute of International Relations. Others would one day work as interpreters and translators in Soviet radio and television. There were only two or three English schools of that caliber in Moscow, all of them near the Kremlin.

Among those in Special English School Number 31 around that time were the grandson of Khrushchev, the grandchildren of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, the daughter of Minister of Culture Demichev, the daughter of Beria, and the children and grandchildren of many high-level bureaucrats. It was nearly impossible for an average Russian family to have a child admitted into that school. When Sanya Slepak reached school age, Solomon Slepak went to the school and had a talk with the headmaster, Gregory Suvorov, reputed to be a decent and honest man, a man of high principle. The details of Solomon’s conversation with Suvorov are unknown, but afterward Sanya Slepak was permitted to take the entrance examination, which he passed.

Masha, after five years of additional medical training, was a radiologist in City Hospital Number 30 on Krestyanskaya Zastava and later worked in a polyclinic named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of Lenin’s secret police; the clinic was in Kitaysky Proezd (“Chinese Way”), in the center of Moscow.

A sudden change in fortune occurred to Volodya in 1957: The Moscow TV Research and Development Institute invited him to work as a senior engineer in a laboratory where experiments were being conducted with measuring and control equipment for television transmitters.

Then his mother died of cancer, in 1959. A year later his father married a Russian woman and moved to her house on Mashkova Street, about three miles from the Gorky Street apartment, which he relinquished to Volodya and Masha, who now had two children; another son had been born to them in May 1959 and named Leonid, after no one in particular. Masha liked the name.

Astonishingly, in 1962, the institute where Volodya worked asked him to lead a laboratory; he was to be the chief designer of a special project. His new position needed to be confirmed by the Ministry of Radio Industry; the project was part of a contract between the Ministry of Radio Industry and the Ministry of Defense. Apparently the former ministry was less interested in his Jewishness than in his ability to fulfill the latter ministry’s contract.

Volodya Slepak was now involved in the development of the Soviet air-defense system.

The Soviet Union was girded by a dense network of radar stations that relayed their sightings to a central computer that in turn sent signals to antirocket and antiaircraft systems, as well as to airfields and to the air defense general staffs. General officers and their staffs needed to have the signals translated onto huge screens in situation rooms, where defense and attack positions could be read on maps that showed moving rockets and aircraft. Each aircraft and rocket on the screen had to be accompanied by its appropriate characteristics: type, speed, altitude.

It was the responsibility of Volodya and his laboratory to design the most up-to-date display screens. To obtain that position, it had been necessary for him to receive First Form security clearance, second only to the top security clearance known as State Secrets.

Volodya Slepak, son of Solomon Slepak, had risen to the very summit of nonpolitical life in the Soviet Union and now stood on the frontier of the Motherland’s national defense.

A year or so before he obtained that sensitive new job, Volodya had purchased for about eighty rubles in a Moscow shop a radio called a Spidola, a black-and-yellow plastic box, about twelve by eight by four inches. A radio powerful enough, after certain modifications, to receive the Russian-language broadcasts of the BBC, the German Wave, the Voice of America, the Voice of Israel. The voices of the enemies outside.