From on high, out of the darkness of the heavens, let not only these unpretentious folkloric strains be audible, but the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, and the seventeenth, and the thirty-second preludes and fugues, fragments of The Well-Tempered Clavier, those magnificent musical texts, music for all time—let that music resound. Because, ultimately, all these mad and evil games of rash and mindless people led to the dress rehearsal of the end of the human world, to the Holocaust.
On the stage, all that would remain were the black poles, and emptiness, and silence … Oh, and about the costumes … What will they be? Leotards, and on top of them some loose-fitting smocks or tunics, garments without shape or color, and no ethnic allusions—no embroidered vests or headscarves tied above the forehead—nothing of that sort.
And, please, no applause. Only ancient fear and the presentiment of absolute finality, of wholesale death. Go home, ladies and gentlemen, into the darkness and into the silence …
“Good, Nora! Very good. We’ll do it. There’s just one thing I don’t understand. What is this Jacob’s Ladder you mentioned?”
Nora glanced at Berg in surprise. “You don’t know? The dream of the patriarch Jacob near Bethlehem. He dreamed of a stairway with angels going up and down it, and at the very top of it, the Lord God says to Jacob something like ‘The place where you are lying asleep, this land, I will give to you and your descendants, and I will bless you and them, and I will be with you and all your peoples.’”
“Amazing dream. For some reason I didn’t remember it.”
“I would have missed it, too. Tusya pointed me in the right direction. Don’t worry, Efim. The most important thing for us is that the Lord God bless all peoples through the Jews, each and every person. And if the Jews are hounded out of this world, it is not certain whether the blessing will be preserved,” Nora said, laughing.
45 With Mikhoels
(1945–1948)
They were the same age, Jacob Ossetsky and Solomon Vovsi, but Jacob entered the Commercial Institute a year earlier. Jacob’s friend invited him to a literary evening where this very Solomon was reading a long and unintelligible poem in Yiddish to a group of admirers. Jacob remembered his striking outward appearance, which verged on the grotesque, and his artistic expressiveness and passion. This was in 1911, and by 1912 neither of them was at the Institute any longer.
Many years later, in 1925, when they had already moved to Moscow, Jacob and Marusya chanced to be at a play in the Moscow State Yiddish Theater. By that time, Marusya had parted with the theater for good, but her youthful dreams about a career as an actress still rankled her.
Marusya was agitated about the play, A Night at the Old Market. On the one hand, she liked the tradition of farce, but the story about corpses that come to life was unpalatable to her. She had become disenchanted with mysticism at that point, and had also outgrown her theatrical past and rejected “disengaged” art. She sought a political meaning in everything, and it disturbed her that this otherwise compelling play had no ideological underpinning. The language itself, Yiddish, called up associations with bourgeois nationalism. The content of the play was flimsy, even trifling, but even so the play was magnificent. Professionally, the direction and set design were of the highest order. The acting was stunning—the delivery of the lines was sharp and light, with remarkable concordance of intonation, the movements were beautifully choreographed, and the music was superb.
In short, Marusya suffered from artistic-ideological discomfort; nor could Jacob fully enjoy the play. He kept feeling he knew the actor in one of the main roles. He snatched the program from Marusya’s hand, but couldn’t make out in the darkness the name of this marvelous jester who combined provincial humor, which was directed at himself, and the manner of the Italian piazzas, which at the same time made fun of the public.
As soon as the lights went up after the first act, Jacob looked at the program to see the name of the actor.
“Marusya, do you know Mikhoels? His face is so familiar, I’m sure I know him from somewhere. He’s extraordinarily talented.”
“Yes, he is,” Marusya said sourly, as though Mikhoels had deprived her of her calling. “It’s a stage name. His real name is Vovsi.”
“Ah, Vovsi! Now I remember. He studied at the Commercial Institute with me, in Kiev. Then he disappeared.”
“Jacob, you and I are the ones who disappeared. Vovsi never went anywhere. He’s made a name for himself; they’ve begun writing about him. Often.”
“You didn’t like him? I think he was superb.”
“This play, this spectacle, is for philistines, Jacob. Look around you—all you can see are Jewish dentists.”
Here Jacob realized that he had made a blunder and touched a sore spot in Marusya. But at that very moment, someone took him by the arm from behind. He turned around. It was a doctor he had visited for a consultation a year before. A dermatologist, though, not a dentist.
“Well, what do you think of Mikhoels? He’s my cousin! What a pair! Mikhoels and Suskin!”
“Abel Isaakovich, meet my wife, Marusya. Marusya—Dr. Dobkin, a dermatologist.”
Marusya could hardly contain her laughter, but she managed to get out: “Oh, I thought you were a dentist!” And they all went to the buffet together.
There was an endless ovation at the end of the play. Then they stood in line at the cloakroom with Abel and his wife, and when the audience had almost dispersed, and Abel’s wife was struggling with her gray felt boots, which she couldn’t get to buckle all the way up, Mikhoels—small of stature, with a large head—emerged from a side door. He was looking for someone, and when he saw Abel, he came up to him, patted him on the back, and kissed him. Then he looked at Jacob, who hadn’t taken his eyes off him, and smiled inquiringly.
“Jacob Ossetsky, right? Ah, how grateful I am to you! You know, in your younger years, it’s very important when people give you pointed criticism.”
“I don’t remember offering any criticism at all. Now I feel I should apologize…”
“No, there’s nothing to apologize for. At the time, you expressed yourself with great civility. I’ll remind you: ‘Clearly, a great talent—just not in the realm of poetry!’” And Mikhoels guffawed, turning his homely face, with its protruding lower lip and flattened nose, toward the others. “It was a terrible poem! Let’s go. We’re having a small party tonight. I’d like to invite you.”
Then a tall woman, somewhat advanced in years, appeared. Mikhoels followed behind her to the cloakroom, and all of them, in a large group, peeling off the winter coats they had already pulled on, fell in line behind him.
After that, they met up with one another on occasion—outside, by the Nikitsky Gates, sometimes at the conservatory, or for concerts at the Gnesin Institute of Music. The Moscow they inhabited was quite circumscribed. At their last prewar meeting, not long before Jacob’s first arrest, they met by chance on Malaya Bronnaya. They shook hands, and Mikhoels invited Jacob to a play.
“Maybe this evening? The Court Is in Session, by Dobrushin. A contemporary play.”
This was in 1930, and Jacob had never seen the play. A few months later he was arrested, and he observed the subject of the play not from the point of view of the audience, but from the defendant’s dock.
The next chance meeting took place fifteen years later, after the war, in 1945. By this time, Jacob’s long peregrinations through the provinces had already ended. The best years of his life were under way: freedom, books, music, pleasant proximity to film, while teaching statistics in the Economics Department at the Institute of Cinematography.