On that day, Mikhoels had a business meeting at the Institute, where he had been offered the opportunity to teach an acting workshop. They ran into each other in the cafeteria. Mikhoels embraced Jacob like an old friend. Then they ate pea soup—the cafeteria had already run out of the main course—and had some tea with bread.
Mikhoels’s face was homely, but his hands looked as if they had been sculpted by the Lord God Himself. Jacob couldn’t take his eyes off the large supple fingers clasping the dim glass of tea. The conversation was lively and touched upon the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had interested Jacob for a long time already. Mikhoels, seeing the lively interest his interlocutor took in the matter, suggested he visit him to discuss it further. They exchanged phone numbers.
Jacob was a bit abashed by Mikhoels’s hail-fellow-well-met attitude toward him, which didn’t correspond to their long, but no more than nodding, acquaintance. But he found an explanation for this cordiality—and Mikhoels confirmed his surmise in later meetings. During the fifteen years that had passed since they last saw each other, before the war, so many people had disappeared, gone missing, died of starvation, or perished at the front that every familiar face seemed to belong to someone newly returned from the land of the dead.
Thus began a rather intense interaction. Ossetsky was interesting to Mikhoels. The actor did not often socialize with people who were so scholastically inclined, with such erudition and finely honed logic. In addition, during his years of exile, Jacob had learned the art of reading newspapers. Through the structure of the phrases, the subordinate clauses, even through the punctuation marks, Jacob knew how to excavate the subtext, the implicit message, the undisclosed intentions and latent tendencies. Mikhoels sensed this.
It was a transitional period, vacillating and uncertain. Things that had seemed clear-cut and comprehensible somehow grew turbid and blurry. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee had done a great service to the homeland during the war when, in ’43, even before the opening of the second front, it completed its tour through America, Canada, and Mexico, collecting money for equipping the Red Army. Now, however, after the victory over fascism, the committee was faced with a new, vaguely defined task—to demonstrate to the world the pro-Israeli and at the same time anti-British policy of the Soviet Union with regard to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Mikhoels very delicately described the situation the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was in today, more complex than it had been during the war, before the opening of the second front. He had already caught indirect signals that the people at the very top were dissatisfied with the activities of the committee. Jacob reacted immediately and, with the precision of formulation characteristic of him, put into words exactly what was filling Mikhoels with alarm: the deep discrepancy between the logic of the external and internal policies.
“Yes, yes, something of that nature,” Mikhoels said, nodding.
“With Europe, things are more or less clear. The new borders have essentially been determined. But there is a global geographic map, and new borders are being formed there, too. Now the real question is: Who will Palestine belong to after the war—the Arabs, and the British who back them, or the Jews, and the Soviet Union, which in turn supports them? And will the Jewish state be patterned on a socialist or, better yet, a communist model? This is a very thorny issue. On the one hand, Zionism, as a variety of nationalism, is a bourgeois current or trend; on the other hand, European Jewry is completely permeated with the spirit of communism.” This was how Jacob outlined the situation to Mikhoels, who listened attentively, his head cocked to one side, like a bird.
Mikhoels, who had received many letters from Jews, in particular from those who had fought on the front line, expressing a readiness to fight to conquer Palestine for the Jews, suspected as much. How should he answer them? He was in a quandary. He understood that Israel was not the same as Spain. And he didn’t pick up any clear signals from the government on this issue.
“I don’t think Soviet Jews will be allowed to leave for Palestine,” Jacob ventured to say.
He is certainly well versed in this political mathematics, Mikhoels concluded. And, before long, he enjoined Jacob to write overviews of the Western press on the Palestinian question for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Jacob would work under contract as a consultant.
For Jacob, this agreement meant not only supplementary income but also the satisfaction of interesting reading, a new domain of knowledge, and deeper understanding of all these burning issues. In postwar Europe, there were hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been spared extermination, who wandered around from pillar to post, dreaming of their own state. They were not allowed into Palestine. Their fate was an insignificant chip in the game of the victorious powers, which had not yet completed the postwar division of the world, its borders, cultural values, oil, grain, water, and air.
Jacob agreed to take the job, with the caveat that, along with his examination of what was happening currently, it would be necessary for him to assess the Palestinian political situation at least from the time of the Balfour Declaration. This historical context was indispensable.
Mikhoels agreed, and immediately gave Jacob a book by Richard Williams-Thompson that had just been published in London, titled The Palestine Problem.
This was how Jacob began his work with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
His greatest difficulty in the job was the limited—in effect, closed to nonspecialists—access to the American and British press. The sources that Jacob used at first were generally accessible—newspapers published in “fraternal” countries, or communist publications from Western countries. But, in spite of his skills in squeezing the necessary information from newspapers, he still lacked comprehensive source material.
He recalled the now-distant past when he had had a reliable personal source for Western newspapers—the Englishwoman Ivy Litvinov, wife of the former people’s commissar for international relations. Their acquaintance dated back to the end of the 1920s, when the Litvinovs’ daughter, Tanya, and Jacob’s son, Genrikh, were in the same class in school. Later, Jacob even took English lessons from Ivy. In those days, he often took home with him a pile of newspapers from the Litvinovs’ house. This is how he learned the particular language of newspapers, which differed from the literary English he was acquainted with.
But his contact with Ivy Litvinov, as with many other former friends and colleagues, had been broken long ago. He passed by the government residence where the Litvinovs had lived before the war fairly often, but he wasn’t sure whether they still lived there. From newspaper notices, he gathered that Litvinov had been dismissed from his post. In other words, he had fallen into disgrace. But disgrace has many gradations, from quiet retirement to quiet annihilation. Jacob, of course, could not have known that the renowned people’s commissar, onetime close collaborator of Lenin, lived full-time at his dacha and kept a handgun under his pillow, awaiting arrest. No, he would never again get any English newspapers from Ivy Litvinov. But he had great need of them.
During those days, there were only a handful of places in Moscow where one could find the British and American press, and they all required a special permit, the right of access to special collections. Mikhoels set to work and managed to get hold of such a privilege for Jacob. A month later, Ossetsky, as a consultant for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, received permission to work in the library of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Once a week, on Tuesdays at 9:00 a.m., he went to the library—a seven-minute walk from his house—and spent two hours there, poring over the week-old papers. Then he went home to drink tea and muse over the new information.