In an article about his wartime visit to the United States, Mikhoels expresses deep contempt for the state of American theater.
Vulgarity is the currency of the New World that unveiled before him. Rockettes kick up their heels in shows that get neither better nor worse. The words of Shakespeare aren’t heard on Broadway. And as America’s sons are sent across the seas to die and as Europe and Asia burn, New York feasts. Mikhoels seems infected with the dark mood of his old friends, German intellectuals, as they contemplate ending their lives in rat-infested hotels in Midtown.
Forget shtick. Mikhoels expresses contempt for Broadway. “Broadway brings together everything that’s not serious about America,” he writes. “It’s the place where you find a high concentration of cafes, cabarets, and all the theaters. From the point of view of the God of Business, it’s the Boulevard of Sin. It’s where the entrepreneurs conduct their business.”
Mikhoels understood the business schema of Broadway theater: a producer, basically a businessman, leases the premises and proceeds to seek out a director who has a play. “But if that director is someone like Max Reinhardt, who doesn’t happen to have a play, he remains unemployed.”
Reinhardt, a German and Austrian director and theater educator who had been a friend of Mikhoels’s for decades, is in New York, bemoaning the need to please what was then the shorthand designation for Broadway’s target audience: “a tired businessman,” abbreviated as TBM, someone who has no use for culture or, for that matter, politics.
Reinhardt has just escaped from Fascism, yet he doesn’t want to talk about Fascism. Instead, he wants to talk about theater in America, that is, the tyranny of TBM. “American theater isn’t just a zero, it’s negative one,” Reinhardt says.
In another essay, Mikhoels describes his argument with Charlie Chaplin, who tries to convince him that his work is apolitical.
Mikhoels disagrees. The character of the Little Tramp, his travails, his efforts to survive as the machine age deals him one setback after another, is as political as it gets, he argues. And what does he make of Chaplin’s film about the rise of Adolf Hitler, The Great Dictator?
If The Great Dictator isn’t politics, what is?
Is it surprising that Mikhoels returns to Moscow, to GOSET, the theater born to integrate its audience into the societal mainstream, to make them strive for something better, a task that often involved using humor to evoke self-awareness, often through ridicule and shame?
Whether you are a Communist, a Zionist, or both, GOSET existed to enlighten and inspire. Please note that in the early morning of February 24, 1953, with Mikhoels gone and the GOSET lights dark, Levinson turns to the Bard to illuminate the magnitude of his defiant pirouette with Finnish daggers. Ask yourself: Would the soft-bellied comics of American wealth have either the athleticism or the sense of purpose to execute such a maneuver?
Shtick is for the TBM. Art is for the soldier.
* * *
Malakhovka is a dacha settlement forty kilometers from Moscow, a quick train ride.
At the turn of the century, Moscow’s Jewish illuminati established a summer colony amid its gentle, wooded countryside. After the Revolution, the Jewish culture in Malakhovka revolved around the Orphanage of the Third International. There, the children could hear the writer Peretz Markish teach the works of Sholem Aleichem; they could learn drama from Mikhoels or Zuskin and art from Marc Chagall, a set designer who had just arrived in Moscow from Vitebsk.
In those days, Chagall’s interests included erasing the boundary between the players and the audience and using costume to create moving sculpture.
Now, the great names are gone. Mikhoels run over by a phantom truck, vilified upon death. Chagall, in Paris, makes poetry out of movement, building a fabulist past. Markish shot dead in the Lubyanka cellar. Zuskin dances foolishly on the clouds, an executioner’s bullet in his head, his calico dress in shreds.
* * *
In February, Malakhovka’s graceful dachas stand dark and empty behind tall fences.
Gusts of chilling wind whistle through the rotting latticework of the summer theater. Rowboats by the lake lie buried in snowdrifts. The gazebos — those shaded temples of tea-drinking rituals of the summer — stand deserted beneath the wrap of bare vines, and white marble lions of Judah survey the cloud-like expanse from the tombstones at the Jewish cemetery.
At dawn, the Black Maria approaches Kogan’s dacha, located on the edge of the Malakhovka Jewish cemetery.
The dacha used to be part of the grounds of a large, prerevolutionary estate. The original dacha, which belonged to a Moscow banker, burned down in the late 1920s. The plot was split into four pieces. Kogan has exactly a quarter of the original plot.
It is a simple peasant log hut, two rooms separated by a wood-burning stove and an open veranda. The stove is of typical Russian construction, large, white, with a heated surface to cook on in the area that serves as the kitchen. On the other side of the wall, there is a shelf Kogan can sleep on. This stone sleeping shelf makes the place usable even on the coldest winter days, which means Kogan can use it for his favorite pastimes: picking mushrooms in the summer and skiing in the winter.
Since paint was perpetually in short supply in the late twenties, when the place was built, the dacha was left unpainted. Kogan has done nothing to keep up or renovate the place.
The prerevolutionary owner of the dacha took great pains to shield his estate from the cemetery. This delineation of the romantic from the inevitable was accomplished with a hedge of pine trees, which now shade Kogan’s little world.
The Black Maria fits snugly between the line of trees, the house, and a shed. Like three blocks of lard, the corpses lie in their cage.
* * *
Lewis doesn’t get much sleep on February 24, just a couple of hours beneath a sheepskin, on a folding bed.
Anyone who has had the experience of coming awake on a jailhouse cot after a night of unbridled revelry would recognize the cluster of feelings Lewis experiences that morning.
On the bright side, there is the exhilaration of unknown origin, something that is a likely outcome of casting away the taboos, something fundamental, something liberating, something that, upon reflection, makes you wonder: “Did I actually do that?”
This sense of freedom is weighed down by dim memories of vows taken, deities acknowledged, deities cursed. “What did I do last night? Hmmm, let’s see, Comrade Lewis, you became an accessory to a triple murder of uniformed agents of state security, you took part in an effort to dispose of their bodies, you had a chance to run, but chose not to, and instead you joined a plot to murder the most powerful czar Russia has known. Now you find yourself on this cot, beneath this sheepskin, at this dacha. What the fuck are you going to do about that? Ideas? Regrets?”
Even after twenty-two years in the USSR, on some mornings, he wakes up thinking that he is in Chicago. That’s the magic of half-slumber: overshadowing reality, it leaves you not knowing where you are.
In Chicago, Lewis had a room on the South Side, near the university. He worked the night shift at the smelter between Chicago and Gary, and during the day he donned his Sunday best and attended classes.
He was the academic equivalent of a stowaway. Yet, in a class on Hegel, when other students meandered blindly between thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the professor called on Lewis, the young man in the back of the room. He had the look of a student who understood, really understood the material. Even if he had been a bona fide student at the University of Chicago, Lewis wouldn’t have raised his hand. His primary purpose was to learn, not to demonstrate.