Which, in fact, is the case. Stacked on the chairs and windowsill are piles of dispatches: articles and essays documenting Nazi atrocities against the Jews, profiles of Jewish officers and pilots, biographical sketches of scientists and engineers in the defense industry—all to be prepared for publication. But not in the Soviet papers, where they are useless and unwelcome. These communiqués must be translated into flawless English, with no ounce of poignancy lost, and made suitable for the foreign bourgeois presses: the Chicago Daily Herald, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, the Evening Standard. For all their purple prose, the aim of these articles is simple: to help the Red Army raise money in America and England. At last, Florence is doing the Important Work she has waited all her life to perform. Every morning, she and Leon—comrades-in-arms on the ideological front—walk together to the office of the SovInformBuro on Vantsek Street to translate the dispatches that have been approved by the editorial board and military censors for consumption by American and European readers.
The theme of international friendship is stressed at every turn. The Volga, which Hitler’s troops are threatening to cut off, is referred to as “the Soviet Mississippi.” If a successful attack has employed British Hurricanes or Spitfires, or American bombers, the article is to follow this formula: First profile the heroic Soviet pilot, then go on to praise the machinery and make note of its manufacturer. If an American company has sent a donation of blood transfusion kits or portable X-rays to a Soviet field hospital, the article should first mention the brave and skillful nurses, then the ways in which the medical equipment has eased the pain of the wounded soldier; finally, the name of the company and country that sent the supplies must be noted. Every gift deserves a thank-you card. In charge of generating this mountain of propaganda are a number of anti-fascist committees—one for women, another for scientists, yet another for youths, one more for Slavs—each producing editorial content to milk a different segment of the foreign public. But it is no secret inside the offices of the SovInformBuro that the most lucrative wartime agitprop by far is being exported by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Its members are Yiddish writers, poets, and actors, some of them celebrities even beyond the Soviet Union. There is the poet Peretz Markish, wild-haired prophet of the avant-garde; David Hofshteyn, poet-elegist and compatriot of Marc Chagall; Leyb Kvitko, beloved author of children’s verse; and the novelist Dovid Bergelson, perhaps the best-known Yiddish story writer besides Babel. All of these men once left Russia to live abroad, to wander through Warsaw and Berlin, Paris and New York, London, Vienna, Palestine. Each one of them, unable to support himself with his writing in a world indifferent to the mame loshn, has since returned to the Soviet Union, lured by promises of publication and of a Yiddish renaissance funded by the government. Unbeknownst to their humble translators, each of these celebrities feels as trapped as Leon and Florence. (Markish, in a secret letter to a Warsaw friend, has written: “We don’t know what world we’re in. In this atmosphere of trying to be terribly proletarian and one hundred percent kosher, much falseness, cowardice, and vacillation have manifested themselves and it has become impossible to work.”) But now, after years of evading peacetime terror, they too have emerged into the relative safety of war. Like Florence and Leon, they have been granted a second chance.
At the helm of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee is Solomon Mikhoels—renowned actor and director of the State Yiddish Theater. His five-foot-tall jester’s body and pugilist’s face are instantly recognized by Moscow’s audiences from his role as “the Jewish King Lear.” A little-known fact: just before war broke out, Mikhoels feared for his life, and with good reason. The NKVD had been planning to link him to the arrested Isaac Babel. But when a thief is needed, he is brought back from the gallows. Spared, for the time being, the eminent performer is entrusted with the task of squeezing dollars out of foreign Jews to fight the Nazi scourge. At the very moment when Florence is clearing away papers to set the table in honor of Leon’s twenty-ninth birthday, Solomon Mikhoels is breakfasting on a sunny veranda in Los Angeles with Charlie Chaplin, who has helped him raise money among the Jews of Hollywood.
Months earlier, Mikhoels and the poet Itzik Feffer were put on an ocean liner bound for New York. Everywhere they went, great swarms of people gathered. At a rally at the Polo Grounds, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia greeted them as old friends while American and Soviet flags snapped in the wind. The head of their welcome committee was none other than Albert Einstein. Privately, Mikhoels and Feffer could not stand each other, but onstage, with the red carpet rolled out for them, they became blood brothers. From below, one hundred thousand American eyes watched Mikhoels carefully lift up a crystal urn filled with yellow and black dirt, but no flowers. At the raised rostrum he addressed his American brethren: “Before I came, some friends from the Moscow Theater and I bought this vase. Our soldiers filled it with some earth from Ukraine, which holds the screams of mothers and fathers, of the young boys and girls who did not live to grow up. Look at this. You will see laces from a child’s shoes, tied by little Sara who fell with her mother. Look carefully and you will see the tears of an old Jewish woman….Look closely and you will see your fathers who are crying ‘Sh’ma Israel’ and beseeching heaven for a rescuing angel….I have brought you this soil of sorrow. Throw into it some of your flowers so they will grow symbolically for our people….In spite of our enemies, we shall live.”