Cheers burst forth from the crowd. Men in felt fedoras stood at quivering attention. Women wept into their fur stoles. They had been primed for the arrival of Mikhoels and Feffer by articles and essays in American newspapers, translated from tragic Yiddish into galvanizing English by none other than Leon Brink and Seldon Parker. Offstage, Mikhoels’s secret police escorts took note of the actor’s tear-streaked face. He was, of course, an orator of the first rank, the obvious choice for this important trip. To his left stood Itzik Feffer. In Russia he was known for his tepid, satirical verse. Among his literary comrades in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were those who thought him undeserving of being selected to accompany Mikhoels on such a glamorous voyage. Each believed he ought to have been chosen in Feffer’s place. All of them, having lived abroad, knew they would never be allowed to set foot outside the Soviet Union again. It was the shared opinion among them that Feffer’s great talent was not for poetry but for tacking with the political winds. On this score they were correct: it would be Feffer’s testimony, after the war, that would lead to their roundup and arrests. But now, standing beside Mikhoels, Feffer was taken aback by the violent affection of the crowd. The air in the open stadium smelled of corn dogs and the fusillade of camera flashes. He looked down into the audience as if into an abyss. The faces of the American Jews were hardly distinguishable from those of Russian ones. Only their eyes were different. The absence of fear in them alarmed him. He felt disturbed by their untamed goodwill, already sensing how this public ceremony of adoration would be repaid with a private ceremony of vengeance once they returned home. Feffer approached the rostrum and, speaking in Yiddish and Russian, urged their support for the heroic Red Army.
Leon and Florence, confined to the boundaries of the country that had forcibly adopted them, did not witness any of this, though they were able to read in the foreign presses about the trip’s success. Hadassah, the Jewish National Fund, and B’nai B’rith all welcomed Mikhoels and Feffer with profound enthusiasm. Fund-raising dinners were held for them in Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Everywhere they went, Jews opened their purses. At an event in Chicago, so many people rushed the stage that it collapsed under Mikhoels’s feet. He would complete his tour on crutches.
Beneath this froth of giving was a cataract of genuine feeling, a common pulse tapped by Soviet writers who, for a decade or more, had been prohibited from any open talk of Jewish unity or Jewish suffering. The fight against fascism had loosened their shackles—or, rather, made their proclamations a matter of military necessity. “I grew up in a Russian city,” wrote Ilya Ehrenburg, the most prominent journalist of his time, and Stalin’s own court Jew. “My mother tongue is Russian. I am a Russian writer. Like all Russians, I am now defending my homeland. But the Nazis have reminded me of something else: my mother’s name was Hannah. I am a Jew. I say this proudly. Hitler hates us more than anyone else, and this makes us proud.”
And what about Florence and Leon—were they immune to the force of these once-forbidden sentiments? For Florence, watching Leon translate dispatches day and night was no less startling than noting the changes in her own body. Leon’s identity as a Jew was maturing from a nomadic wanderlust born in the tenements to a full-on national consciousness. Years later she would wonder if the Biblical echoes in Markish’s poems were responsible for her husband’s surreptitious attendance at the Moscow Choral Synagogue on the eve of Yom Kippur, if the reports of Jewish soldiers fighting bravely in Stalingrad were what nursed his budding interest in the mechanics of shortwave radio, by which he would follow the secret transmissions broadcasting the struggles of a new state being formed in the desert.
But all that is in the future. For now, Florence finishes clearing the table of papers and lays out on chipped enamel dishes her bounty of salted fish, kielbasa, and black bread. The men are less than helpful in setting the table, lost in talk of the recent military turnaround at Kursk. If the bloody triumph at Stalingrad was mainly an accident of climate (the same brutal Russian winter that had stymied Napoleon’s armies a century earlier), then the strategic offensive on the Eastern Front this summer has been more reliable proof of the Red Army’s mettle. The tide of war has turned. “It won’t be long,” says Leon, “before all the fighting is over.”
“Pure bosh,” objects Seldon, rolling himself a cigarette of cheap makhorka, the only tobacco available. “Nothing’s going to be over until the Allies open a second front in Europe. We’ll provide them with cannon fodder until everyone’s exhausted or dead, and then the squire of Hyde Park and that pompous pair of jowls will finally grace us with a few battalions. And just in time, deus ex machina, to get all the bloody credit.”
“Roosevelt wants to enter, he’s only waiting for a decision from Churchill.”
“You sweet soul. Those two gentlemen sausages are in it together. If Germany were winning, they’d help Russia. But if Russia is winning, they’ll help Germany by doing nothing. Just as long as they’re getting as many dead bodies as possible on both sides.”
Since their evacuation to Kuibyshev, the three of them have been living and working side by side in this tiny attic flat. Staying up and talking late into the nights. Their domestic arrangement makes Florence think of Seldon as their ward, though more often it’s Seldon, with his mix of Yiddish and East London inflections, who sounds like their guardian. When he gets his teeth into a topic, he won’t let go, and he keeps sounding off about Roosevelt and Churchill even as the siren wail from the loudspeakers announces curfew. Florence squints through the window. Everywhere, lights are being turned off, gas lamps extinguished, cigarettes snuffed out. She gets on her knees and fetches the thick black-painted paper they keep behind the wardrobe. She drags a chair to the window and carefully mounts it, her movements becoming more deliberate and cautious as, on her tiptoes, she begins to tape the paper to the top of the window. By now the street below is practically invisible, quarantined in a darkness meant to protect the city from German air-raid bombs. For the past two years they have lived in a constant state of emergency, and still, during most of that time, Florence has been unaccountably happy. So happy, in fact, that she can hardly admit it to herself without a momentary twinge of shame. All over the Eastern Front, men are falling dead—being slaughtered, as they say, in the flower of their youth. Wives have been separated from their husbands, sweethearts from lovers. And every morning, she wakes afresh into a state of guilt and gratitude to find Leon asleep (alive!) beside her. It is like a miracle. All over the country, mothers and wives are opening envelopes with death notices. Essie, back in Moscow, has already received a pokhoronka of her own. In a letter, she has informed Florence that her young husband perished during the assault on Rostov. At the age of twenty-six, Essie is already a widow, her grief tempered only by the fact that she has “no orphan mouth to feed at a time like this.” It is while Florence is balanced on top of the wooden chair, thinking about her friend, that she suddenly feels it. A brief flutter in the slightly gas-distended balloon of her abdomen. But this time it is not indigestion from the Lend-Lease gelatinized meat Leon brought home a few days earlier (a delicacy donated by the Americans, with the letters SPAM printed on the can). What she feels is a disturbance not at all gastronomical: a flapping of butterfly wings, a tiny somersault. For the first time, the new life, quarantined in a protective darkness all its own, announces itself. For a moment, Florence loses her balance.
Leon jumps up, hearing the chair’s scrape. “What are you doing up there! You shouldn’t be doing that.”
“You were too busy strategizing our victory.”
“Put that paper down. I’ll glue it.”
“That’s right,” pipes in Seldon. “Your woman’s been on her feet long enough. Come and have a drink, Florie. We’re celebrating tonight. Your boy’s a man. Almost thirty years old!”
“I’ll put the kettle on,” she says.
“Enough, you teetotaler. A little homespun spirit won’t kill you.”
Leon attaches the last piece of rolled paper to the window and glances at Florence as if asking permission. She gives a happy shrug.
“Seldon, Florie’s going to have a baby.”
Seldon’s eyes, growing wide, turn from one to the other. “You’re having me on.”
“No, it’s true.”