—
FOR SEVERAL WEEKS, FLORENCE attempted to forget Essie’s malicious insinuation. But the distasteful notion had taken semi-official residence in Florence’s mind, and renewed its lease the morning when Leon and Seldon left for the Choral Synagogue to hear the ambassador from Israel, Golda Meyerson, speak. (The only centimeter of ground Florence had won was in forbidding Leon to take little Yulik along with them.) It stayed in her head when Leon came home alone that evening, intoxicated by what he’d witnessed. He didn’t even remove his aviator’s jacket, merely hung his flat cap on the hook by the door before gathering Florence in his arms and gripping her waist. “Florie, I’ve never seen anything like it. The whole street, it was like a river of bodies: students, old folks, men in uniform, mothers and kids! Thousands of people! I didn’t know there were so many Jews in Moscow. Oh, and the most amazing part—do you know the first thing Meyerson said when she got up to speak? ‘A dank ir zai giblybn idyn’—‘Thank you for remaining Jews.’?”
Yulik, whom she’d been getting ready for bed, ran up in his stockinged feet to his father. Leon lifted the boy to his shoulder and gave his son a moist kiss on the head.
“Papa, you’re wet!”
It was true. Leon was glistening. His hair—cut short now, so that only a bit of curl showed—was matted to his head by the sweat of his excitement. He set the boy down and wiped his forehead. “Oh, you should’ve seen it!” His hands were on Florence’s hips again. “Right in the open, they were calling out ‘Am Yisrael chai!’ When she came down, everyone was crowding around her. People were trying to touch the hem of her dress and kiss it. She’s speaking again on Yom Kippur, and this time we’re all going.”
“I wanna go!” cried Yulik.
“That’s right. You’ll go with your dad. I’ll teach you a new song, ‘Am Yisrael, am Yisrael, am Yisrael chai!’?” Leon sang.
Yulik started hopping. “Ha misraim, ha misraim…” He was chanting it louder than Florence thought advisable. The smart thing—the wifely thing, she knew—was to pretend to share Leon’s excitement. Later, in bed, she could tell him quietly of her misgivings. And yet something about his grotesquely happy face warned her that he was in the thrall of a new love affair—not with Seldon Parker, as Essie had implied, but with something still more dangerous.
“Is she the Messiah, that people need to kiss the hem of her gown?” Florence heard herself say.
She could tell from the unpleasant bitterness around Leon’s mouth that she’d bruised something delicate. “So clever, Florie. So it doesn’t mean anything to you?”
“It means something,” she said. “It means all the ones who touched her holy robe will be called in for questioning next week. And I hope, for your sake, it was well worth it when they ask you to explain, inside the ‘Special Department’ at the SovInformBuro, what you were doing there.”
“Ha misraim, ha misraim!” Yulik continued chanting in his high voice.
“Enough making that noise already!”
The boy stopped singing, startled. He glanced at his father.
“Don’t shout at him.”
“Go wash your face, and get some water for your teeth,” she ordered Yulik.
“There were thousands of people. Nobody saw who was who,” said Leon.
“Don’t be so sure.”
“If they call me in, then they’ll call in Seldon too, and dozens of others.”
“What happens to them or to Seldon Parker is of no concern to me,” she said, getting the child’s toothbrush off the windowsill. “You can be sure that crowd was crawling with agents.”
“So was Mikhoels’s funeral, for heaven’s sake! What do you expect me to do—stop living my life? I can’t worry about them every minute. Tell me, what are you frightened of: that the word ‘Jew’ was said in public today? Not any more than it was said at all those rallies the committee held during the war.”
“That was the war! There was a reason for it—we were raising money for the army.”
“Understood. It was fine to say it when they told us to say it. But not now, not when people actually believe it.”
“Are those your words or Mr. Parker’s?” she said.
He gazed at her uncertainly, as though he didn’t know her. Then he spun around and took his cap off its hook. Florence followed him. “Where are you off to—back to boozing with that windbag?”
But Leon didn’t seem to hear her. “Don’t stay up,” he said.
—
TEN DAYS LATER, an article appeared in Pravda. The Party flack, Ilya Ehrenburg, had written up an opinion piece laying out the official policy to dictate how Soviet Jews were to regard Israel. “Is Israel the solution to the Jewish question?” No, was the emphatic answer. The injection of Anglo-American capital was as dangerous to Israel as were the Arab legions. The solution to the Jewish problem would depend not on military success in Palestine but on the triumph of socialism over capitalism, principles of the working class over nationalism. If there was no choice but for some victims of Nazi atrocities to leave demolished Europe and make their way to Palestine, this was by no means the case for Jews within the borders of the Soviet Union, where the oppression of money, lies, and superstition had long been conquered.
“There’ve been rumors, coming out of Birobidzhan,” Seldon informed them late one evening. It was nearly nine when he pressed the apartment buzzer, ringing three times for their room.
“What rumors?” said Leon.
“That the Jewish Party members are being arrested for receiving aid packages from the U.S.”
“Receiving packages? Hell, everybody did that. It was all done through the Red Cross.”
Florence insisted they talk more quietly. She could hear Yulik stirring in his cot. “By taking those packages, they were encouraging the impression that the U.S. was responsible for victory,” whispered Seldon.
“Mama?” the boy was calling out from behind the floral curtain that partitioned his side of the room from the grown-ups.
“That’s absurd. What were people supposed to eat?” said Leon.
Florence said, “Where did you hear that, Seldon?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Mama?” Julian had gotten up from his cot and parted the curtain.
“Go back to sleep, monkey.”
“I can’t. I want to sleep with you.”
“All right, lovey, just get back in your bed. I’ll lie down with you as soon as Uncle Seldon leaves. Seldon, can’t this wait till morning?”
“There’s more. The articles we were translating—for the American press—now they’re being called bourgeois nationalist propaganda.”
“That’s got to be a joke,” said Leon.
“Especially any articles that mentioned the names of American companies—the ones that sent rubber heating pads, syringes, those sorts of things. They’re saying that by praising those companies, the writers were encouraging American businessmen to make deals over the blood of Soviet boys.”
“Seldon, who’s saying all this?”