The gates of November (10 page)

Volodya vaguely recalls his parents’ large trunks filled with ivory sculptures, paintings, silks, Chinese kimonos, books. The trunks were sealed. In Kobe, Fanya Slepak, claiming diplomatic immunity, refused to open them for the Japanese customs inspectors. The stevedores dropped the trunks into the water and then fished them out. Still Fanya Slepak would not open them. As they left Kobe, the ships captain offered to clear a deck of all passengers so she could spread out the objects and let them dry. Politely she refused—embarrassed, perhaps, by the number of objects inside, their immense worth. The trunks traveled wet all the way to the Soviet Union. Many of the objects bore water marks all the years afterward.

After sailing from Japan, the boat docked in Vladivostok, where Volodya said good-bye to his Chinese nanny. Decades later he wrote: “My nanny was with me all my life in China—in Peking, Mukden, once more in Peking, at all seashores where we went every summer. She accompanied us on our way home to Russia through Japan, until we came to Vladivostok. We parted with her in Vladivostok. From there we went to Moscow and she went back to Peking. From that moment, I never heard from her or about her.”

Many years later Volodya asked his father why he had always been given diplomatic status in Asia when all the while he was only a correspondent. His father turned away and would not respond.

In Moscow, they moved into two rooms in a rented communal apartment on Petrovka Street, not far from the Hotel Lux. Four other families lived in the apartment. All shared a bathroom, kitchen, toilet. In the communal kitchen there were frequent quarrels among the women. Slowly, over the course of the next year, Volodya’s health improved.

Solomon Slepak, who had reclaimed his original name and was no longer Semion Ignatievich, was now working at Tass.

The agency had two departments: International Tass and Internal Tass. The former, the larger of the two, dealt with news and information concerning countries outside the Soviet Union; the latter, with domestic matters.

Solomon Slepak was deputy chief of International Tass. In 1936 Beriozov, the head of that department, was arrested by the secret police. Solomon became acting head. Beriozov was later shot.

The office had to be covered around the clock. Solomon worked twelve-hour shifts, alternating with his deputy, Kotsin, and reporting to the head of the Press Department of the Central Committee. Soon after Solomon became acting head, Daletsky, the director of Tass, who was a Jew, learned from his close friend Karakhan, also a Jew and a deputy minister of foreign affairs, that they were both about to be arrested. Daletsky shot himself in his office. Karakhan too committed suicide. The great purge had begun.

Decades later Solomon told Volodya that three years after the family left Peking, members of the Russian diplomatic staff who had served there began to be ordered back to Moscow. One by one, summoned for reassignment; and once back in Moscow, all were arrested, including Ambassador Bogomolov. Prolonged contact with foreigners, for whatever reason, had by then been made to carry an automatic presumption of guilt. Accused of counterrevolutionary activity and of spying for the Japanese, they were all shot.

That might have been the fate of Solomon Slepak as well had he and his family remained in Peking. But now, in Moscow, he went on working as acting head of International Tass, his many years in China inexplicably overlooked by Stalin and the secret police.

Cutting Down the Forest

T
here were uprisings in Spanish Morocco and parts of Spain in 1936, and the British Labour Party expressed its support of the JL faltering Spanish Republic while the British government remained uncommitted. With Hitler’s approval, twenty German transport planes flew to Spanish Morocco to airlift General Franco’s Army of Africa into Seville. It had been Franco’s idea, the first such use of aircraft in history. Granada fell to Franco, and the Comintern agreed to help the Republic. The Spanish Civil War began in earnest.

That summer a Spanish soccer team arrived in Moscow to play a Russian team called Spartak. Solomon Slepak took nine-year-old Volodya to the game. In the stadium before the start of the game, a party leader spoke of the menace of fascism and General Franco, and a worker representative praised the courage of the Republican forces. The Soviet team won. That was the only time Solomon Slepak took his son to a sports event.

The Slepak family lived then on Petroverigsky Pereulok, having moved in the spring of 1935 from their rooms on Petrovka Street. The city still bore a gray and grimy look; many of its buildings stood half crumbled. There were few automobiles on the streets; people traveled mostly by tram. Many streets were being paved over with asphalt. The first line of the Metro had been completed the previous year. Only in the center of the city was there electricity. Most people cooked their food on kerosene stoves. Many homes were heated with firewood taken from torn-down wooden houses, but the apartments in which the Slepak family lived had central heating and hot water. There were no landlords in the Soviet Union; one obtained an apartment from the government and paid rent to the government. The Slepaks occupied rooms assigned to people who were working abroad for Tass for a year or two. Thus they moved five times during the decade of the thirties until, in 1940, they settled into an apartment on Gorky Street—as of 1936, the new name of Tverskaya Street. (In 1992 it again became Tverskaya.) There they lived until 1986.

The family often went to the movies. Volodya remembers seeing, among numerous other films,
Zlatie Gory
(“Golden Mountains”),
Tzirk
(“Circus”),
Iskateli Shastia
(“Seekers of Good Luck”),
Vratar
(“Goalkeeper”). They attended the Bolshoi Theater. Bolshoi tickets were difficult to obtain, but Solomon Slepak had connections and tickets were somehow always available to him, and the family saw with much pleasure the operas
Carmen, Rigoletto, Eugene Onegin,
and
Snow Maiden
and the ballets
Swan Lake
and
Nutcracker.
They visited the city zoo and went several times to the Moscow Circus, where they delighted in the clowns, gymnasts, jugglers, lions, tigers, elephants, and Russian bears.

From the time he became acting head of International Tass and began to work twelve-hour days, Solomon Slepak seldom saw his family on weekdays. He and his wife woke around six-thirty in the morning; Volodya and his sister, Rosa, a half hour later. Breakfast consisted of eggs or porridge, on occasion sausages, cheese, salad, tea. Solomon especially liked wild strawberry jam. Volodya and Rosa ate lunch in school, where they bought salad and tea and ate the sandwiches they brought from home. For dinner Fanya served soup and then meat or fish with potatoes and cooked grains. Food rationing had ended in 1934, but there was barely enough food in the regular city shops; people were happy to obtain bread and potatoes. The Slepaks ate better than most Russians did because they had returned from China with American dollars. Soviet citizens who worked abroad in the 1930s received part of their salary in rubles, deposited to their savings accounts in Russia, and part in American dollars, which they used abroad; they were permitted to bring back their savings in American dollars and shop in special stores that sold food to foreigners and Russians for hard currency. On most weekdays Solomon ate supper in the Tass cafeteria. “Your father is very busy,” Fanya told the children. “He is doing important work.”

Even in the summers he was busy. But sometimes the family rented a dacha outside Moscow, and Volodya and Rosa would swim in a nearby lake and walk through the forests of pines, firs, birches, and mountain ashes and pick berries with their parents. Solomon would swim, too, and take long walks alone in the forests and fields. Sometimes after a meal he relaxed in an armchair with a book. At times friends would visit.

For two years they rented a dacha very close to the dacha of Gregory Voitinsky and his family, whom they saw every day Two middle-aged Bolsheviks talking quietly about—what? Old times in China? And guardedly, and only when absolutely certain they were alone, about the current nightmarish time in their homeland? Voitinsky was teaching then in the Department of Far Eastern Studies at Moscow University. Good memories, those weeks of summer in the dachas away from Moscow.

In the fall of 1936 the Slepaks moved to Neopalimovsky Pereulok, and a year later they moved again, to Bolshaya Serpukhovskaya Street. One of the apartments in which they rented rooms was occupied by two women who, because their husbands had been arrested, were suddenly bereft of all economic support; their own incomes left them with far less than they needed to survive. They had decided to rent part of their apartment, and the Slepaks were their first tenants. The women could often be heard crying in their room.

Volodya’s first school was on Starosadsky Pereulok, not far from where he lived on Petroverigsky Pereulok. Schools had no names, only numbers: his was number 329. Because of a citywide shortage of school buildings, there were two shifts for the school’s total student body of about eight hundred. When a school building was completed nearby, half the students of school 329, including Volodya but not his sister, were sent to the new building, number 617. It was a four-story brick building located on Spasoglinishchevsky Pereulok (now Arkhipova Street) opposite the Moscow synagogue, the city’s only remaining Jewish house of worship. For Volodya the synagogue was connected “not with Jewishness but with religion,” and as he had no interest at the time in anything religious, he has no recollection of ever seeing anyone entering or leaving it. Today school 617 is a hospital.

Most of the teachers in the schools Volodya attended were the sons and daughters of illiterate peasants, the very first educated peasant generation. He studied arithmetic, Russian language, Russian literature, geography, natural science, history There were about thirty to forty students in each classroom. The walls were painted a light color; a blackboard covered the wall behind the teacher’s chair and table. In almost every room there was a photograph of Stalin above the blackboard, and in some rooms, of Lenin too. Every student was required to join the Young Pioneers at the age of ten. They wore red ties and marched with red flags and attended meetings at which one of the teachers, a party member, spoke about events in the Soviet Union; about the international bourgeoisie who were the enemies of the people; about the fascists in Hitler’s Germany who persecuted the Communists, arrested them, sent them off to concentration camps, shot them. No one ever mentioned the Jews.

Two of the apartments into which the Slepaks moved—on Neopalimovsky Pereulok and Bolshaya Serpukhovskaya Street—were quite far from the schools Volodya and Rosa attended. Solomon Slepak took them along every day in the Tass car that brought him to and from his office, at that time on Armiansky Pereulok. From there the children would walk the rest of the way to school so no one would spot them using the car. Solomon insisted that they continue to attend those schools despite their distance from where the family now lived; they were among the best schools in Moscow, he said.

On occasion Volodya caught the word
zhid
directed at him by certain students, and ignored it. The first time he had heard the word, he asked his father what it meant, and his father explained that it was a bad word used by ignorant and misguided persons as a nasty and crude description of the Jews, an ancient and honorable Mediterranean people who had been persecuted all through history and to whom their family belonged, and, his father went on, when the dream of a perfect Communist state came true, that persecution would end and all the peoples of the Soviet Union would live in harmony as one great nation and as a sign to the entire world that Comrade Stalin and the Communist Party had finally put an end to religious hatred and bigotry.

Volodya was about eight or nine at the time. A Jew! He was a Jew! Apparently he had forgotten the Purim celebration he had attended in Mukden years before. Then again, perhaps there was nothing especially Jewish about that event; it may have been merely another party, unremarkable save for the costumes and the clamor.

There was no organized Jewish community in Moscow when Volodya discovered that he was a Jew.

Lenin had detested anti-Semitism. He thought it contrary to the socialist ideal of equality and believed, with Karl Marx, that the Jews would have assimilated and disappeared long since had it not been for the persecutions to which they were endlessly subjected. Indeed, he had approved the decree of the July 1918 Council of People’s Commissars condemning anti-Semitism as “fatal to the interests of the workers’ and the peasants’ revolution” and instructing all Soviet deputies “to take uncompromising measures to tear the anti-Semitic movement out by the roots.”

But Jewish Communists had other notions about the future of Judaism in revolutionary Russia. At the June 1918 Second Conference of the Jewish Communist Sections, the Evsektsia, in Moscow, they resolved that the “Zionist Party plays a counterrevolutionary role” by hindering the penetration of Communist ideas among the toiling Jewish masses. They urged “the promulgation of a decree suspending all activities of the Zionist Party” and concluded that the “communal organs, which are the mainstay of all reactionary forces within the Jewish people, must be suppressed.”

Lenin’s government immediately adopted the resolution. Two leaders of the Jewish Commissariat, Simon Dimanstein and Samuel Agursky—the former a onetime yeshiva student, rabbi, and Lubavitcher Hasid—were appointed to the task of tearing down the Jewish community.

In June 1919 the government issued a decree closing all Jewish establishments. The decree carried the signatures of Samuel Agursky and Joseph Stalin. Most synagogues were padlocked or turned into Communist clubs, schools, dining halls; their possessions became the property of the Soviet state. There is a photograph of a pile of Torah scrolls from desecrated Russian synagogues, and it is difficult not to wonder if somewhere in that heap there might be the scroll whose completion was once celebrated with music and recorded in the photograph of Dubrovno Jews assembled before the Ark in their synagogue. Youngsters under the age of eighteen were forbidden to receive religious education outside their homes and required to attend classes in which communism would be taught. The Zionist movement, which had once numbered about three hundred thousand Jews, was banned. Religious officials—now regarded as “declassed members of society,” individuals without civil rights—found it difficult to secure housing, jobs, food rations, and the admission of their children to schools. Circumcision—illegal. Marriage and divorce laws—repealed. The Hebrew language—suppressed. Jews were even warned against kissing the Torah; it was unhygienic. A secular Yiddish culture was what the Jewish Communists wanted for the Jews of Soviet Russia. Yiddish elementary schools; Yiddish newspapers and journals; Yiddish to be spoken at the meetings of the Jewish soviets. The Jews were to be a nationality culture, with Yiddish as their language, socialism as their secular religion.