That summer the two members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee traveled throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico and spoke to many Jews whose ties with Russia had been severed for more than two decades. They talked of future political and cultural links with their Soviet brothers and sisters, of the heroic role being played by Jews in the Red Army. At public and private meetings in Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles, they recounted the valiant struggle of the Red Army against the Nazis and emphasized the need for Jewish support. The two men seemed to complement each other: Fefer was a colonel in the Red Army, an impassioned Communist; Mikhoels, astonishingly, was not even a member of the Communist Party. In the Polo Grounds in New York City, at a rally attended by nearly fifty thousand people, Fefer and Mikhoels spoke first; the writer Sholem Asch then lauded the Soviet Union for doing away with anti-Semitism; Ben Zion Goldberg, the Yiddish journalist and a son-in-law of Sholem Aleichem, spoke of Marshal Stalin as a great leader. And the actor-singer Paul Robeson sang Yiddish and Russian songs.

Mikhoels and Fefer returned home after two months, having raised more than two million dollars for the armed forces of the Soviet Union.

During the time they were away, about seven thousand tanks and self-propelled guns fought the largest land battle in history near the Russian city of Kursk, some 250 miles south of Moscow. In Moscow, where Solomon Slepak was working for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and for a publishing house, and Volodya was studying for and then taking his eighth-grade exams, the Slepak family read the newspaper accounts of the nearly weeklong battle and heard it reported over the radio in their apartment. In the end the German Army lost more than ninety thousand soldiers and two thousand tanks; its attack along the central front was crushed. As with Stalingrad that previous February, where Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus had surrendered his armies, Kursk was a turning point in the war, the last major German offensive on the eastern front.

The family chronicles offer no details concerning Solomon Slepaks participation in the work of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee other than the bare fact that he worked in its press office. At the height of its activities, the committee had a membership of about one hundred individuals. It published its own Yiddish-language periodical, Eynikayt (Unity). The membership was not of one voice regarding the committee’s goals. Some wanted to limit the committee’s efforts to foreign propaganda, others hoped to make it a force for the revival of Jewish institutions and culture in the Soviet Union, and still others began to urge that the committee persuade Stalin to permit the creation of a Jewish republic in the Crimea in place of Birobidzhan. The Crimean Tatars had been permanently exiled in May 1943 for collaborating with the Germans-loaded onto cattle wagons by the NKVD and sent on a four-month journey across the barren steppes to Central Asia-thereby opening the Crimea to the possibility of colonization by others.

There seems to be no way of determining what Solomon Slepak’s position was on any of those issues. No record of his views, if indeed he had any, can be found anywhere. His name does not appear in the only scholarly book known to me on the activities of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. And at home he never talked about his work.

By March 1944 the Red Army had pushed the Germans back to nearly the western border of pre-1939 Russia. In White Russia the German lines extended to a few miles beyond Orsha on the eastern side of the Dnieper. In the fall of 1944, with the Red Army in the suburbs of Warsaw and the American Army assaulting the Siegfried Line in Germany, Volodya was attending the Aviation Institute as a first-year student in radio electronics. Daily he traveled by trolley bus to the Sverdlova Square Metro station and from there to the Sokol station. Classes were from eight-thirty in the morning to, at times, five in the evening. In addition to his classes in engineering, Volodya was required to attend three weekly lectures or seminars on Marxist ideology: the principles of Marxism-Leninism; Marxist philosophy; Marxist political economy. Absences from three or more such seminars without valid reason, or failure in the exams, meant expulsion from the institute.

The Aviation Institute was at the corner of Leningradskoye Shosse and Volokolamskoye Shosse, wide asphalt-paved streets with large office and apartment buildings and many shops. Like the compound of the Russian Embassy in Peking, where Volodya had spent the early years of his life, a wall surrounded the institute, with a guarded security entrance at one end and gates at the other. Behind the gates ran the railroad to Riga. Inside the compound were the buildings that contained the classrooms, auditorium, and administrative offices, the hangar and wind tunnel, the machine shops and student club. At the entrance to the administration building stood a heroic-style bust of Stalin. As with almost all the buildings in Moscow, those of the institute were made of brick and covered in part with either plaster or stone or concrete blocks. There were also volleyball, basketball, and tennis courts and a soccer field.

In each of the five classes Volodya attended there were thirty to forty students, about 65 percent of them men. Fewer than 10 percent of the faculty were women. Around one-fourth of the students and faculty were Jewish. The student body of the institute numbered about seven thousand.

Volodya’s only close friend was Valery Voitinsky, whom he had known for years, the son of his father’s old friend from New York and China. They attended the Aviation Institute together, talked about the movies they saw, the books they read, their school problems. In summer they vacationed together; in winter they went ice-skating and to the theater. But after about six months in the Aviation institute, Valery decided to drop out, and enlisted in the Red Army. The friendship grew cool, slowly dissolved, came to an end.

Volodya was five feet seven inches tall, and slim; his hair dark brown, almost black; his eyes were grayish green. He favored sports jackets and sweaters, but food and clothes were rationed, and he wore whatever he could. He had no overcoat and would have gone about cold were it not for a cousin who served in the Red Army and somehow procured for him a military greatcoat. His taste in music ran to the classics: Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Brahms. He attended concerts in the Moscow Philharmonic Hall, listened to music on the radio, owned a phonograph and Russian records. He liked Russian and Gypsy tunes and on occasion went to a jazz concert. He read in Russian the novels of Balzac, Hugo, and Dreiser, the poetry of Pushkin and Lermontov. He had little interest in sports.

One late afternoon in May 1945 came the announcement over the radio that the Germans had surrendered. The Great Patriotic War was over; the hated fascist enemy crushed! In the Slepak apartment-jubilation! Two of Volodya’s friends were visiting at the time, and Volodya hurried out with them. His parents remained at home. In the streets strangers embraced. Volodya and his friends were swept up in the crowds surging through Gorky Street to Red Square. Music and dancing and fireworks. Red Square was packed with joyous people until morning.

Not long afterward Solomon Slepak learned of the fate of his brother, Aaron, whom he had left behind in Dubrovno and had last seen in 1936. Volodya’s cousin Anatoly, one of Aaron’s sons, who was in the Red Army, returned to Dubrovno soon after the war and discovered that his father, along with three of his seven siblings and his stepmother, had been killed by the Germans.

The Germans murdered one and a half million Russian Jews. Most were killed by the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units of the German security police that accompanied the army. The Slepaks read nothing of this in the newspapers, though it was known by March 1944, when a special government commission of inquiry into German crimes reported the killings and detailed the events at Babi Yar but made no mention of Jews. It was Soviet policy then not to single out the Jews as the primary victims in this Nazi drama of death but simply to state that those killed were noncombatants, slain with so many other innocents. A monument to the Jews slaughtered and buried in Babi Yar was put up only recently, after the demise of the Soviet Union.