In all, about four hundred Jewish writers and artists were arrested and exiled. One could never say with certainty that Stalin’s fury was directed only against the Jews; always a few non-Jews, too, would be arrested, exiled, shot. With the termination of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the wholesale loss of Jewish writers and artists, there came to an end any open and effective Jewish culture in the Soviet Union.
Mysteriously, as in the purges of the thirties, Solomon Slepak escaped arrest. But this time he did not slip away entirely unscathed. Close friends in the Regional Party Committee and the Moscow Party Committee informed him that he would soon be dismissed from the publishing house. The reason? He was a Jew. And if that weren’t grounds enough, his having lived so many years abroad was now of itself sufficiently strong cause for job termination. There was nothing they could do for him, his friends said, except request that he be given a party pension because of his service in the Bolshevik cause during the Civil War, even though he was not yet of pension age.
In October 1950, Solomon Slepak-dedicated Old Bolshevik, esteemed editor and translator, noted writer of articles for Izvestia and Pravda under the pseudonym M. Osipov, lecturer on international affairs of the Moscow Party Committee-was abruptly discharged from his position at the publishing house.
He received the pension and lived for nearly three more decades, writing, lecturing, translating. But his effective role as a player in the center of power had come to an end.
THE SON
4 The Enemy Within
At about the same time that Solomon’s life as a career Communist was concluding, Volodya, having graduated from the Aviation Institute in June 1950 in the top half of his class with a master’s degree in radio electronics, began to look for a job.
He applied to factories and institutes. The standard application form contained more than one hundred questions, among them: Have you any relatives abroad? Did you or any close member of your family ever live abroad? What was the nationality of your grandparents? Were you or your parents or grandparents members of any party other than the Bolshevik Party before the Revolution? Have you ever had any doubts concerning the policies of the Communist Party?
On his internal passport, his identity card, the line that revealed his nationality read, in Russian, Evrei. Jew.
For months Volodya went searching for a job. After handing in each completed application, he would wait two or three days and then call, only to be told that his services were not needed. He applied about a dozen times. Few who turned him away made any effort to hide the reasons for his being rejected. Volodya Slepak, son of Solomon Slepak, after six years in one of the leading scientific institutes in the Soviet Union and with a master’s degree in radio engineering, was finding it impossible to get a job because during his childhood he had lived abroad, and because he was a Jew.
He told his parents often of his fruitless efforts. His mother commiserated and urged him to keep trying. His father said, “This is happening because there are many traitors and spies among Jews, especially with those who were abroad. Now our country is surrounded by enemies, we must build communism alone, and the party hasn’t the time to check everybody. So they don’t accept Jews into positions that are important to the state. Later, after careful investigation, everyone who is innocent will be given a job according to his education and knowledge.”
Volodya unhesitatingly accepted his father’s explanation. After failing for months to find work in the field of radio engineering, he took a job as a television repairman in a shop on Gorokhovsky Street in a Moscow neighborhood near the Kursky Railroad Station. The manager of the shop was a Jew.
In those days a television set cost approximately 500 rubles (five months’ salary), the equivalent of about $250. The sets were the size of a microwave oven, with a rectangular fourteen-inch black-and-white screen. The box was of polished brown wood; the pictures were of poor quality. In the 1950s there was one television station in the Soviet Union and a wait of about five months for a set. If you lived in Moscow and your set suddenly no longer worked, you brought it to one of the five or six television repair shops in the city.
The shop in which Volodya worked consisted of a hallway and two rooms, each about two hundred square feet in size, with large windows, workbenches, and shelves along the walls. Into the shop one day walked one of Volodya’s friends, who had been his classmate in the Aviation Institute, accompanied by a young woman. The friend had been visiting a woman named Rita and her cousin Masha. Rita had asked him to look at her television set, which wasn’t working. It turned out that one of the tubes needed to be replaced, but a new tube could not be found in a regular shop, said the friend, because of the shortage of television parts. There was, however, this repair shop where he knew one of the workers, who might be able to get his hands on a new tube. He could go and be back in an hour. Did Masha want to accompany him?
She wore a knitted white and black wool hat and a beige sheepskin coat. Her skin was smooth, her face roundish, her eyes brown and alert behind glasses. She was in her fourth year in the medical institute in Ryazan, a town 125 miles to the southeast, and in Moscow for the weekend to visit her family.
As soon as his old classmate had left the television repair shop with Masha and a new tube, Volodya telephoned Rita and said that he wanted to come over and visit her next Saturday, and could she also invite her cousin Masha?
That Saturday Volodya met Masha again, in Rita’s apartment. This time Masha’s aunt was present, and they all had tea. Later he said he would walk Masha home. Her family lived not too far away in an apartment building in the center of the city, near the Moscow synagogue. It was February and very cold. They walked together for several hours.
Volodya has no clear memory of what they talked about; probably, he thinks, her studies in medical school, books they had read, concerts they had attended. Vaguely he recalls an attempt to explain why he was working as a repairman-a brief, guarded remark about anti-Semitism in the field of engineering-but he is not certain whether that happened then or later in their relationship. They did not discuss Israel or politics.
Her name was Maria Rashkovsky (in Russian, Rashkovskaya); her mother’s name, Bertha. The chronicles record her fear of remembering too much. “I wish I knew more about my family than I do now,” she tells us. “But there is nobody to ask. Before, it was dangerous for children to know, they could blurt it out. After the Revolution, people tried to conceal their past, bury it as deep as they could. I remember my mother filling out application forms, many pages, gray-colored paper. She would answer the question ‘What class are you from?’ with the words ‘petty bourgeois’ or ‘lower middle class.’ That terrifying question was on the first page of every application-for an apartment, a school, a job. Also: ‘What parties did you belong to before 1917?’ ‘What views did you have?’ The applications would stick to you all your life. So my mother tried to conceal as much as she could. Many things are gone with my mother.”
Despite that, Masha’s astonishingly retentive memory is rich in specificity and abundant with details. She remembers vividly her father, Sanya. A handsome stocky man, five feet seven inches in height, brown straight hair, his face smooth, close-shaven, glistening in the morning and bluish with beard by evening. He was born in Tiraspol into an assimilated family that had abandoned Jewish observance a generation earlier. He grew up in Odessa, served in the Red Cavalry during the Civil War, and rose to the rank of captain. After the war he settled in Moscow, where he met and married Bertha. Self-educated, well read, a devotee of opera, and the life of any party. His work in a secondhand bookstore and later in a government publishing house enabled him to indulge his passion for books. He owned a collection of about eight hundred rare leather-bound books printed before the Revolution: Boccaccio, Daudet, Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Hugo, Shakespeare, Swift, Voltaire, Defoe, Maupassant, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nekrasov. He loved the books, loved the smell and feel of them. He read them, knew the provenance of each. At his place of work he was able to remember the history of every book that came into his hands: the year of publication; where and by whom published; how many editions; the number of copies printed. He taught Masha to read and write and count long before she began to attend school; the first book she read on her own, in Russian, was Little Red Riding Hood. A short-tempered man, he once found Masha bending the corner of a page to mark her place in a book and shouted, “How dare you treat a book that way? It’s so low, only uneducated people do such a thing. Do you know how many people labored to create this one book?”