Dearest Leni,
Thank you for the well wishes for the Kossuth Prize. I was very touched you remembered me fondly enough to convey the message and I was frankly amazed to have received it. Of course, the prize itself is meaningless: the Rakosi government needed a Hungarian communist to honor, and I've somehow been the USSR's Hungarian du jour for sixteen years. Surely it's the only reason "Uncle Joe" (as the Americans call him) has kept me alive.
Now, I should specify, I can never send this letter to you. I never could, I never will. The NKVD would shoot me, shoot you, then shoot this letter.
But my remaining days are short: my blood pressure's high, my head grows dizzy, I forget what I'm writing mid-sentence, I even forget the names of the women I speak to. It won't be long now.
But the days are short of everyone I know, everyone that's left is about to leave. Stalin one day will leave, and he is determined to take us as the mortar of his monument. Those he hasn't shot, those he hasn't starved, those he hasn't exposed to Hitler's gas, he kills by fear. We're drinking all the liquor and smoking the cigarettes from which you abstained so easily, woman of will that you are.
Vodka is the only way we speak our minds. We all are dreadfully polite to each other, utterly stoic except the pasted cold smiles that stop at the mouth while eyes beam the same fear as ever. Then work is over, and those who haven't gotten through the day with vodka begin their drinks and toasts: the solidarity among each other is all we have. Every one of us knows how the other suffers, even if don't know, we know.
And we grow drunk, we laugh, we cry, we scream, we throw punches, we make up, we laugh and we cry again. The talk is always abstract: this or that artist, this or that composer, this or that book--and unlike in Weimar, everybody's read them. We all need those books: not because we're so unoccupied, but because the books are all we have to give meaning to this life of death. The discussions of books here are literal life and death, because if we've interpreted the book wrongly, we no longer have our reason for living.
And then the talk of books goes to an example from personal life, and then does Moses part the Red Sea, and all the secrets emerge in a little inlet of dry land with dangerous water threatening to crash us on both sides. This or that one has contraband, this or that one speaks treason about Malenkov, this or that one makes an implicit threat to Beria or even the Man of Steel himself. It's entirely possible that we've been informed upon, but half the time the arrests make no sense with charges utterly fabricated. What's the point of keeping secrets when the state makes up your secrets?
And yet none of us do it sober: to do so would violate the unwritten code. Russia is two lands: the land when it's sober, the land when it's drunk. All the frowning formalities of life disappear when the potato liquid emerges from the freezer. And then comes laughter, and tears, and all the falsities of the workday disappear in a torrential Nyeva of truth.
So here is my truth Leni: for the first time in my life, my soul is sad. Sixteen years in this sad land have left me sad in a way no amount of German humorlessness ever could. The irrepressible gypsy who accumulates life is dead: he probably died around the time he saw Triumph of the Will.
All happy people are happy in the same way, all unhappy people are unhappy in different ways: whoever said that (I know I know...) never lived under dictators. We're all sad in the same way: mourning the same people, unable to talk to one another until we're in a half-conscious state, knowing that some of our friends and family are informing on us and we don't know which ones: I frankly can't imagine the informer's life is easier, but Idite na khuy all the same (I know you know Russian by now Leni... You're currently calculating if you can get anything out of Mosfilm, but by the time you get here I'll be dead.)
I fancied myself a hero while you almost deliberately made yourself into a world villain. In the thirties, while you were the talk of the earth, I was a nobody: just an academic with an exotic accent, bad grammar and a penchant for my female students. But then I found Shloyme Mikhoels: the first male friend I could ever talk to as truly as any woman.
You know of Solomon Mikhoels surely: even a Nazi like you keeps track of every great actor in the world for potential collaborations. Shloyme was my path to redemption: I helped you become the genius you were, and you used that genius to murder all my other women.
I've known three natural geniuses in my life: Bela, Shloyme, and you. All three were dear to me, and all three concealed things in their souls no one could touch. In Bela's case, it was everything: what he thought, what he felt, what he heard: his whole body was pure music. Kodaly and I would be talking over coffee and Bela would be writing out staves at the table as though we weren't there.
The second was you: I needn't tell you what you concealed, but for sixteen years I've been left to ponder your motive, and I haven't any idea now more than now.
But Shloyme, he gave me purpose. I had no idea why he was so sad any more than I knew why he was so great an actor: I would imagine the two come from the same source, as did the outrageous inner strength he never knew he had until he summoned it. Crowds would transform him from the saddest man in Russia to the liveliest, the most commanding, the most inspiring. He could elicit waves of laughter and tears: not just laughter and tears, but the exact amount he wanted as though his body were a volume dial. Everything was as naturally built as the pianism of Rachmaninov: the architecture arriving to 'the point', the climax of the whole night, at which point you could hear the whole audience blowing their noses and choking back their sobs.
But getting him to the stage was a nightly problem. He was never nervous, he was too sad to be nervous. He would not even move from his chair for at least an hour every day. He would cry, his hands would tremble, his eyes would tic, he would look at the floor when talking. Sometimes he would overbreathe with fear, but more often he would sigh with the weight of the world.
I was one of the few people he would let into his dressing room of gloom. In that room, the lion's roar became a faint mumble. Shloyme was barely there until I asked him what was wrong. Inevitably, it was simply that day's frustration: he had no more reason than that, and he was utterly powerless against it. Every small decision threw him into an agony so existential that this joyful man suddenly whispered that all in life is torture and terror.
And he did not make any secret of it. In public, he would simply laugh off his anguish and say 'what was I so sad for?', and then the people left, and the sadness would transform him yet again.
Why did he let me into his confidence? I suppose it's because I treated him like I treated my women: I listened to him, would give an occasional word of support and advice, and whenever their paragraphs stopped I would attempt to fill the room with enough cheer for us both. In public his laughter was a roar, in private, just an appreciative chortle, if he thought what I said really amusing it would even be a faint chuckle. I sometimes tried to cheer him with vodka, his personality was exactly the same drunk as sober, but his performances were not as good. I would bring him the finest Olivier salad and Shuba, and he would gobble up enough for four men as it was the only thing that let him remember what something good in this world felt like, then he would go onstage and sweat the entirety off by the end of the first act.
Audiences transformed him. The only people to whom he allowed his real self were his wives and me. Even his daughters were barred from his study during his black moods, but then he would emerge from them the same clown as ever: witticisms by the granyoni stakan, deliberately exaggerated facial expressions, cheers and antics. One time we were in the car and he had his daughters sing Kalinka, and he kept telling them to sing it louder and louder, and as they sang, he twisted the wheel of his theater truck and made the truck spin around in circles. That's all we did in an empty parking lot for twenty minutes. Audiences transformed this man, gloomy as Michelangelo, into the most joyous being on earth. All it took was two other people in the room rather than one, and the urge to perform came upon him, and he wore the mask and animation of a man as happy and wise as the Buddha. If anyone knew the price at which that wisdom came, they would have volunteered for the gulag.
And the greater his success on stage, the more weight the world accumulated upon him. In '41, starring in a Yiddish production of Falstaff, in the grips of one of his daily hours of audience induced mania he went in front of the curtain before the second half to announce he was so grateful for the gift of life amid this era of war that he would lead the Jews of Moscow in a demonstration in Gorky Park to encourage Jews around the world to give money for the Soviet war effort.
We all thought we were going to be shot, including Shloyme in his lower moments. Contact with the outside world was forbidden, particularly outside Jews. We planned the event, we got the permits, and nevertheless we waited for the day we would be hauled out in a police van to be shot. When we got to Gorky Park on the day of, we checked continually for sharpshooters and any menty mounting machine guns. Yet tens of thousands showed up, and the police were all perfectly nice. Instead of being shot, Shloyme was summoned to the presence of Stalin himself, and Koba told him he was creating a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee which Mikhoels was to head that would raise money and give benefit performances for people around the Soviet Union and at the Front. It's not like Shloyme had a choice in the matter.
Shloyme went home and would not emerge from his dressing room for two days. He took neither food nor vodka. He simply slept and cried.
We finally hit upon the idea to bring Shloyme his daughters, and suddenly Shloyme emerged transformed. He had ideas for how to raise money for the war effort, for new modern stagings of Henry V and Tartuffe to take place in present-day USSR so as to be done cheaply, for films, and all for the express purpose that Jews would be rewarded afterward with a basically autonomous state in Crimea.
We all looked at each other: this could truly get us shot. We told Shloyme let's get through the war effort first, then we can worry about Crimea.
We did not get Shloyme through the war effort, Shloyme got us through. Literally. He raised more money than any other Soviet spokesperson: doubtless it didn't look good to thousands of apparatchiks when no one raised more money for the Soviet Union than the Jews, but money is money, and that's what we're kept around for: I understand you're having trouble finding funding these days, you should have considered your sources better...
We went to the UK, we went to the US, we went to Canada and Mexico: all to raise money expressly for the Soviet War Effort from other Jews. We knew that this would make Jews look like Communists in the eyes of the goyim, and so did Stalin and Beria, that was exactly what they wanted.
We could not let Shloyme be alone for a single moment on that tour. We did not want our hosts to know our leader was unreliable, and we did not want the NKVD to know the extent of his malady, because they would immediately report back to Beria that Shloyme was a liability, and poor Shloyme would be shot crying in a jail cell.
So instead, we would not let him out of sight. He would fall asleep while people talked in his dressing room. When everybody else went to sleep, I paid the younger actresses to go to bed with him. Two at a time. Shloyme was usually far too melancholy for sex to interest him. So many times a woman would go into a room alone with him and too disinterested was he in anything but his own gloom that he could not evince the slightest response to their overture. Hundreds of women would knock on his dressing room after a performance, and he knew it, but he would not answer. Some thought he was gay, but the truth was he was sad. Yet we learned, apparently when two women opened the door of his dressing room rather than one, he turned into a tiger. Even sex was something for which his partners had to be his audience. When it was over, he charmed them both into spending the night, but when they said they had to leave in the morning to tend their kittens or children, he begged them on his knees to stay even if there were only twenty minutes between their departure and his wife's arrival.
It was then that he met Charlie Chaplin. I don't know what happened, but after an hour and a half of improvised pantomime in front of an audience that included Albert Einstein and Upton Sinclair, they retired into Shloyme's dressing room alone together. Shloyme didn't speak English, Chaplin spoke neither Russian nor Yiddish, but when they went into Shloyme's dressing room, we heard the sound of overwhelming sobs coming from two voices.
Einstein, Sinclair and Chaplin followed Shloyme and us to the New York and the Polo Grounds, where they play a sport called 'baseball' and 'American football' which is apparently completely different from any football we play in the rest of the world. Those Americans are meshuggeh and their weird disconnection from the rest of the world will eventually catch up to them.
And what did Shloyme do at the Polo Grounds? He found what every socialist has in common: all throughout the world, they're political enough to appreciate a good imitation of a world leader: Hitler, Roosevelt, Truman, de Gaulle, Churchill, Peron, Franco, Mussolini, Salazar, Ghandi, Nehru, Hirohito, Mao, King George, Ben-Gurion: not speaking a word of their languages he took them all through every one and made the whole Polo Grounds plotz in laughter. It was this thing called 'double talk': a mixture of real words and complete naarishkeit. He went through every major world leader: even a few of the past like the Kaiser and the Czar, and then he did exactly what we prayed he wouldn't do to the God we didn't believe in until the moment we needed Him.
He did Stalin. He took the same comb he used for Hitler, but instead of blocking most of it with his hand, he held the whole comb up to his upper lip and used a black marker to draw giant eyebrows on himself.
He did the whole thing: the swaying back and forth, the senseless mid-sentence grand pauses, the monotone inflection, he even imitated Stalin falling asleep in the middle of his own speech. Instead of double talk, he just looked down at a paper and read a speech that Stalin once gave. And just to add to the point, he read the whole speech: all fifteen minutes of it. The length itself was the joke. First he yawned, then nodded off, then dropped to his knees, then sat on the stage floor, then started lying back, then fully laying down on the ground, then falling asleep, only for the snores to wake himself up so he could resume the speech.
We all looked at each other with dread, then we stopped even looking at each other: what good would it do look into one another's terrified eyes just to horrify ourselves more?
We'd raised so much money, but we spent that night in Shloyme's hotel room. I stood with him in the bathroom to prevent him from slitting his own wrists and watching him slap himself, while our campania all sat in Shloyme's room, silently passing one vodka handle around after another.
Around 5 in the morning, just as Shloyme finally fell asleep on the toilet, the phone rang, and it was Koba himself, Comrade Stalin, who demanded to speak to Solomon Mikhoels immediately. Shloyme came to the phone, and Stalin said 'I heard you did an impersonation of me. How DARE you insult the Russian people by (loud snoring sound)" and then Koba roared with laughter and congratulated Comrade Mikhoels on this magnificent effort on behalf of the Soviet people. Somehow, we were safe again and when we got back Shloyme got the Stalin prize.
