Outwitting History (31 page)

Kenny Turan, who was taking careful notes, picks up the story from there:

For a time, life was sweet. The Khariks had two sons. Dina Zvolovna remembers with glee the many new experiences which awaited her, including a 1937 trip to Moscow. . . . But by the time the Khariks returned to Minsk, life started to unravel. “They began taking people, arresting them all over the city,” Dina Zvolovna remembers. “At first, we thought that because the people were arrested, they must be guilty. We knew Kharik was innocent and besides, what could we do?”

Then a close friend was arrested. “Kharik was very upset, he said, ‘I know he’s innocent.’ It was a horrible situation and Kharik
was afraid. I said to him, ‘Why don’t you go away and rest.’ So he went to a small town near Minsk, a little bitty place where the Writers’ Union had a rest house. And soon after that, I got a message: ‘Dina, they’ve arrested Izi Kharik.’”

A month later, she received a letter from Kharik. “He had to write all the bad things he’d done, sign that he was an enemy of the people, to be able to write that letter. ‘I’m not guilty,’ he wrote, ‘they must have mixed me up with someone else. I’m coming back—don’t marry anyone else.’” It was the last communication from him she was ever to receive.

There was worse to come. “A month later, at night, someone came for me. They were taking all the wives. My oldest son, three years old, and his brother, a year and a few months, were lying in their beds. I had to leave them where they were. They took me and I never saw them again.”

Dina Zvolovna ended up in a women-only prison camp in the Soviet Far East. She was assigned to a forced labor brigade, and nearly died from drinking contaminated water after exhausting herself fighting a grass fire. “We fell on this water like animals,” she remembers. “Afterwards, I was so sick, I couldn’t stand for a year. There were no medicines, no remedies. One woman carried me everywhere. Without this woman, I would have died.”

Dina Zvolovna spent ten years in this camp before a doctor gave her a certificate saying she should be released for health reasons. She spent most of the next decade living clandestinely, without proper papers, fearful of renewed police sweeps, before Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin began the process of Kharik’s rehabilitation. Eventually, she was able to return to Minsk, where she was given an apartment and a small pension. “I found out recently,” she says quietly, “he was shot in 1937 together with other Russian writers.” And the children? “No one,” she says,
“knew where the children were.” To this day she had not found them.

After politely but very firmly refusing to be photographed, Dina Zvolovna stood up, shook hands, and expressed regret that we hadn’t given her enough notice of our arrival to allow her to cook something for us. As she prepared to leave she mentioned that all her own copies of her husband’s work had been lost. Aaron asked if she would like us to send her copies. “With all my life,” she said, emotion suddenly in her voice. “With all my heart!”

The murder of writers, the burning of books—after decades of such depredations, only scattered pockets of Yiddish culture remained in Russia proper. But the situation was very different in areas that had come under Soviet rule during and after the Second World War: the western Ukraine, Moldavia, and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. There, despite the best efforts of Germans and Soviets both, there were still people alive who had been trained as Jewish teachers before the war, who still spoke Yiddish fluently and remembered its literature clearly, and who were now eager to teach what they knew to a new generation. We headed for the Baltics.

In Estonia we met Moyshe Michelson, who for twenty years taught Yiddish illegally in the university town of Tartu. Now that his classes were permitted, more than two hundred students had enrolled, and he desperately needed books.

In Riga, the capital of Latvia, eighty-two-year-old Avrom Barmazl, a professor in that city’s Yiddish Teachers Seminary before the war, had called together all his surviving students. Prohibited for almost half a century from practicing their chosen profession, many had gone on to excel in other fields: one was an engineer, one an actor, one an editor, one the principal of a Russian school. But even after all these years, the moment they had the chance they gave up secure positions elsewhere to return to their old profession as teachers in a new Jewish school.
Opened just ten weeks before we arrived, the school they founded already had four hundred students. With the exception of a homemade, handwritten Yiddish primer and exactly one copy of an anthology of Yiddish folk songs printed in New York, there were no Yiddish books.

In Vilna (now Vilnius), the capital of Lithuania, members of the local community had just reopened the first Jewish school in fifty years. The day we arrived parents and other volunteers were busy removing Soviet propaganda posters from the walls and replacing them with flowered wallpaper and Jewish art. Here, too, we found experienced teachers, eager students, and no books.

At these and other newly opened schools and libraries, Kenny and I promised to return soon with all the Yiddish books they needed. Each time we made this pronouncement some in the audience would clap, some would cry, but most remained coolly skeptical. When, in Riga, I asked why, a teacher showed me a guest book in which were written the names of a hundred or more representatives of Jewish organizations in the United States, Canada, and Israel who had visited the school in the ten weeks since it opened. “You should excuse me, but you are not our first visitors,” the teacher explained. “They all make promises, but we have yet to receive a single Jewish book.”

I knew that with an intrepid staff and more than a million books in our warehouse, we had a far better chance than most of making good on our promise, and I vowed to return by spring. But I also harbored no illusions: Important as it was to support these schools, I didn’t believe for a second that many young Jews would remain here once the doors of emigration were opened and they had a chance to leave. The threat of renewed anti-Semitism was never far from anyone’s mind. Already, in Moldavia, a local nationalist movement was organizing with the slogan “We will drown the Russians in the blood of the Jews.” But as Boris Kelman, the forty-two-year-old head of the Jewish community
in Leningrad explained, “Even if
all
the Soviet Union’s one-and-a-half million Jews decide to emigrate, and even if one hundred thousand a year—a figure we’ve yet to attain—can be resettled abroad, full emigration will take at least fifteen years to complete. In the meantime, we must do something for those who remain.”

How exactly we were going to get thousands of Yiddish books into the country and distribute them from city to city, we weren’t quite sure. But any doubts we may have had that it
could
be done were quickly allayed once we returned to Moscow and boarded our SAS flight for home. The moment we were airborne the pilot came on the intercome to announce that, while we were in the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall had fallen. If that was true, Kenny and I agreed, all things were possible.

The plan we hatched was this: We would ship eight thousand books to Sweden, load them on a truck, cross the Baltic by ferry, and deliver them in person to waiting Jews in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. But then, in March, just weeks before our scheduled departure, Lithuania formally declared its independence, and all hell broke loose. By late March, Soviet troops were massed at the Lithuanian border and tanks were rolling through the streets of Vilnius. It was definitely not an auspicious moment to be arriving with a truckload of Yiddish books.

That’s when we set to work on Plan B. Among the various groups seeking Yiddish books was the National Library of Estonia, which was authorized to import Estonian books from abroad. They agreed to serve as a go-between for our Yiddish shipments as well. In late spring we sent an urgent appeal to our members, who responded with unprecedented generosity. In May and June we pulled books from the shelves, affixed commemorative Yiddish-and-Russian book plates, and carefully packed the books into coded boxes, each labeled on the outside “Estonian Books.” We then delivered them to Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, where they were loaded into a watertight container and hoisted
aboard a freighter bound for Helsinki, whence they would be transported by a Finnish trucking company to Estonia.

It was not until July 12 that we finally received a telex from Tallinn informing us that the books had arrived. Two days later, at five in the morning, I was standing in Stockholm-Arlanda International Airport, waiting to rendezvous with Kenny Turan and Janice Rubin, an old friend and freelance photojournalist from Houston, Texas. The two would be covering the trip for
Smithsonian
magazine. It was almost fifty years to the day since the Soviet occupation of the Baltics, forty-nine years since the Nazi invasion, and eighteen months since we had received the first letters from Soviet Jews requesting Yiddish books.

Thanks to advance work by leaders of the Stockholm Jewish community, we had no difficulty renting a van and booking passage on the
Nord Estonia,
a trans-Baltic car-passenger ferry that had begun regular service to Tallinn just six weeks before. The sea voyage lasted sixteen hours. After a good night’s sleep we awoke in time to see a weatherbeaten pilot boat with a faded hammer and sickle on its stack plowing through the waves to meet us. An hour later, standing on the windy deck of the
Nord Estonia,
we caught our first glimpse of the medieval spires of Tallinn rising in the distance.

Due to mechanical problems, once we had docked it took more than an hour to open the main door to the car deck. (The successor to the
Nord Estonia
had similar problems: Not long after our voyage, the ferry’s door accidentally opened in stormy seas. The ship sank with all nine hundred people aboard.) Customs was harrowing. Armed soldiers in blue coveralls swarmed over each car in turn, pulling up carpets and removing door panels in an energetic search for contraband—though what it was they were looking for was not entirely clear. Although we had sent most of our books ahead, we were carrying one large box of late arrivals: newly commissioned reprints of Dubnow’s
Idishe geshikhte far shul un heym (Jewish History for School and
Home),
a Jewish history text for children, originally published in Riga in 1937.

“What is in box?” asked the chief customs officer.

I swallowed hard and answered as matter-of-factly as I could, “Jewish books.”

“Religious books?” he asked.

I thought for a second. The books were, of course, social history, written by a secular historian. But guessing that the Soviets might be eager to demonstrate their newfound embrace of religious tolerance, I decided to respond in the affirmative. It was the right answer. The officer turned to his men and said something in Russian, which sent them to the next car in line. After they were gone he turned back to us and asked, “So tell me, are they in Yiddish or
Ivrit
?”

His use of the word
“Ivrit,”
the modern Hebrew word for “Hebrew,” was clearly intentional. Surprised, I looked up at him, and under his official visor I suddenly recognized an unmistakable
yidishe ponim,
a Jewish face. Our eyes met and his stern expression softened into a warm smile. We smiled back, he nodded, closed the back of the van, stamped our papers, kissed each of us on both cheeks, and signaled to a soldier to open the gate. We restarted the engine and, with a friendly wave, made our triumphant entry into the USSR.

Waiting for us on the other side of customs was Moyshe Michelson, the indomitable seventy-year-old Yiddish teacher from Tartu. He hopped into the truck, directed us to the hotel, stopped traffic so we could back into a parking space, and then showed us how to remove the van’s windshield wipers (a necessity in the Soviet Union, where rubber was in short supply and windshield wipers a favorite target of thieves). He stayed with us illegally that night in our hotel (a pack of Marlboro cigarettes—brought for just such an occasion—was enough to persuade the floor monitor to look the other way). I gave Mr. Michelson a new Yiddish Book Center T-shirt to sleep in, but he declined to put it on.
“Aza min hemdl trogt men nor af yontef!
(A shirt like this one should wear only on holidays!)
”
he explained.

The return of Yiddish books to Tartu was one of the greatest moments in Mr. Michelson’s life, he said, and he had persuaded the Tartu Public Library to designate a special room just for them. He had already transported many of the boxes himself, traveling back and forth to Tallinn by train. He was a strong man, a veteran of World War II with shrapnel still lodged in his leg; but as he showed us the familiar books, which had been sitting in our Holyoke warehouse just a few months before, tears began flowing down his cheeks. “When you count the books you’ll find that several volumes are missing,” he hastened to explain. “My friends and I have already checked them out—we couldn’t wait to read them.”

I
N MIDSUMMER THE
sun in the Baltics rises at four o’clock and doesn’t set until just before midnight; our own working day was almost as long. After a brief night’s stay in Tallinn we got up at dawn, reloaded the van, met our volunteer guide, a Jewish university student named Lena Beckergoun, and shoved off for Riga, three hundred kilometers to the south. The day was beautiful, and we sang and talked as we rolled past fields of beets and rye. At lunchtime we stopped in Pärnu, an old Jewish resort town, where we ate rich, creamy ice cream and drank kvass, a fermented grain drink dispensed from a tank-trailer and served in dirty glasses by a twelve-year-old street vendor. The scene could have been straight from Sholem Aleichem’s
Motl the Cantor’s Son,
the story of an exuberant orphan boy who, among other misadventures, peddles diluted kvass on the streets of his shtetl—except there were so few Jews around. “Most have left for Israel already,” Lena explained.

I’m not sure anyone in Riga really believed us when we announced in December that we’d be back with enough Yiddish books for all the students in the school, but here we were, barely seven months later,
pulling into the courtyard with a truckload of three thousand school texts and a complete five-hundred-volume reference collection for the school library. The first job was to get the boxes out of the truck and into the third-floor auditorium, where the books could be unpacked, sorted, and shelved. Luckily we had plenty of volunteers. Although most of the students were away for the summer (some were at Jewish camps in the countryside, others in Israel), some thirty young people, most of them members of a Jewish chorus, showed up to help. The excitement was palpable. In a mixture of Yiddish, Hebrew, and English, with frequent translation into Russian by the teachers, we organized the students into a bucket brigade that wended its way up three circular flights of stairs. It took less than half an hour to unload the truck, and then the real excitement began. Wielding knives and scissors, some students began cutting open the boxes, while others pulled out the books and stacked them by title on long tables set up all around the room. Professor Barmazl and the other teachers were beside themselves, examining every volume. “Even in the best of times we didn’t have such books here,” Professor Barmazl told us. Sema Gassel, a teacher who had studied under Professor Barmazl fifty years before, came over and kissed my cheeks. “My eyes want to cry in happiness,” she said. “Perhaps you don’t understand, we are hungry in our hearts for this. Seeing all this reminds us of our childhood, our Jewish teachers, our Jewish homes.”