Russian Treasures

31. THE JEWISH QUESTION

Spring had already come to Novorossiysk. The snow had melted, and the weather was warm and windy.

Klim got off the train at a small dirty station. To judge by the blankets, oil stoves, and swaddling clothes drying on ropes, there had been refugees camped out here for weeks, and people were dying here too. In the waiting room, medical orderlies were picking up the dead and laying them on stretchers. There was an epidemic of typhus in the town.

Klim came onto the crowded square beside the railroad station. A strong gust of wind lifted his cap from his head and dropped it at the feet of a guard sitting on a broken hitching post.

“This is nothing to what we get in winter,” he said amiably, “when the Nor’easter starts up.”

“Do you know where I can find a room to rent here?” Klim asked.

The guard beamed and put his hand to his mouth. “That’s fifty-four!” he called out to a porter nearby.

The porter gave him the thumbs-up.

“We had a bet on how many people would ask for a room to rent,” the guard explained to Klim. “I told him there’d be a hundred before lunch.”

Klim looked around. Officers, Cossacks, Kalmyks, and aristocratic ladies with children—everyone was hurrying off somewhere, their feet churning up mud.

“There ought to be something available,” Klim said.

The guard shrugged. “Go to the market and ask around. Maybe some widow will let you into her bed.”

The tin shop signs rattled in the wind, and great clouds were massed in the sky. The sidewalks were so full that people inched forward like passengers on a crowded tram. There were hundreds of beggars—mostly adults and youths—but almost no elderly people or small children to be seen. The streets were lined with rows of covered wagons and broken-down cars used as shelter by soldiers, who were building bonfires and butchering horse carcasses right in front of their makeshift dwellings. The living paid no attention to the corpses lying in the road; they might have been dead dogs for all anyone cared. Some of the dead had gunshot wounds, and some looked as though they had died a “natural” death.

As usual, no one knew where anything was, but after walking for some time around the streets that ran down toward the sea, Klim found the marketplace.

Carts harnessed with long-horned oxen stood close to the stone wall. The smell of damp earth and rotten potatoes mingled with smoke from the braziers.

“Get your barbecued meat here!” the street sellers called. “Kebabs for sale!”

“Pickled watermelon!”

“Dried apricots! Sweeter than a Cossack’s kiss.”

Buyers could find everything here from cutlasses to oranges, from silver mackerel to watery soup doled out by traders into cups and pots.

Blue-eyed Cossack girls haggled contemptuously with refugee women. They held up the White government banknotes to the sun, grumbled under their breath, and tucked the money into the tops of their men’s boots.

The sprawling flea market was full of people buying and selling, gambling and fighting, and everywhere the air was thick with cement dust.

Klim walked up to a cart loaded with newspapers: Russian Time, Free Speech, Great Russia, and the like. All of the editorials looked the same: “Let’s hear it for our boys and victory!” no matter what.

Klim began to read an appeal to “Our brothers, the peasants”:

Are they idiots? Klim thought. What sort of time is this talk about how crops will be shared out in the future with the White Army on the brink of destruction?

A little old hunched Jew with an oversized cap pulled down over his big hairy ears was selling copies of Great Russia.

“What time is it?” Klim asked him.

The man bowed—just in case. “You can choose any one of five times, sir,” he said. “The first is local time, the second is nautical time, the third one is Petrograd time, which is what they use on the railroads. The fourth is marked by the factory sirens, and the fifth is the time in the British mission. So, there’s no sense looking at a clock.”

The old man’s name was Zyama Froiman. He told Klim that the population of Novorossiysk was divided into three categories—the townspeople, the Cossacks, and the guards. The townspeople were refugees in constant search of jobs, accommodation, and food. The Cossacks who lived in the surrounding villages despised the townspeople and deceived them as much as they could. The guards took it in turns to rob both groups.

“Are you a refugee?” Zyama asked Klim. “Just arrived from Nizhny Novgorod? We know your fair very well here. They made Jews pay extra tax there, and then your governor ordered all the Jewish stores to be shut down except the ones belonging to the richest merchants.”

The old man dreamed of the day when the Jews could move to Palestine and set up a Jewish state in which there would be no anti-Semitism or pogroms.

“The Whites really hate us, and with the way I look, I can’t pass for a Russian. You’ve no idea what’s been going on in Ukraine and here in the south this last winter. There haven’t been such brutal pogroms since the sixteenth century. The Whites think that because I’m engaged in trade, I’m a rich man. They tell me, ‘You profit from the blood and tears of the Russian people.’ If only I knew how to sell blood and tears, it seems I would get along just fine.”

“What does General Denikin say about the pogroms?” Klim asked.

Zyama waved his thin hand. “There’s no point appealing to the authorities. Even the more kind-hearted officers you will not find standing up for a Jew. They’re afraid. They think people will say, ‘He’s being paid off by the yids.’ My son Jacob, a wonderful boy, used to own a newspaper here in Novorossiysk. But the paper was requisitioned, and now, my son is reduced to working in the small ads section—and with his brains! Still, you will not find another man in town who understands advertisements better than my Jacob. The Whites don’t dare get rid of him because none of them have the subtlety required for the job, if you’ll pardon my opinion.”

“I’m a journalist myself,” Klim said. “Do you think I can get a job at your Jacob’s newspaper?”

Zyama shook his head. “You must understand, sir, what times we live in.”

“Couldn’t we ask your son?” Klim ventured. “You say he’s a wonderful boy. If he’s so smart, perhaps he can give me good advice.”

Zyama’s house had been requisitioned by the American Red Cross, and the owners had moved into the basement where Zyama’s wife Rivka still managed to maintain a semblance of order and comfort. Their grandchildren, shy adolescents with the same large ears as Zyama, were sitting at a long joiner’s bench doing their homework. They were utterly absorbed in their work and paid no attention to their grandfather, Klim, or the complaints of their grandmother.

“You plague!” Rivka lamented. “What have you done, bringing him back here? Don’t tell me this is a guest! Not since 1914 have I had guests in my house. I would be happier to see a tax inspector.”

“Hush, woman!” Zyama shouted at his wife. “Who is the head of the household here? We shall wait for Jacob to come back from work.”

Anxious to keep out of Rivka’s sight, Klim went out to the backyard. It was full of trucks, nurses were dashing to and fro, and a long line of people was standing at the porch.

He spoke to one of the US Marines on guard and found that almost all of the foreigners in the city had already moved to the other side of the bay where British mission was stationed on the site of the former cement factories.

“Are they going to give up Novorossiysk?” Klim asked.

The Marine looked up at the mountains, covering his eyes with his hand. “I think we could defend the town if we had the will. It’s a natural fortress. But everybody here gave up long ago before the Reds started to advance.”

When Klim returned to the basement, Zyama ran up and grasped him by the sleeve. “You speak English! I saw you talking to the American. My Jacob will be so happy! You two can discuss business later today.”

“What kind of business?” Klim asked.

“My son will tell you everything. It is a very delicate question. Stay here with us tonight. You can sleep on the joiner’s bench.”

Klim’s accommodation problem was solved. Not only that, but he now seemed to be in Rivka’s good books. She made him up a cup of powdered milk.

“Sorry,” she said, “but we have no other food besides this powdered milk that we get from the Red Cross. What a blessing that you know how to speak foreign languages! For us, this is like a miracle. There, you dumbheads!” she shouted at her grandchildren. “You must study! Let this educated man be an example to you.”

It was night, but Jacob had still not come home. The Froimans said their prayers and went to bed.

“They have taken him away to counterintelligence,” Rivka sobbed in the darkness. “Don’t try to comfort me—I know it’s true.”

“Don’t scare the children!” Zyama said angrily. “Jacob has just stayed late at the office. They can’t do without him there.”

The general mood of anxiety affected Klim too. The joiner’s bench was uncomfortable, and he couldn’t get to sleep.

I feel like a corpse laid out for burial, Klim thought.

The Zyama’s oldest grandson, fourteen-year-old Syoma, was tossing and turning on the chest that served him as a bed.

“Can’t you sleep?” Klim whispered. “Tell me about Novorossiysk. What’s going on here?”

Syoma took a deep breath. “When our men were driven out of town—the Reds, I mean… anyway, the White officers took all the sailors who hadn’t run away and forced them to dig a pit. Then they shot all of them, about fifteen hundred—they were all flapping around like fish out of water until the Whites filled the pit with dirt. Then the bodies started to stink—you could smell it all over town. So, the women went to the commandant and asked permission to rebury the dead. ‘You can do what you like with them,’ he said. ‘Make a stew out of them if you want.’ Later, they found that commandant dead in a lavatory. He was missing his head.”

“Hush!” Rivka hissed. “Don’t listen to him, sir. He’s just a child. He doesn’t understand anything.”

Klim knew that Syoma understood everything very well. Those who had been victims of the Whites were waiting to be saved by the Bolsheviks. They looked on them as miraculous deliverers just as the citizens of Nizhny Novgorod had looked on the White Army.

They’re all hoping for their people to come and punish their oppressors, Klim thought. But they have no idea what they’re wishing for.

“I don’t know who he is,” Klim heard Rivka’s distant voice break into his sleep. “Your father brought him from the market.”

Klim sat up.

In candlelight, a short, bald, narrow-shouldered man pulled off his boots. Rivka thrust a mug into his hands. “Jacob, sweetheart, drink some milk.”

Zyama sat next to his son, holding him by the shoulder as though he was afraid Jacob would disappear again.

Klim walked over to them. “Good evening.”

“Same to you,” Jacob grinned wryly, and Klim noticed that his forehead was covered by a large graze.

“They took all his money again,” Rivka wailed.

“Listen to me, Jacob Froiman,” Zyama whispered excitedly and pointed to Klim. “This young man can speak English. He has been sent to us by God.”

The Froimans knew that they couldn’t count on being evacuated—they had no money for tickets on civilian ships and couldn’t dream of getting a place on a naval ship. They had no idea what to do. Should they throw themselves on the mercy of the Bolsheviks? Their children—who seemed to have picked up socialist ideas from somewhere—thought they should wait for the Reds.

“I don’t want to scare them,” Jacob said, “but when everything here blows up—which could happen any day—there’ll be panic in Novorossiysk, and the only safe place for Jews will be the graveyard. Anyway, I’m not sure the Bolsheviks will overlook my ‘bourgeois past’ because I’ve been working on a White newspaper. We have relatives in New York—wealthy people. I’m sure that my cousin will help us get to America. We just need to contact him.”

“What do you want me to do?” Klim asked.

“The American Red Cross is up there now in our house.” Jacob pointed to the ceiling. “We need to write a petition to their commander and explain our situation. They’ve been sent here to help, and I’m sure they won’t ignore our request. When we reach America, we’ll find a way to repay them.”

Klim shook his head in disbelief. Even princes in possession of fortunes were finding it impossible to get out of Novorossiysk, let alone impoverished Jews.

But the Froimans were determined.

“You’re our only hope,” Zyama told Klim. “Please write a petition for us! Perhaps the man in charge of the Red Cross is from New York. He might even know our Solomon.”

“There are millions of people living in New York.”

“We have to try,” Zyama insisted. “We asked a Russian translator to help before, but that young man didn’t like Jews. He even insisted that the Red Cross stop giving us powdered milk—although we have four children to feed. The boys have been left without their mother. She was murdered for ‘espionage.’ Whenever they arrest a ‘Bolshevik,’ the counterintelligence agents get half of the money in his pockets.”

“For some people, it’s just a way of earning money,” Jacob said in a trembling voice. “They find out who has been paid that day, slip communist leaflets into their pockets, and then shoot them, and no one had ever been punished for it.”

Zyama had everything ready—a sheet of white paper and a sharp pencil.

“Please be extremely careful,” he said nervously. “No smudges, please. Americans are very particular people. Our petition must look like a real official document.”

Klim felt uneasy providing the family with false hope. The Froimans stood around him dictating in a whisper what he should write in their petition: their previous achievements, an account of their New York cousin’s wealth, and a note of Solomon’s address to which the head of the Red Cross should send a cable.

There is simply no way that the Red Cross is going to bother with healthy people when the town is full of sick and wounded in much direr straits, Klim thought. But there was no point trying to dissuade the Froimans.

Jacob put the precious petition in his pocket. “How can we repay you?” he asked Klim.

“I’ll be glad of anything you can offer,” Klim said with a sigh. “At the moment, I’ve nowhere to live and no job.”

“This young man wanted to ask if he could get a job at your newspaper,” Zyama prompted.

Jacob frowned. “It won’t work. We already have a crowd of authors—all of them famous—who’ve come here from the capital. Everyone wants to publish their writing, everyone’s looking for money, but we have only four pages in our newspaper.”

Klim had an idea. “You’re in charge of ads, aren’t you? My wife is missing. She was trying to get to Novorossiysk. Maybe someone knows where she is?”

“I can put an ad under Missing Persons,” Jacob said. “And we can print it in the largest type to make it more noticeable. I won’t take any money. I’m sure the Red Army will take Novorossiysk before our books are checked. And when the Bolsheviks come, we’re doomed anyway.”