Black on White

The long ordeal of Jacob Haimovich, Soviet citizen, puts the saga of Job in the shade. Every new drive against “former people,” boorzhooys, lishentzi, nepmen and speculators was tried first, it would seem, upon Jacob Haimovich. He had been fashioned by birth, instinct and hard luck into the perfect scapegoat for the new revolutionary regime. The son of rich parents, with a natural propensity for private trading that can be curbed by no threats and dangers, he has been repeatedly arrested, driven from jobs, ousted from his room, manhandled by the G.P.U. on suspicion of possessing “valuta.”

But somehow he has survived. Always he was released in time for the next arrest or perquisition. And in the end, at least when I saw him last, he had squirmed into a job as third assistant director of a government trading trust. He was no longer Jacob Haimovich, but Comrade Rubinstein if you please.

Well, in Leningrad one day I ran into him accidentally on the street. The very fact that he dared walk by the side of a foreign correspondent was a measure of his new courage. We were both headed for the Hotel Astoria. With a twinkle of pained humor he informed me that he was now Comrade Rubinstein, carried a portfolio and was in Leningrad on a komandirovka or official business visit. Under the boasts, however, he was still fluttering, polsed for flight. He seemed ready to retreat from the new glory into his natural habitat as an outcast.

“Were you ever in Leningrad, I mean Petersburg, before the revolution?” I asked him casually.

I asked it merely to make conversation. But his reaction startled me into attention. He chuckled and looked at me from the corner of hi. eye, as though he possessed some amusing secret. For a long minute he said nothing. Then he chuckled again.

“A goldene medine,” he said finally “a goldene medine this Soviet power.”

In all of Russia there is probably no man who has less obvious cause to praise the Soviets than Jacob Haimovich. Yet he was in earnest about it.

“Yes, I was in Petersburg twice,” he explained. “Both times illegally. I was rich and came for business, but as a Jew from the pale I had no right to be here. So I avoided the main streets, I couldn’t register in any hotel and nobody dared take me in for fear of being denounced.

“So I slept night after night, in an outhouse a sort of wooden shed dirty and smelly, after bribing a dvornik, a janitor, to let me in At home was one of the respected Rubinsteins and in Petersburg I was a zhid who had to sleep in an outhouse.

“But now — I am stopping at the Astoria, no less. They gave me one of the best numbers and the government, my trust that is, is paying for it. Yes, a goldene medine….”

Despite his ordeal and his fear that it might be resumed he was aware of his new dignity as a citizen, the absolute equal of non-Jews. His sufferings had been inflicted upon him as a merchant, as a “former,” but not as a Jew.

Within view of the hotel we separated. Courage is one thing, foolhardy bravado quite another. It was not healthy for any Russian, let alone a former Nepman and a perfect scapegoat, to walk into the Astoria in friendly discourse with a foreigner. Suddenly, by common unspoken consent, we were total strangers.

At the desk, as I received my key. I ignored him. I heard the clerk addressing him:

“How are you, Comrade Rubinstein? Here’s your key and a letter.”

Jacob Haimovich was only flesh and blood after all. Forgetting discretion he looked towards me and smiled happily. I could read that smile as though he had spoken aloud: “Did you hear? Comrade Rubinstein! Me … in the Astoria … in Petersburg … a goldene medine …”

A Jewish organization in Brooklyn has invited me to speak on the subject of Jews in the Soviet Union. oubtless I shall talk in broad generalizations, as is the way of the lecture platform. And I shall feel, when I am through, that I have not begun to indicate the reality.

Because the reality consists, for me, not of Jews in the abstract but of the Jacob Haimoviches and the scores of others whose lives I know. I lack the skill to convey that reality to any audience. It is the new dignity, the new self-confidence, the eradication of something apologetic in the Russian Jew’s attitude, that is at the core of the change. Even in his economic distress, in his persecution for political reasons, he is no longer a denizen of the pale. He has problems aplenty, but they are no longer distinctively ghetto problems.