Red Love Read online

  In this town, church bells rang for the call to prayer, and on Sundays and holidays. On this particular day—not Sunday or a holiday—the church bells rang. The peasants, the town doctor, the school principal, the intelligentsia, and the priest gathered.

  The Jews went into a panic. Yet it was a friendly town. They waited.

  The group came out of church. They knew all the Jews and where they lived. They knocked on doors and asked the men to come to a meeting. They called them by their first names and smiled. My grandfather had evaded Petlura’s soldiers. But these men called him by his name and he went. Five hundred Jewish men gathered. They were taken out of town to a building in a forest clearing.

  The town could not decide how to kill them. In the meantime, they had to feed them. They let the women in the town know they could bring food. For a week the women, including my grandmother, came with food for the men and saw them and talked to them.

  At the end of the week, on Friday, they didn’t permit the women to bring food. There was no contact during the next week. The women wrung their hands and tore their hair.

  A young peasant boy from the nearby French sugar refinery wandered into town. The women controlled themselves and said to him: “We’re not going to hurt you. We just want you to tell us: what happened to the men?” He took them to the mass grave. It was a block long.

  They had thrown a bomb into the building. A young Jew within the building picked it up and threw it back. It didn’t detonate. The rabbi and the older Jews were critical. They said you must not fight back.

  When the bomb failed, the town tried shooting the Jews in groups. But they ran out of ammunition, or didn’t want to waste it.

  So they cut their throats.

  They piled the Jews into wagons. They drove them around the town and to the grave. The town doctor advised them to put lime on the grave so that a mass epidemic would not result.

  One man survived. He had been at the bottom of the pile. When they emptied the wagon, he surfaced. They left him for dead. He was only slightly wounded in the leg. He crawled over the bodies and out of the grave. He ran into the woods and hid.

  My grandmother went out of her head. She spent the days reading doom poetry to my mother and the other children. Poetry by the Zionist Bialik. The poem began: “God sent me to you to warn you.” It ended: “Go down to the potter’s house, buy a pot, throw it on the ground. That’s how the Jewish people will be broken. And bow your head and say no more.” She read these poems. That’s what she did. She said that animals in the woods were calling: “Don’t call me man.”

  One day my mother went by a synagogue. The children within were saying the kaddish for their dead parents. She listened to the weeping.

  Soon after, my mother left for America.

  Mother was a charter member of the Party. She was at the rally in Madison Square Garden when Mother Bloor spoke. The Communists were forbidden to display the red flag. And so Mother Bloor wore this beautiful red blouse with big butterfly sleeves. She started to talk and spread out her arms, and the red flag blazoned freely. The crowd roared.

  My mother. Her leather jacket, beret, blue work shirt and red tie, heavy work shoes. Her borscht with cream, her black bread. That was in my youth. Then came the Popular Front. Browder called Communism “twentieth century Americanism.” Mother now had ribbons in her hair, spoke with a reborn Yiddish accent, wore skirts and lipstick.

  Mother studied at the Yiddishe Arbeiten Universitett—the Jewish Workers University, run by the International Workers Order on 14th Street. She worked in the factory by day and after work studied Marx in Yiddish until midnight. Some of the other students couldn’t even read the clock. The legendary Pop Dinwich singled Mother out one night. He took her aside and said: “My child, you want the right things for the people. You must go out and be with the workers.” Mother went, and never came back. I was seven years old. But I always saw her on May Day when she spoke at Union Square.

  Mother believed in the Soviet Union one hundred percent. When her brother wrote her from Russia in 1923 that he was not surviving, Mother felt sorry for him. But upon reflection, she decided that if he had believed deeply enough in the Socialist transformation, he would have established deeper roots and found his way. She never heard from him again, and never mentioned him.

  My mother stands five feet tall in her heavy orthopedic shoes. She has a jutting jaw and a lined face. She speaks with a Yiddish accent in a fractured English that is careful, reflective, and charming. Like her friends Manya Poffnick and Sylvia Pollack, Mother has a wonderful way of communicating with the workers. And unlike Manya and Sylvia, there is an air of serenity to Mother, a calm, that is comforting to be around. She really is becoming a very nice little old lady. She has little busts of Stalin and Robeson on her bookshelf. “Remember,” she says to me, “there is only one Soviet Union in the entire world.” Who can deny it?

  When I told her I was going into the car profession, she told me a story her mother had told her. There were a bunch of businessmen on a ship. They had superb merchandise with them, and they were the center of attention. Suddenly a storm erupted, and the ship went down. The businessmen drowned. The survivors went to a nearby town. During the sabbath service, one of them spoke to the congregation. He was inspiring and wise, a student of philosophy and a poet. The other survivors said: “How come we didn’t notice you when we were on the ship?” He replied, “The merchandise I bring with me doesn’t sink.”

  Mother always told me that the Party released untold creative sides to her nature, making her venture into realms that would ordinarily have been denied to her in a male chauvinist oligarchy like the United States. For two years Mother became Patrick O’Shaugnessy, head of the American Legion post in Doberman’s Creek, New York, patriot, boozer, and cocksman. Patrick spearheaded the war drive in Doberman’s Creek after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, headed the war bond effort, sang in the barbershop quartet at Clancy’s Pub, and shot at least eighteen shirkers during the legion’s weekly “faggot hunt” of men spending the war crocheting or writing poetry in the eaves of their grandmother’s houses.

  At the height of the campaign against Orientals in California, a comrade named Molly Figman, donning pigtails and eye makeup to make herself look Chinese, pitter-pattered down the street in white socks and sandals. Mother would whip out her pistol and scream, “Send the Chinks back to China!” and chase Molly down the street. Soon a crowd joined in the fun. Molly and Mother led the witless crowd to Union Square, where a Negro on a soapbox was waiting to deliver a lecture to them on the Chinese Soviets. The comrade began his address on the anti-imperialist struggle of the Fukien Soviets. The crowd misunderstood him and somebody yelled, “Hey, Nigger. Don’t you know there are white women here? You let a nigger talk and right away they use dirty language.” Mother had to plead with the crowd to keep their minds on the Chink menace, but the progressive nature of the meeting was seriously undermined.

  Now that Mother was getting older, she was beginning to take a genuine interest in me, and even visited me here, since she had to see Jay West anyway. (No one was allowed to see Solly or Maury.) She was very impressed that I was in such important company. She had known Solly (and Maury Ballinzweig too) since they were young men. And when I hinted to her that I was involved with Solly in a progressive way, she responded to me with incredible warmth and electricity. Her eyes filled, she touched my arm, and said, “Davey, if you can be of any help to our Solly, you will fulfill all my hopes and dreams for you as my son. Never did I imagine you could play such a crucial role in the people’s struggle. If Solly trusts you, my son, so do I.” Mother had never called me son or, in fact, Davey before. She had always addressed me as “fellow worker.” I trembled when she touched my arm.

  And even when Mother heard the ridiculous charge that I had also been a “pimp” for a number of years, she did not bat an eyelid. I was tremendously relieved. The charge was ridiculous on the face of it. The women in question were just a couple o
f young sluts of limited education. If other men had been as understanding and giving of their time as I had been, perhaps their fates would have been different and less of a blot on the educational and economic systems that just used them and threw them away.

  Mother said that she knew positively that Solly and Dolly were innocent—because they were pure of heart, because they knew the score, because they aided the forces of peace, and above all because they helped the people. “Whatever they did,” she said, smiling, “they didn’t do it.”

  It would have killed Mother if I testified openly against Solly— and just at the moment when we were getting along so well.

  Solly had wanted more time to prepare for cross-examination, but the trial started. He had two years without salary to explain. Henky Rubin told him to say he was selling scrap iron. He had three trips to Pennsylvania, two to Syracuse. Henky said they were hot scrap-iron towns.

  Solly told me that Bobby Metzger, Joe Klein, Sophie Rich, the whole gang, were “all my boys.”

  Fingering his cigar, the light flickering in the dark cell, he repeated proudly, “All my boys.”

  “Aren’t you worried about them, Solly?” I said.

  “They won’t talk. None of them will talk. They’d cut their own throats,” he said.

  At night, he said, Dolly was writing a history of the world from a progressive perspective. She was up to 1939 and the Hitler-Stalin pact. When he visited her, she had all the pamphlets from before and after the pact. She was seated on the floor reading two at a time. One pile was labeled Peace. The other was labeled War. Solly tried to talk about the Case, but Dolly interrupted him: “The Party was correct! Always correct!”

  Solly told me that he was worried that the F.B.I. would find the passport photographer. What passport photographer? I said, genuinely interested. Solly and Dolly had a hundred pictures taken with the kids just a few weeks before their arrest. It would show intent to flee.

  When I told Goldberg, he assured me I should no longer worry about getting my parole.

  Then he knew he was going to die. And Dolly.

  Solly couldn’t hold anything back. He looked like his legs were falling off. He lost his watch. He couldn’t eat. His voice went up a decibel. He smoked the burning end of his cigar. Dolly was terrific, he whispered. Dolly wanted him to die first.

  “That’s wonderful, Solly,” I said.

  The Trial

  Herzbie, Solly, Dolly, and Manya.

  —G. L.

  Mr. and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea—dots and dashes with lots of flashes from border to border and coast to coast: for the red white and blue . . . the great white way … and the stars and stripes forever … this is your favorite newsboy … your whale of a guy . . . your Broadway gigolo on a furlough … your Hiawatha gewgew man … Mrs. Mayfield’s little boy Howard, taught at her knee to Love It Or Leave It … Howard May They Wave Forever … Howard Traitors Are Treife … Howard Toss Me Another Red Herring, Harry—Howard Mayfield … far from the guys and dolls at Lindy’s . . . Love to Leo and Sugar to Sherman at the Stork … Howard Mayfield … live from left field … the trial of the century, for you, Mr. and Mrs. America, the trial of the scummies and peculiars, the Rubells, Solomon and Dolores, and Maury Ballinzweig … keep the nova fresh, Leo, this won’t take long.

  Maury Ballinzweig never took the stand at all. He read the Gourmet Diner much of the time.

  Sid Smorg was not cross-examined by the defense. A wise decision.

  The jurors took their seats: a guard in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a rayon converter, a caterer, a pulp producer, a heating consultant, a brakeman on the Erie railroad, a furrier, a broker in a securities cage on Wall Street, a tractor operator at the Brooklyn Army Base, an official of Morton Salt Company, a milliner, a cat trainer.

  Juror Y: “I don’t believe in capital punishment.”

  Judge Milton Goldman: “You may be excused.”

  Judge Goldman to the jury: “If you can’t keep your mind open, if you are prejudiced before you even begin to hear the evidence, I want to know about it right away.”

  Hy Briské was the youngest member of the prosecution team. He looked like a handsome ferret. His T-shirt said SUPERJEW on it. He skipped up and down the aisle. Solly’s lawyer, Henky Rubin, began: “What does Communism have to do with this case?”

  Hy flung his wrists out: “Oh … noth-ing! … noth-ing!”

  Hershie Stern, Dolly’s brother, burped and belched his way to the stand. He had a cross-eyed, fat look to him and a smiling joviality. The buttons popped off him.

  “Solly said the Russians were bearing the brunt of the war and we had to help them. Dolly backed him up. So I went with it. It was okay. I mean, it was shit, but I was twenty-three, right?

  “Then,” Hershie said, “Solly gave me five thousand dollars to get out of the country. He said Rolle was arrested. Smorg had been his courier, and he would be apprehended next. Then it would be my turn. I took the five thousand dollars but I ain’t going nowhere. When Solly left, I turned to my wife Jelly and I guffawed. She wanted to flush it down the toilet.”

  “Didn’t you have qualms?” Hy asked him.

  “Didn’t I have what?”

  “Qualms. About keeping the money.”

  “Why, Hy?”

  “It was Solly’s money.”

  “No, Hy. I had no … qualms”

  “Why not?”

  “It wasn’t Solly’s money. It was the Russians’ money.”

  Hershie paused and rubbed his hand against his mouth. “You see, Solly had said at first it was all for the sake of science. But it turned out to be C.O.D. Just C.O.D.”

  “So why did you take the five thousand dollars if you didn’t intend to use it?”

  “We didn’t want Solly to know we were gonna stay put. We were dangerous to him that way. We were in his way.”

  On the following day, Hy said, “Did you draw up a sketch of the bomb that Solly Rubell wanted?”

  “Yes I did,” Hershie replied. “I wrote out all the information for Solly.”

  “Did you prepare descriptive material to explain your drawings?”

  “I did.”

  “And you gave Solomon Rubell all of this information?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you prepared for us a replica of your sketch, the one you gave to Rubell that day?”

  “Yes I have.”

  “And it is very much like the sketch you gave him in 1944?”

  “Very much like it, yes.”

  “Who was in the room when you handed the material and the sketch to Rubell?”

  “My wife Jelly, my sister Dolly, and myself.”

  “We offer this in evidence, My Honor,” said Hy.

  “This is diabolical!” shouted Henky Rubin, running down the aisle. “What will happen to our vital juices? I insist that the court impound this exhibit so that it remains a national secret.”

  Judge Goldman looked at Hy Briské. Hy looked at Judge Goldman. Duboff, the senior prosecutor, stared. They all looked at Henky Rubin.

  “In the name of all that’s good, please, Your Honor, don’t let the enemy be apprised of this material.” Henky was trembling.

  “Henky, I know how you feel, and I love you for it,” said Hy.

  “I do too,” said Duboff. “I love you more than Hy does.”

  “No you don’t, ficklepuss,” said Hy. He turned to Henky. “Look, this is incredibly generous, coming from the defense. Albeit a little weird.”

  “Nothing weird about it,” said Henky. “I love my country, and I want to keep it that way. I’m not going to allow a foreign power to use this stuff to undermine our national security.”

  “If I had made this suggestion,” Hy said, “there might have been criticism of my trying to ramrod something through. But you, you heavenly creature, you did it yourself. I thought you said Hershie was a moron, that he couldn’t find his own mother’s pussy.”

  “He spotted the pussy,” Henky said.

&n
bsp; Judge Goldman said, “There might have been some question on appeal. But since the defense is making the request, the question is removed entirely.”

  “We are all Americans,” said Henky Rubin. He joined hands with Hy and Duboff. “We may have our little disputes, but we don’t want to see our country double-crossed.”

  “Your hand is warm, Henky,” said Hy.

  “The sketch and material shall be impounded,” said Judge Goldman.

  “May I have a glass of water?” Solly whispered to Henky, his face chalk white.

  “Sure thing, Solly,” Henky said.

  In his excitement, Henky handed Solly an empty glass.

  On Friday afternoon, Hy said, “Your Honor, I have a busy weekend ahead. I’ll be at the Athletic Club with Commissioner La Farge, Judge Delaney, and Father Balaban tonight; then we’ll shoot over to Jack Dempsey’s for bourbon and poker with the boys. Tomorrow I’m hosting a communion breakfast for His Holy Eminence Spellman.”

  Judge Goldman said, “My boy, I wash my hands. What you do on your own time is none of my business. Far be it from me to dampen your boyish enthusiasms and noble endeavors. Plug on.”

  Solly’s turn would come soon. Solly in his shiny suit. Negro-lover Solly, the lamb Solly, nebbish softness, yeshiva madness, schmuck face.

  He’d read Jews Without Money. He was Jews without Money. He’d been a Jimmy Higgins, a nobody in the Party; he’d struck out on his own and reached the stars. Now he was on the cutting edge; he was on history’s express train.

  Never taken a penny. Oh a penny sure. To get a maid for Dolly. Dolly, Solly said, was a diamond—no filth could scratch her honor.

  This couple was principle plus. They wanted vitamins for the entire human race. Hy Briské was the brilliant, vulgar Jewboy, the Irgun type, the patriotic bullshit artist. Jews, he said, should get down on their knees and kiss the earth for what America had given them. He sincerely hated faggot Jew Commie bastards. Their ingratitude, their betrayal, their worship of Stalin.