The Last Stalinist
Evanier, David
David Evanier THE LAST STALINIST A New York story. Sylvia Pollack would only meet Daniel Greenwald at Nutburger or at Communist party headquarters on 23rd Street. A few months before, she had...
...Their tumult bewildered him...
...I had an orange bush right in my kitchen window...
...A young man came to my house and my father would cover the windows with blankets, and lock the door...
...The old, semi-retired performers were kind to him...
...He knew the derivation of words...
...And now they get to the point of being great artists...
...Monday morning he wasn't home...
...My crowd went on hikes to Palisades Park...
...They lived in a slum, but when the husband died, they fixed up the house, they got new furniture...
...From the time he was eight or nine years old...
...Pepper trees, eucalyptus, lemon trees...
...I said my son was very depressed, and that he tried to hang himself in the bathroom...
...For the third meeting they went back to Nutburger...
...When he called her in January 1985, Sylvia said, "I'd like to meet you...
...I had to get out of the house because I was so unhappy with my husband...
...I think it was my fault...
...I accepted with pleasure...
...He saw the tattooed numbers on the arms of the Israelis as they pitched cherries into bags in the golden sunlight...
...I can't stand them...
...He was your age when he died, Daniel...
...But I'm busy...
...My father made an incision in the boy's leg so he could call himself crippled instead of going to the army...
...I would go from the shop to the Met and stand on line...
...we called it 'pasimen-tary.' I got two dollars a week...
...How were you going to light a fire of optimism under the masses if you drooped with subjective misery...
...Friday about four o'clock, two cops come to my house and told me...
...I might have gone because it was a holiday and there were some very special singers and musicians...
...She hit the back of her head against a stone corner and cracked her skull...
...The thing was I trusted the doctors and I didn't know how to handle him myself...
...I spoke to a lot of people about them...
...When he felt he needed it, he took it...
...When he felt he shouldn't take something, he didn't...
...Did you read Khrushchev's speech in 1956...
...Then I saw Yehudi Menuhin make his debut playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto...
...We can't meet in my house because it's a mess...
...I hate to say it, but I miss you," she said...
...For Michael...
...My neighborhood in East New York was like a prairie in 1917," Sylvia said...
...Merv had seen me when the Six O'Clock News had me on...
...She cackled...
...When I was on, he mentioned that my .son was killed and I said I had to use my own money to cremate him...
...It was three years after her son's death...
...She is just a few years younger than myself...
...I was so angry I threw it down the incinerator...
...You didn't know how old he was...
...He had always been more at home with the aged...
...There is only one Soviet Union in the whole world...
...Daniel held her and asked how her son had died...
...I worked on artificial flowers...
...While all these thousands of young people have no place to go...
...His father was always running around...
...There was a program at Carnegie Hall the other night made up of refugees from the Soviet Union...
...I didn't like the idea but I accepted it...
...She took him for dim sum lunches in Chinatown, and gave him socks and milk and tuna fish and books by Anna Louise Strong and William Z. Foster...
...He said he couldn't take it one more minute...
...He was screaming blue murder and the nurse said, Look, I'm in the hospital...
...And he looked sleepy and he had such a contented look on his face...
...Around the Communist party, progressive types reacted to his anger with suspicion and fear...
...Anyway, Merv saw me and asked me to be on his show...
...He put on his coat, he put his collar up, and he ran to Bellevue in the middle of the night...
...he traveled back in time to vaudeville and old time radio and Winchell, Jolson, the RKO Palace, Sammy's Bowery Follies...
...I don't know how he learned it...
...They listened and danced to rock 'n' roll...
...We married the next year...
...At the morgue, they brought up his body in a glass case all covered with a sheet...
...They loved him...
...So I come from a revolutionary family but I'm the only one who retained it...
...I was at a mental illness hearing last week," Sylvia said...
...I wasn't an attractive-looking woman, and he knew beautiful ones...
...He never told her why...
...She talked of Wilfred Mendelsohn, the legendary Mendy who had led the Young Communist League in Brownsville and died in Spain...
...She was 88 years old...
...He was jealous of me- very...
...Half naked...
...Our country didn't have a war on its own land since the Civil War...
...I didn't love him physically, but he was so brilliant...
...Then I said plenty: that all the money we use for wars and nuclear weapons we should use for housing and college and libraries and food and -all kinds of wonderful things...
...It scared the hell out of people, particularly girls...
...He would take Michael to the park, spread a blanket, and fall asleep...
...When they first met at Nutburger, she came down the street with her cane, lobbing along, and kissed Daniel on the mouth...
...My father didn't think I heard...
...How did you feel about the trials...
...They brought him up on an escalator...
...She had stood up to put her coat on and fallen backwards...
...I wanted to play the record...
...In 1964 Daniel met Comrade Rose, a clerk at the Jefferson Bookshop...
...They pulled him out of the East River," Sylvia whispered...
...I was looking over a bunch of pictures...
...Michael was born in June 1937...
...When he saw Sylvia again at Nutburger, her mouth had moved back to the center, and she looked well...
...I want to forget this rotten system...
...He was her young Lenin...
...It does my heart good...
...I said do you realize what they can do with seven billion dollars that they want to spend on military missiles, that they want to destroy the world...
...For one thing, it didn't seem right for a progressive person to be so profoundly sad and depressed all the time...
...I would buy records with my last penny, taking from food, and come home at night from a concert...
...They get a wonderful education...
...I had to know what happened...
...She was a hawk-nosed woman in her sixties married to an ex-Harlem Globetrotter...
...He was disturbed, and I feel very guilty about it...
...It's like a blind date when you're young," she said, "and you don't know what's gonna be...
...When I think of the plays you could write about the civil rights movement, about the Negro youth in motion: uh...
...They all lit up at the sight of her and responded with warmth...
...They said he was schizophrenic...
...Sylvia replied...
...I've heard about him plenty...
...Have you read Solzhenitsyn...
...Daniel, you write so beautifully, and you have content too...
...I said, 'What do you do with them?' He said, 'They collect them...
...Sylvia was wearing three buttons: "Outlaw White Violence," "Ban Nuclear Weapons," and "People Before Profits...
...You'll come back," he told them, and when they did, the times would be gentler, and he would understand the language...
...When he got there, the guard asked him what he wanted...
...The Cuban saying went, "If you don't love your mother, you can't love your country...
...I loved to read in those days...
...I used to take a toothpick, sharpen it off, stick my head in that great big horn and play the record so I didn't awaken my family...
...I feel . . . badly . . . over my son...
...My father took a pail and got milk from a cow on a farm...
...How do I know...
...Ben Hodge said not to, and his vision was deeper than all mankind...
...That summer he worked on a kibbutz in Israel...
...I loved that guy...
...He understood himself so well...
...She hated the decline of the Party, which she believed was not due to Stalin and to Khrushchev's speech in 1956, but to the "revisionists" who criticized everything and whom she said she could spot a mile away "like an old piece of carp...
...I felt like writing, 'You should be where he is.' But I knew Michael voted for Reagan to spite me...
...Sylvia lost her hearing in the right ear and her speech became slurred...
...See, the thing is, I went to work when he was a baby...
...When I was on the Merv Griffin show my family saw me...
...Listen," Sylvia said, "I don't think about the individual...
...But he was insecure...
...He didn't.want to go...
...But what he was really depressed about was his lack of success with girls...
...He showed it to me, and he tore it up page by page right in front of me...
...But inside I resented it...
...They taught me how to work on a button sewing machine...
...The News wanted to show how old people were starving, so they put me in front of a Shopwell supermarket...
...I sewed up the sides of the nightgown and sewed up the sleeves...
...Shortly after I came back here, the Soviet Union had the Moscow trials...
...He did something bad once in the apartment...
...Isn't it beautiful...
...She'd see these little children go off to school in the morning and she'd be jealous...
...Most of them are Jewish, otherwise they wouldn't have come here...
...For a while I took Michael to California and we lived in a bungalow...
...Tuesday he didn't come home...
...There were no cars...
...When he read his stories to her, she said, "Beautiful...
...Just to spite me, see...
...Then I went to work in a pocketbook factory...
...The thing is," she said, her voice breaking, "he really loved me very dearly...
...Strangers plunked together in the dust, a cold wind seeming to blow between them...
...There was a great deal of fighting...
...I'd listen to whatever I'd get out of the toothpick...
...Then you'll know how it feels to lose so many people...
...One day I was in his room and found the damn thing...
...She laughed...
...I don't know anybody else who ever did that...
...He still didn't get laid...
...He was a salesman for a paste and glue factory...
...But he said he was writing about progressive humanity...
...Among her favorite books were early works by writers before they turned against the Soviet Union: John Strachey, Andre Gide, yellowed pamphlets by Richard Wright and Ignazio Silone...
...When Jolson sang again, so would he...
...I heard Rostropovich many times...
...Knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with a breath of kindness throw the rest away...
...He didn't have a life...
...One day at sunset Daniel came to the bookshop and Rose locked the door...
...Michael told the guard that he'd tried to commit suicide but that the rope broke and he fell on the bathroom floor and the rope hurt his neck...
...My head bothers me," she said...
...And so I shuttled from one shop to another...
...I graduated from junior high school in 1914 and got my first job in a lady's house...
...I can't accept it...
...And I said to them, 'Do you know what the guard said to him...
...But...
...They treat these things with drugs...
...He was in a case...
...So Michael stood up, raised his hand, and said, 'It seems to me from your commercial that the wife is better off with her husband dead.' Everyone roared...
...They loved the poem he published about the blinded Communist leader Ben Hodge: "His vision is deeper than all mankind," it went...
...I called her 'the youngster from Brownsville.' She still is active all over...
...I stay here too.'-Angry as he was, Michael turned around to her and said, 'Yeah, but you're getting paid for it.' You see, he was so brilliant...
...He said he put a rope on the riser in the bathroom and the rope broke, and it cut into his neck...
...This was 1915.1 was working at the Arrow shift factory in Williamsburg...
...And it was true...
...At the bottom of the page was written, "Love, Michael...
...After the show he came over to me and said, 'I'll bet you do a lot of reading...
...When I came home, Michael told me...
...It's so rotten...
...They made pocketbook frames on footpress machines...
...She chattered away with everyone: Chinese waiters and warehouse workers and subway trainmen...
...Not since he had the nerve to shelter Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet authorities...
...From 1964 to 1985, he had been working on that...
...Daniel asked...
...The table and chair were on elevated platforms...
...I used to go to every concert in the city since I was eighteen...
...I was always the one who got the blind date...
...My mother was the janitor of the house...
...I had a tragedy in my life three years ago...
...One Sunday evening in 1982, he was very disturbed...
...She continued, "Ooh, they're so vile...
...I said I was away one weekend in Cleveland...
...I never did meet the right man," she said...
...He came out in short pants with one of those big collars...
...he was their last fan and he was so young...
...we'd go hitchhiking and come home at-four o'clock in the morning...
...These so-called defectors...
...Look, I was in the Soviet Union in 1937 when Stalin was president...
...I knew I'd never hear the end of that story, 'cause I didn't dare to ask him...
...It would be terrific...
...As I get older, it grows on me more and more...
...The thing is, Sophie is not what she was...
...She finally answered the phone on the afternoon of the third day...
...She's so bitter...
...He bought a copy of William Z. Foster's old book for five dollars, Towards a Soviet America...
...Remember what Lenin said about infantile leftism," they warned him...
...Things quiet down and you live with yourself...
...I love this place...
...I got acquainted with symphonies and soloists...
...During the Hitler-Stalin pact, they introduced me as 'Sylvia, the Rock of Gibraltar.' But I have faith in you, although I don't know you very well...
...He learned Morse code by himself, and talked a lot to these people, the CB's...
...In the middle of the summer you could see the snow on the mountain...
...We had a landlord with a car...
...She handed Daniel a typed page with two quotations on it: "Oh, the comfort, the inexplicable comfort of feeling safe with a person...
...Just love me.' "He had a wonderful sense of humor...
...they spoke in foreign tongues...
...Then he was-" "That's right...
...He was envious because he knew that I had friends...
...I looked through the window, see, and developed a hungry look...
...One of the first musicians I ever heard was Percy Grainger- from Australia," she said...
...Michael felt terrible...
...Rose had said, "What do you want to go there for...
...He was a dark brooding boy with a big mop of hair, like yours, Daniel...
...She laughed at herself, a shriek of laughter in the silent store...
...Daniel darling," she had said, "I've been waiting for you...
...Sylvia is the only one still alive from my ILG Local 50 from 1922," Sophie told him...
...I said, 'What should I do with you?' He said, 'Love me...
...I lost a son three years ago, and I'm dying inside of me...
...We had four rooms, no bathtub...
...She'd watch from the window and I'd watch her...
...Daniel, I'm so glad you came...
...I know you're not that progressive...
...Oscar Wilde, I learned the Rubaiydt by heart, I learned Shelley...
...And she gave him a picture of Mendelsohn's grave...
...to his mother...
...I have about forty meetings...
...They were hidden in the basement of the bookshop, along with Trotsky, Stalin, and a pamphlet called: "Happy Days for American Youth in a Soviet America...
...He said, "Go home and get a stronger rope.'" And I said to them, 'That's the kind of society we have.' In his radical youth, in the early sixties, Daniel Greenwald was burning up with furious confusion...
...I remember my father reading the part where they took the daughter into court...
...The big shots used to walk around with their canes and their ladies, and the old women used to go about with a stick and clean up the papers and do the sweeping...
...When I went out with a group of friends, if they had somebody they didn't know who to pair off with, I was it...
...My heart is aching every minute...
...Rose called him Sergei at first, mistaking him for a Soviet youth...
...My parents couldn't make a living...
...So I lost interest in the whole thing...
...She made tassels and colored buttons...
...At ten he said he was going to go to Bellevue for the medication...
...When I was twelve, I heard my father read an article aloud where a father seduced a daughter...
...Having neither to weigh thoughts or measure words, but to pour them all out just as they are, chaff and grain together...
...I had met Earl at Camp Nitgedaiget ["Don't Worry"] in 1936...
...And I told them about Michael...
...Somebody walks out of the house and that's it...
...I felt there had to be a clean sweep, and there was...
...In the last generation they wouldn't have had a goddamn thing in all their lives...
...Just as long as you don't go any further backwards...
...We knew what to live for...
...As he was walking out the door, I said, 'Michael, don't take too much money with you.' He said, 'Don't tell me what to do,' and he walked out...
...When I was seven, we lived in one room in Russia...
...And then they bury them.' And you know, I get thoughts: How do I know what he did with his ashes...
...You ought to see my calendar...
...When he was twelve, I took him to a TV preview studio...
...Daniel called Sylvia for three days after that meeting and got a busy signal...
...They sat down in a private room across from each other...
...The fact that people don't have to sleep on the sidewalks is enough for me...
...Daniel tried to see her again for two months, but she was busy with a Communist party convention, peace demonstrations, union picket lines...
...It reeks with rottenness...
...He saw a noose as she spoke, hovering above them: in case the content was wrong, if there was not enough of it, if his future work did not describe how workers were "affected by living in this rotten society dialectically...
...The guard wouldn't let him into the hospital...
...he was really nothing to look at...
...I didn't realize Michael wanted somebody close to him...
...He missed his father...
...Her face went over to one side...
...The young men who wrote poetry in those days all had 'dens.' There was a guy named Ezzi, a shriveled-up little thing...
...She used to say: 'He should have been buried before I ever heard of him.' She always resented the fact she had no education...
...She wore a black cape to hide her pregnancy...
...We used to run in the lots where the gypsies would camp...
...He was bad that night...
...Now if he hanged himself I wouldn't go to hear him anymore...
...Daniel, this is the anniversary of Socialism's victory in Cuba and I said to myself the person I want to drink to Fidel with more than anyone else is my Daniel...
...His parents had never let him play with children his own age, and as he grew up he had no idea what the other kids were doing...
...I had his body cremated...
...I took him to Rockland State Hospital, to Bellevue...
...I wake up and hear him say, 'Ma?' I don't wish it on anyone...
...The man said to me, 'Do you want the ashes?' What am I going to do with the ashes...
...So I told my father that I wanted to learn Yiddish...
...Daniel asked her...
...Now let me tell you something about the Russians...
...Then I worked in a white goods factory: cotton nightgowns...
...He added that he was involved in some kind of secret work, and that if he were suddenly to disappear (now a fierce look tinged with fatalism and incredible courage and strength), well, that's what the risks were and you took your chances...
...But then what did you think when Khrushchev said all those people were innocent, and the trials were rigged...
...There were gas lamps on the streets that Dickens talks about...
...A great thing for us...
...My father would read to my mother the Forward when he came home from work...
...But we came back home, and Earl got a divorce...
...I'm very much in favor of what the Soviet Union is doing...
...Multiply that by twenty million families...
...Daniel asked her...
...He would have been 44 years old now," Sylvia said...
...Their day will come too,' they said...
...In the drawer of my machine in the shop I always had poetry and while I was turning the sleeves, I used to secretly read...
...We'd stop a milkwagon and buy a bottle of milk...
...She encouraged his writing...
...He didn't finish reading the story...
...To hell with them...
...My mother would tell stories about how much people hated the Czar," Sylvia said...
...When the dissidents started coming here, I wouldn't give them the satisfaction of spending my money...
...a year and a half or two years...
...I didn't bother," Sylvia said...
...I've been hoping-all day that you would come...
...Just to spite me, he bought a copy of 1984 when it first came out...
...They had lamplighters...
...George Eliot The second quotation was from an article by Liz Smith in Reader's Digest: "The son to mother communication transmitted over the longest distance is the birthday greeting sent on November 22, 1968, by astronaut James Lovell, Jr...
...I couldn't even touch him...
...I heard Caruso twice...
...I have something for you," she giggled, "and I'm so glad nobody's here...
...I let Griffin know how I felt about things, believe me, although I didn't say I was in The Movement...
...The first thing she said to him was, "What is the Soviet production quota this year...
...In the Soviet Union they lost twenty million, people...
...He was writing a book about Nazi-Soviet collaboration...
...He said that's what's gonna happen, rotten things like that...
...These bureaucrats had finally reached the day when they had servants and felt like millionaires...
...He used to go to Bellevue Hospital for medication...
...They showed an ad for a life insurance company advertising insurance for the husband so the family would have something when he died...
...But it only makes me even more anxious for you to take a more active part in The Movement...
...Sylvia paused, and said, "The thing is, he often said: 'I love you, but I don't like you.' As he got older, he seemed to take it out on me that I was progressive...
...Once a week he came and took the kids for a ride...
...But he ran around a lot...
...I wouldn't think of it...
...What could you feel...
...Do you read the New York Times...
...He discovered it was better to explain immediately to a girl that he was burning up with hatred of the country, the system, the President: what America was doing to the world, bringing war and devastation and fascism to peace-loving peoples...
...David Evanier is author of the novel, The One-Star Jew (North Point Press...
...She had accidentally left if off, the hook...
...I hate to give you the satisfaction...
...I don't go around telling people because each one has his own troubles...
...And that's how I learned...
...And I learned...
...Daniel Greenwald came to her from Sophie Siskind, 92 years old, who lived on Montgomery Street on the lower East Side and had a photograph of Paul Robeson on the wall and a little bust of Lenin on her bookshelf...
...But we have respect for each other...
...Right from the cow...
...I began by talking about the military budget...
...The young blacks wearing beanies and holding giant radios greeted Sylvia at the door...
...I said no, I couldn't afford it...
...They spoke on the phone...
...He met her next at the large Communist party headquarters on 23rd Street, seven stories of a former courthouse...
...My grandmother told me many times they'd helped these young people to escape...
...He hunted down vaudeville shows at the decaying Jefferson Theater on 14th Street where five "big acts" were sandwiched in between two movies, he hung around nostalgia shops on Sixth Avenue, he went backstage at the Palace, and he called up Helen Kane, the Boop Doop A Doop girl, and Belle Baker on the telephone...
...The kids were bathed in the washtub...
...I got a letter the other day from Reagan...
...The atmosphere was exactly as Daniel remembered it from thirty years before: cold and antiseptic, like a hospital corridor...
...I don't let anybody in anymore...
...When he came back, he pulled away from her...
...Sylvia said to him, peering up at the barred windows and around the empty shells of rooms...
...Very bright, an advanced thinker...
...He had thought The Movement would be the perfect place to find his very own Anne Frank-after all, the adults welcomed him instantly as a "representative of the youth" at a time when the youth had deserted the Communists in droves...
...I have no objection whatsoever...
...She rummaged through her bag and took out two whiskey miniature bottles, and two paper cups from the water cooler...
...He got very frightened...
...We had a lot of trouble together because Michael was not well...
...They sent a self-addressed envelope with a stamp and they want a reply...
...Oh, I wanted to show you a letter my son sent me once...
...A few months before, she had cracked her head at Nutburger...
...He had the feeling of a poet, like you...
...And I didn't like humiliation...
...How do I know they cremated him altogether...
...It's more than three years now...
...At the time of its transmission he was 140,000 miles out in space on his way to the moon...
...Every time I broke a needle they would mark it down and take two cents out of my pay...
...Daniel and Sylvia passed little old ladies sitting quietly, pale white young men and women who looked as if they'd come to New York from the prairie...
...He did very, very well with old ladies...
...Whatever we did we did with our whole being...
Vol. 18 • September 1985 • No. 9
