Remembering Solomon Mikhoels
KAFANOVA, LUDMILA
REMEMBERING SOLOMON MIKHOELS by ludmila kafanova SOl'J.VOI . .'.'I* H'"'EL-j The recf.nt announcement that there would once more be a Yiddish theater in Moscow could not help striking some...
...His portrayals exhibited a richness of emotions, thoughts and fantasies...
...She told me her family believed the drama critic for the magazine Theater, a man named Gol-ubov, was an accomplice of the killers...
...First, Mikhoels' name completely disappeared from the newspapers and magazines...
...The actor was going to see a friend the day he was killed, but at the last moment Golubov urged him to visit a poor Jewish family...
...He knew and understood everything...
...In this time of general dullness and hypocrisy, Mikhoels managed to achieve his greatest acting triumph葉he role of King Lear...
...A former assistant to the director Max Reinhardt, Granovsky was not a political person...
...The tactic worked: On tour in Europe in the late '20s, Habima defected en masse...
...Granovsky, who came from a wealthy Jewish family, had no knowledge of the language and little interest in ethnic theater...
...For Mikhoels, King Lear was a tragedy of the downfall of this false perception of the world...
...Mikhoels continues to be an official nonperxon in the USSR...
...Still, he agreed to undertake the project...
...None of the praises given to Mikhoels could be considered an exaggeration...
...Petersburg, under Aleksei Granovsky...
...When the war was ended, Mikhoels dedicated Freilechs用erhaps his best production葉o the memory of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis...
...Following his murder, I reread the notes he had published about his trip to the U.S...
...Through pain, suffering and humiliation, his Lear found a genuine wisdom...
...Like many others, Mikhoels had to maneuver between his desire to produce ti uly creative work and the necessity of obeying orders to stage blunt schematic plays that reflected nothing except the latest government directive...
...Mikhoels rejected the traditional version of the tragedy...
...But while nature had given him a wonderful voice and a strong temperament, he was short and stocky, with an odd-looking face, and had found little success in the Russian theater...
...It is not surprising that after Granovsky defected in 1929, Mikhoels was chosen as his successor...
...on the contrary, he appeared on the stage short, deplorable and woeful, enveloped in a dismal mantle...
...Then, in the final scene, he lay down beside the dead Cordelia and tried to kiss her...
...I asked Nina if her father, whom 1 had met several times in their home, really believed what he had written...
...Despite the Soviets' reported willingness to revive the Yiddish theater, the subject of Solomon Mikhoels proved not long ago to be a sore spot...
...Benjamin Zus-kin, a prominent Yiddish actor...
...It was intended to counter an existing Jewish stage group, Habima, which performed in Hebrew and produced plays concerned with the abhorrent themes of Judaism and Zionism...
...She currently lives in New York City...
...He did not challenge the Party leadership directly, but he often defended the right of an artist to be independent, to experiment, to make mistakes...
...and Mikhoels' son-in-law, Michael Weinberg, a well-known composer...
...He disassociated himself from the Bolshevik Revolution and dreamed about eventually returning to his beloved mentor and to theatrical work...
...Finally, the authorities arrested Lev Sheinin, a zealous investigator assigned to examine the case for the Procurator's Office of the USSR...
...Nevertheless, he was a real king who rigidly believed in his own superiority and in the eternal stability of the order in which he towered over the people...
...The British director Gordon Craig, after attending the Jewish Theater production, said: "Since the time of my teacher, the great Henry Irving, I do not remember an actor who has touched me to the very bottom of my soul as Mikhoels did with his King Lear...
...reasons...
...Enriching the director's sophisticated and arcane stage ideas with his own acute observations and acid wit, he soon became a star...
...And he was the link connecting the Jewish Theater with all that was substantial and significant in Soviet drama of the '20s, with the experiments of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Aleksandr Tairoff and Konstantin Stanislavsky...
...On his paydays, he distributed money to the crowds of poor people waiting for him at the doors of the Jewish State Theater, often going home without a cent...
...Mikhoels worshipped Granovsky and entirely trusted him...
...To understand the role of Solomon Mikhoels in Soviet Jewish cultural life, one must understand the history of the Jewish State Theater...
...REMEMBERING SOLOMON MIKHOELS by ludmila kafanova SOl'J.VOI . .'.'I* H'"'EL-j The recf.nt announcement that there would once more be a Yiddish theater in Moscow could not help striking some close observers of the Soviet scene as ironic...
...When everything was completed and the program had already been announced, it was abruptly cancelled...
...At dawn the next day, though, the bodies of both Mikhoels and Golubov (who suffered a common fate of informers) were found in an uninhabited outskirt of Minsk...
...He was then a 19-year-old law student at Petrograd University whose only goal in life was to be an actor...
...The first characters he played were inhabitants of small Jewish towns擁dealists and daydreamers, "castle-builders" unable to cope with the prosaic routine of everyday life and destined to suffer insults and privations...
...For it came shortly before January 13葉he 30th anniversary of the murder, under mysterious circumstances, of Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Jewish State Theater and one of this century's finest Russian actors...
...At the time of his death, the Soviet government regretfully announced that Mikhoels had fallen victim to unknown bandits in Minsk, and presented cordial condolences to the family...
...From the beginning, Mikhoels also was an important factor in the survival of Yiddish theater in the Soviet Union...
...He was becoming a legend...
...In a telephone conversation with his friend, Mikhoels explained the situation and promised to come over later...
...He agreed to lie because he believed the fight against the Nazis made it necessary...
...His Lear was not at all dignified...
...Unable to reach, he kissed his Fingers and touched them to his daughter's lips...
...It later became known that Mikhoels was beaten severely and then 謡hile still alive and screaming for help葉hrown under an oncoming truck...
...Although Mikhoels knew these people well and felt deep compassion for them, he despised the qualities that prevented them from being masters of their own lives...
...When chased from his daughter's castle, for instance, he touched his head as if groping for the place where his crown used to be...
...Soviet authorities gave him a chance to do the latter, asking him to organize a stage group that would put on plays in Yiddish...
...It began as the Jewish Theater Studio in St...
...Mikhoels' daughter Nina was a classmate of mine...
...When he passed the auditions to get into the Jewish Studio, he realized this was the one opportunity he would have to realize his ambition...
...He probably did not know it, but the Jewish Theater Studio (it became the Moscow Jewish State Theater in the early '20s) was established by the Bolshevik regime for political and ideological Ludmtla Kafanova emigrated in 1973 from the Soviet Union, where she was a journalist and television writer...
...No," she replied...
...During this period Mikhoels' behavior was a mixture of courage and correctness...
...The gestures Mikhoels invented for the part belong to ihe treasury of the theatrical art...
...His keen intellect, his soft charm and flawless taste, won him the respect of the highest authorities in Soviet art...
...By mid-1949, the Jewish State Theater was closed and there was no longer any doubt that Mikhoels' murder was part of a ruthless campaign against the Jews in the USSR...
...he was never just a performer, but an actor capable of uncovering a whole philosophy in an individual life, of making his audience muse over eternal questions...
...He had insisted that Mikhoels make the trip to Minsk and had accompanied him there...
...Even with the official support, Gra-novsky's company might not have survived if Mikhoels hadn't joined it in 1919...
...The government apparently preferred not to arrest him...
...Soon, however, a sequence of events suggested to all but the most naive that the government account was a sham...
...Shortly before I left the Soviet Union in 1973, 1 prepared a show about Mikhoels for Moscow television...
...In them he describes his verbal battles against critics of the Soviet regime, how he had avoided direct answers to the questions about Soviet concentration camps and violations of human rights...
...He never will be forgotten, however, by those who saw him act...
...The official version was generally accepted...
...Then Colonel-General S. Trofimenko, the top military official in Byelorussia, who had ordered a search for the killers, was expelled from Minsk...
...after all, Solomon Mikhoels was a People's Artist of the USSR, a winner of the Stalin Prize and the chairman of the Antifascist Jewish Committee...
...The job was a difficult one in the early '30s, for the Party had initiated its campaign against the vitality and autonomy of art...
...As head of the Jewish Antifascist Committee during World War II, Mikhoels journeyed to Britain and the United States to raise money from Jews for the Red Army...
...His hand flew up and, uttering an abrupt laugh, he died...
...He had always tried to help people, and Jews from all over the country would come to him with their complaints and troubles...
...Once Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign began, Mikhoels was a logical target...
Vol. 61 • March 1978 • No. 6
