Authors: David Evanier
Solomon was scared to death. With Maury, there was almost like a threat from him. At the time, I would have knocked him on his ass and thrown him out a window.
With Solomon, I saw the fright. I knew immediately when I smelled him, that odor. I’ll go to my grave with it. It’s noisome— wretched and terrible.
When we arrested Dolly’s brother Hershie, I wanted to have a person who was qualified to ask questions. A man of authority, of position. We brought Hershie down, and this man questioned him at some length. When it was all over with and Hershie was gone, we sat there and said, “Well, how did it go?” He said, “Mr. Tabackin, let me tell you something. You’re very lucky. We’re lucky that that man Stern did not have a college education. It would have been worse than it already is.”
One other thing about Maury Ballinzweig: he got fresh with one of the guards on two occasions in the city prison. He had a fight with one of the guards and the guard decked him—twice. So he wasn’t a softie, this guy. I was surprised when I heard that. Because you don’t deck a guy in prison. You can have all kinds of things happen to you. That was the end of him. I heard nothing about him after he went out to Alcatraz.
The Rubells’ lawyer, Henky Rubin, was a very nice guy, a little gutteral, his voice, but a nice guy. The only thing I said to him later was, Henky, you know I’ve thought a lot of you, but I don’t think you give me enough credit, buddy. That I’m as smart as I am! Because I’m smarter than you are, Henky. Now you wanted to take this goddamn Committee to Resurrect the Rubells and raise money on behalf of the kids. I beat your ass, buddy.
The Committee raised fifty thousand dollars for the kids. I was determined to see that the Party didn’t get this money.
For those crazy kids. I got that money for them. I did a lot of work on that. I knew where that money was. I knew how much was in the pot. Informants advised us that when it reached fifty thousand dollars, that was as high as it was going to go, that the Party was gonna grab it. They were not going to give it to the kids. And I said, Screw you, buddy, if you think that a lot of good innocent people are going to give money for these kids and you’re gonna take it and give it to the Party. When Henky, who had control of the cash, died, I got Sarah Rubell to become administrator of the estate of the Rubells and coguardian with Dean Smyth of the person and property of the children, which included the bank accounts. That’s what happened. Before that, Henky’s name had to be on every check.
To this day I have no case against the children at all. When I locked Solomon up, I said, “Now Solomon, tell Joseph to sit down or I’ll slap his ass for him. He’s kicking me.” You see the kid was crying. He kicked me: “Leave my father alone.”
I did get the money for them. It was cinched for Joseph, let’s put it that way. Maybe some day I’ll see to it that they know that I did that for them.
In the last minutes of the trial, that passport photographer showed up and said that Solomon and Dolly had come to him and asked for ninety-six passport shots. People thought it looked suspicious that the guy’s office was right behind the courthouse. The thing is, I had known all along about the passport photos. I just didn’t have the time or the man power to do anything about it. I looked at the yellow pages; there were scores of passport photographers.
I got a call from the warden one day: “Come over tomorrow morning first thing before the trial.” Our informant in the House of Detention, Davey, wanted to see me right away. Davey told me, “Solomon came back from the trial last night all shook up. I said to him, ‘What’s the matter with you, Solly?’ He said he was afraid that son of a bitch Tabackin was going to find the passport photographer, and he didn’t want him to.”
I said, “Really, Davey? Is that what he said? Forget it, Davey, thanks.” Oh shit, the guy knows I’m looking.
But I had forgotten all about it.
When I heard that, I got about three hundred guys together and I said, “Get those yellow pages, get out and check every damn photographer in the city of New York.” That was the next-to-the-last day of the trial.
Later in the day, a couple of agents came to see me. One said, “Steve, I think I found the passport photographer.” I said, “Where?” He said, “On Park Row! Back of the courthouse.” I said, “Why do you think so?” He said, “Well, he thinks he recognizes the prints, and he recognizes her, Dolly. What got him were those damn kids.” I said, “Really? What happened?”
The photographer said it was Saturday, he was orthodox, the store was closed. He was making up his chemicals for the next day. But he let Solomon in when he banged at the door. The kids were kicking his cameras; he said, “Mr. Rubell, get those kids out of here.” Then he did ninety-six copies of photos, which was one hundred and three dollars.
Well, I told you Joseph started kicking me when I started to arrest Solomon. I remembered those kids. They could pull a house down, it was perfectly all right. I said, “Get him over here right away.” The photographer came over: Joe Epstein. A nice simple soul. I said, “Come in here.” I said to the attendant, “Get a seat for me and my friend right down in the front row.”
We walked down the middle aisle of the courtroom. I said to Joe, “Look around and see if you can spot anybody you know.” He said, “Oh, that’s the guy; that’s the woman over there.”
So I came back and said, “I got the photographer. He just identified Solomon and Dolly.”
That is the story.
A Soviet America
Get those hookers out of here.
—G. L.
In Solly’s favorite pamphlet,
Happy Days for American Youth in a Soviet America,
by Max Weiss (the cover a smiling young worker in beret holding a sledgehammer over his shoulder), he read of the death of the spirit in the United States: “How many Shakespeares and Miltons are buried together with their talents beneath a sea of poverty! … Not so the youth of Soviet America! For them, the world would for the first time open itself wide, to be rebuilt, to be changed, to be written about… . There would be no mute, inglorious Miltons in Soviet America! … Undoubtedly a workers’ and farmers’ government in America would be of a Soviet form.”
It was the Soviet Union that informed his hopes and his dreams. There was the concrete reality, where civilization had progressed to the stage of human brotherhood. The Soviet Union, whose constitution declared anti-Semitism a crime punishable by death. Small wonder that the workers’ fatherland was bearing the brunt of the war against Nazism while the West practiced appeasement. And that antifascists from every country in the world were finding sanctuary there.
And as soon as that final battle against fascism was won, the police, jails, and army would be abolished, for no soldiers were needed to keep down a liberated mankind. Time would no longer be wasted on military drills and tactics; soldiers would lead rich cultural lives.
Even at this early stage, there was free education, free medical care, tree houses for honeymooners, the elimination of prostitution and crime and homosexuality and venereal disease and mental illness; so soon the elderly were living to a hundred and one hundred and twenty even more because they (and children, of course) came first in the society. Yiddish was spoken everywhere by many workers and by many soldiers in the Red Army as well—but, in the spirit of proletarian internationalism, Yiddish was only one choice; all the nationalities were free to practice their customs as they saw fit. Yet he was acutely aware of how the Yiddish theater and Yiddish books were flourishing.
Tears would come to Solly’s eyes as he contemplated the reality, and he grew lyrical talking about it at meetings and on soapboxes.
He repeated all the information he’d received in his unit; the end of racism and exploitation; the vitamin-filled food the workers received on the job; the poetry they wrote in their spare time in the club rooms and libraries attached to their factories, mines, and mills; how they played chess and checkers, sang, danced, played. The factories themselves, so sunny and spacious, all the machinery made safe and reliable. The infant stations at each factory where mothers happily left their children for glorious days.
This was the end of the Dark Ages; this was where history was tending. A new age—he would live to see it, he would live to see the end of sharecropping and peonage and sweatshops and Jim Crow and limbless soldiers returning from wars of capitalist conquest. He was a red-hot; he wanted to implement his beliefs with action. He wanted to fight with all his heart for the day when his own country would reach that level, and he felt ennobled with the joy and the hope and the humanity of it. Every child he saw in the street, so innocent, so trusting—so soon to be trampled on by capitalism’s uncertainties and insecurities, mortalities, and endless cycles of war and depression—made Solly vow to fight even harder to bring the day sooner when a Soviet America would end the needless suffering of all children. And he thought always of his people, herded off in freight cars to deaths in gas chambers all across the Nazi continent, deaths that were slow and filled with the newest, most ingenious tortures ever devised by man. Practiced by creatures who prided themselves on their anti-Communism. Yes, Solly knew where he stood and why. Brecht:
In Praise of Communism.
They say that it is evil.
But we know it is the end of evil.
Solly was the first to arrive at his unit’s headquarters every day, and he was almost always there when the others had left. He seemed to the others never to go home. Sometimes he acknowledged to himself his loneliness, but it was always with the realization that his feelings were unimportant compared with the objective situation.
Of course it was true he yearned to be holding “a dear one” (as he put it to himself) when he watched the Almanac Singers at hootenannies or the Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus at Lewisohn Stadium in summer or the Freiheit Gesangverein, a Yiddish choral group that sang workers’ songs at Webster Hall, or Soviet films at the Stanley Theater. Of course he wanted to share the struggle with someone who had a correct perspective. Among his subjective feelings were questions about what it felt like to hold a girl in his arms, what a breast felt like (he often stroked his pillow and thought the softness must be a little like that), and what a kiss felt like, how you did it, how much pressure you applied, what you did with your tongue, and with hers.
In the deserted unit, at night, he suddenly heard his pounding heart.
Vomit You Fascist Despoilers into the Sea
Speak English, for Christ sake.
—G. L.
A play by the famous Soviet playwright Yuri Yevbrashsky had been hastily translated into English on behalf of the executed Rubells.
Vomit You Fascist Despoilers into the Sea
had a cast of four: Dolly and Solly Rubell, Lash, a dour government agent dressed in black and wearing an eye patch, and Wilhelm, a cynical but sentimental prison guard. It was set in the Rubells’ death cell.
The play began with Wilhelm holding a camera and waving a hundred-dollar bill before the Rubells. He was pleading with them to kiss so he could sell the photograph to a Hearst reporter waiting outside. “For upon executing this embrace of love a lot of money I can totally receive!” he declared.
“Sweet guy, never will us, designated progressive lovers, crazy with commitment, befoul our nest to Trotskyite plotters of capitalist press,” the Rubells said in unison.
At this point, Solly fell asleep and talked aloud about the destiny of an apple sitting on the table and about the inspiration he had derived from Beethoven, Michelangelo, and Sacco and Vanzetti.
Lash entered and handed Solly a confession. “Glorious life of bourgeois trash will enhance your pleasures withal,” he said, “and freedom for you and your helpmate on a big horse down Wall Street and plenty of bucks, if you sign on the line that is dotted.”
Solly tore the paper into shreds. “Never will us, designated progressive lovers, crazy with commitment, blow up our honor forever for termites of McCarthyism.”
At this point Solly recited the Gettysburg Address. Concluding he turned to Lash and said, “Please to inform the Attorney General and the President, in their hands our livelihoods are perched, yet the truth it is amazing, but their mercy we throw into the garbage!” Dolly raised her fist and shouted, “For to confess to save our livelihoods, all the American workers and peasants to be dishonored they would be!”
The second and third acts consisted of further discussion and argument between the Rubells and Lash about confessing. Lash began whispering that he was on their side, but that the government held him in its clutches because he too had a progressive background. Still the Rubells would not confess, and the annoyed Lash ordered Wilhelm to escort Solly and Dolly to the death chambers. The Rubells held their heads high throughout this, murmuring “Brotherhood” and “Jackie Robinson” to the audience and applauding back Soviet-style when the audience cheered them. “Okay!” Solly called out.
Suddenly the lights went out, and the frightened Lash wondered aloud if the peace forces of the country had arisen in fury and were hurrying to the defense of the Rubells. But the lights went on again and the Rubells walked quietly to their execution while the angry Lash stormed out of the cell.
The lonely prison guard, Wilhelm, stood alone in the empty cell. “What pray, is this?” he said, and discovered on the wall a message in Solly’s handwriting. “To our children,” he read aloud: “Do not forget us. Remain faithful to the future. Peace, lead, and roses.”
The curtain fell.
The Prince of Progressive Humanity
Sensitivity rewarded.
—G. L.
When Maury Ballinzweig came out of prison in 1966 after sixteen years under lock and key, the balance of forces in the world had shifted to his side, to the side of rationality, peace, progress, and human problem solving.
Yet curiously, cancer now seemed to be riddling almost everyone.
These were the exhilarating contradictions.
“Are you having an affair, Linda?” he had asked his wife when she visited him in prison near the beginning of his stretch.
“I am.” She had paused. “But with X, not
Y.”
She was glowing, in a black gown. She was on the way to meet Sartre on Maury’s behalf and could not conceal her excitement.
He had looked at the ground, unable to raise his head.
Although in time he had come to realize how glad he was that she was not sacrificing herself for him, and how good it was that it was
X,
not
Y.
A steel rod, that’s how they designated the Lincoln Battalion members in Spain who had been honored with Party membership. Those who could be trusted to maintain the purity of the Party line. Who could not be broken.
Maury Ballinzweig had no use for Susan Sontag. Or the likes of Susan Sontag. He didn’t care what she had said, and wondered why all the hoo-ha. Berlinger of the Italian C.P. had said worse about Poland, and that didn’t bother him. Maury snorted at the sentimentality.
Look, after they arrested him, the Party demanded that Maury’s mother give up her Party card and not come to Party club meetings ever again. He understood that was necessary. He often said, “I don’t go by the heart. I know that by the heart you can get a Nazi as easily as a Communist.” He waited for his visitor, and sat snuggled into himself, clasping his hands between his knees in the barren room crowded with wall posters for Vietnam and Chile and Nicaragua and American political prisoners and
Guardians
and revolutionary papers strewn across the floor.
The reporter stood in the doorway shaking hands with the man in green work shirt, brown pants, and slippers, who looked like his coat had many buttons in need of sewing. Maury’s long white hair was held in a ponytail by a white rubber band. He fidgeted and jumped.
He looked much older than in the black-and-red posters of the reporter’s youth. The posters had been everywhere. There were large pictures of Solomon and Dolly Rubell with Maury looking from a distance over their shoulders. It was logical: the Rubells had been executed. Maury only was sentenced to twenty years.
After talking about his Social Security and about the weather, they sat down. “Whoo!” Maury yelped. “I’ve got two girl friends. The first one was very sweet and never surprised me. I found her boring. The new one is full of levels and she drives me crazy.” He laughed buoyantly and munched pumpkin seeds.
The reporter sat in a chair wearing the Japanese slippers Maury had handed him—an aid to contemplation. Maury sat on the floor gazing up at him.
The wall posters proclaimed CHILE: FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS. WHO KILLED LETELIER? The battered bookshelf contained books about the Case from all viewpoints.
Maury whistled and said, “God … of course you know that epilepsy is loaded with ideology coming from the ruling class!”
“Oh … sure… .”
“I might like to leave New York,” he said. “I could live on my Social Security. Should I move to Oregon?”
“I like the passion of New York,” the reporter said.
“The passion. Yes. True. Interesting. I don’t know. What I really want to do is to help Vietnam and Grenada. What is their optimum trajectory for technical development?”
The reporter stroked his beard and muttered, “Mmmm. …”
They sat in silence except for the cracking of Maury’s knuckles.
Maury looked at the floor and said, “So? Begin.”
“About Solomon Rubell—”
“So you’re going to write the twenty-fifth book about Solly.”
“Tell me about him.”
“As a scientist, Solly was a fish out of water. He should have been a Greek scholar. He wasn’t a natural.
“Solly and Dolly went to Coney Island one day. People left their clothes in the lockers. But Solly brought all of his things out to the beach with him.” Maury put up his arms and waved them. “Legend has it that all the lockers were robbed that afternoon. They always told afterward how wise Solly was.”
The reporter stared.
As a boy, the reporter had pondered the posters of the Rubells with Maury Ballinzweig looking over their shoulders. At the rallies before and after the execution, the people around him had wept and moaned, they collapsed in a frenzy in the aisle, the elderly had strokes.
On the stage, Linda Ballinzweig pounded her breast. Rubell’s mother wept. Maury’s mother screamed—and then there was the collection. Actresses dressed in Lincoln Battalion uniforms came down the aisle, while the band played “Beyond the Blue Horizon.”
The children, the children, someone screamed. The music stopped. Red and black klieg lights swept across the huge auditorium, crisscrossing the stage. An organ softly played. A drawing lit up of Solomon and Dolly in the electric chair with Maury waving goodbye, and in front of it the huddled figures of the Rubell children, in their little white stockings and caps, who held each other by the hand and walked slowly onto the stage.
People gasped. “Harry, oh my God,” a woman said to her husband, “this society is killing us. We’ve got to stop the killing before it’s too late.” And she bent his nose with a kiss. The second collection began. “My daddy is innocent—” began one of the children. Screams resounded across the auditorium and klieg lights crisscrossed, the organ ripped into the shrill light and the natural voice of the people was heard:
“INNOCENT … INNOCENT … INNOCENT … TOSS THE WRETCHED MONOLITHS INTO THE SEA … RIP THE MARBLES OF STEEL OFF BY THEIR HINGES … ISSUE FORTH THE DAWN.”
A speaker added, “And don’t forget Maury Ballinzweig.”
Maury fidgeted as they talked.
“I’ve read a lot about you,” the reporter said.
“Yes. What?”
He hesitated. “Well, that your wife told you of her relationship with another man while you were in prison.”
Maury stared at the toe of his slipper. He glanced up and looked down quickly, hiding what the reporter thought was a flush.
“The way the warden and the prisoners baited you about your wife. Your lousy lawyers, your best friend’s betrayal. The death of your father.”
Maury remained immobile.
“How did you survive?”
“Historical and political perspective,” Maury answered. “I didn’t look at it in personal terms. Solly was an ordinary person. I can’t consider myself heroic either. ‘Ordinary’ doesn’t mean you can’t become a hero.”
“About Solomon—” the reporter said.
There was a long silence.
“I never had a good hold on him.”
“Did you like him?”
Maury didn’t answer for a long time. They looked at each other. Maury lifted his arms behind his head and breathed from the belly. Then he looked down. “He was a comrade. This to me is saying a good deal. To understand what this meant is a whole story in itself.
“At that time I couldn’t relate to people. I was an atheist at five. I got into people much more in prison.”
“But did you like him?”
“He was wonderful with his kids.”
“Whenever people mention Solomon, they mention you.”
Maury shrugged. “It was a long time ago.” He paused.
“You said that to understand what Solomon’s being a comrade meant is a story in itself. What’s the story?”
Maury shifted.
“My friend,” he said, “beyond that, you’ll have to use your imagination.”
Later, the reporter said: “I thought it was Solomon I was most interested in.” He added, “Now I think it’s you.”
“Well, I’m here,” Maury said immediately. “Solomon isn’t.”
At the door, they said goodbye. They would meet again soon, Maury said. They shook hands, and Maury held the reporter’s hand for a moment longer.
Such buoyancy! Such sweetness! Such willingness! Such trust toward a stranger! Such civilized jargon! The reporter was astonished.
What had preserved Maury?
“I want to help you,” Maury had said to him.
The reporter went in search of Solomon Rubell’s sister. He found her living in Lefrak City with her second husband. Color TVs flashed in the living room, where her husband sat, and in the kitchen, where she talked to the reporter. She turned off the sound, but left the picture on.
“When I went to visit Solly for the last time, I was waiting outside. I heard the guards talking in the enclosure. One of them said, ‘When the spy is put on the slab.’ I wanted to run in there and say, ‘He’ll never die.’ I held myself back. I didn’t want them to know I was Solomon Rubell’s sister.
“A little boy, I remember him. He was the youngest of all the kids we played with. And such a beautiful baby. Little gold curls. And blue eyes.
“He sold lollipops on Shabbat, he wouldn’t take the money for them. He would come back the next day to collect the penny for the lollies.
“I loved his character. Nothing but pride. He was a wonderful person. Knowledgeable, very well educated, well read. To me he was like a king. If you look at me you’ll see Solly, but you’ll see a much handsomer man. Before you knew it he went to Hebrew school, took a keen interest in Hebrew. Put his whole heart into it.
“When he walked, he may have sloped a little. I don’t remember. He entered school speaking Yiddish and didn’t know English. But he learned so fast.
“Stanton Street and Pitt Street where we used to live are torn down. All gone. It was a
shtetl.
You were happy, you walked out, you were among friends and relatives. It was just a
haimish
atmosphere. In later years we had hot water and steam too. Jewish girls went with Jewish girls and Jewish boys went with Jewish boys.
“We used to walk by the river and throw our sins away … on
Tashlikh
on the first day of Rosh Hashanah … like crumbs or something. You say a prayer.
“Mama would cook and bake for every occasion. I loved Fridays but I hated Sunday when the laundry had to be done. Everything had to be stripped. And that tub in the kitchen. Mama used to stand with the board and wash the clothes. The tub would have curtains around it that she made.
“When my father got up to talk, everybody listened. And this is Solly, he inherited his intelligence, ability to talk; he was a born leader, a brilliant boy. He made sense. He wasn’t as fiery in later life as he was in youth. He changed. He married and had a family. Responsibility. You look toward prospering.
“The lawyer Rubin kept saying,
‘They won’t dare kill them.’
When my husband opened the door at eight o’clock, the first thing he said to me was, ‘I didn’t think they’d do it.’ He repeated that several times. And he embraced me. And we both cried. A half hour before, my little son who was twelve years old got up on the chair. He turned the clock back a half hour. He had the sense to get up on the stool, a little fella, to turn the clock back.
“Maury Ballinzweig? He wasn’t cut from the same cloth. Even his mother, I heard her say in court before he testified, she said, ‘I hope he’ll have some of Solly’s courage.’ She wasn’t sure.”
As a boy of fifteen in the fifties, the reporter learned about the Case. The Party took it up only after the Rubells had been safely executed.
He had stood in the thin crowd, the blinding sun on the podium at Union Square in 1954. They toiled onto the stage, the released Smith Act prisoners, blinking into the sun, thin, waving at the barricades behind which no one stood. Telegrams from Moscow, China, people’s republics of Eastern Europe were read. Fists clenched. Anna Louise Strong took a bow. Johnny “Apple Seed” Beaver sang. Reverend Jilly Morris Rogers blessed the Red Army. Molly Leash read martyr poems. Solomon’s sister spoke in a trembling voice: “To think he didn’t live to experience the joys of television”—and wept.
Henry Winston, blinded in prison, stood with his stick. Robert Thompson, his skull bashed in by a Yugoslavian fascist in prison, sat on a chair with a pillow. Benjamin J. Davis, dying of cancer, stood tall. He shouted, “I’d rather be a lamppost in Moscow than president here.” He dropped the rest of his speech and went right into his crowd pleaser: “They can call me red, they can call me black,
but they can’t call me yellow.
They can call me red, they can call me black,
but they can’t call me yellow.
They can call me red, they can call me black,
but they can’t call me yellow.”
They bared their throats for slitting.
This was what they knew.
Their pale complexions and gabardine suits.
They knew their lines.
Eugene Dennis read and squeaked his proclamations. No one listened. There were no human sounds. In the dry listless day, on the hot earth across from Klein’s, the people’s martyrs stood silently.
The problem was that two days before Solomon Rubell was arrested, Maury Ballinzweig fled to Toronto with Linda. Within three weeks they were located by the Canadian police and Maury was handed across the border to a United States agent.
Maury had locked up his house in Flatbush, left his new Chevrolet in the garage, and had not told his employers of his plans.
When he reached Toronto, Maury cashed in his return trip airline tickets and wrote to a friend in Manhattan, using such aliases as “M. Ballbearing” and “Myron Ballast.” Enclosed in his letters to his friend, Maury included notes for his parents and aunts and asked his friend to forward them.
Maury left Linda in Toronto and traveled to Vancouver by himself, using five other false names, to try to find a boat that would take them abroad. Traveling around the west coast of Canada, he inquired about passage to Europe or South America. He wrote later of those lonely days:
I spent a lot of time at the docks, walking around, hoping to find someone to talk to, someone who could give me a lead. Frankly, a lot of the time I just stood around, observing the local customs, or went “slumming.” The music in the pubs was mainly starkly conventional; Doris Day and Guy Lombardo, and at first it was a novelty to observe another culture. Then it got on my nerves. I hope the music did not adequately reflect the cultural outreach of the habitues. I might have enjoyed a dance or two, but this seemed to me like impermissible self-indulgence. For these forays, I purchased prescription sunglasses, fearing slip-ons would mark me as a tourist.