A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (40 page)

But the plays spread the news. Many productions left the denouement unresolved, adapting to events as they developed, amounting, in the words of one historian, to “
three-dimensional newsreels.” And they were precocious expressions of a wave of public protest only now gaining momentum in the country.

One of the few to grasp this point was an editorial writer in the New York–based Zionist newspaper
Dos Yiddishe Folk
(The Jewish People). The popularity of the plays, the author argued, “shows once more the nationalism and
deep Jewishness of most of our people … It is this
feeling that has given us sufficient strength to withstand the many enemies who rise up in every generation to annihilate us.” The author was far more perceptive than the ostentatiously high-minded critics. They failed to pick up on what the popularity of the vulgar plays said about American Jews: their sense of solidarity, their commitment to justice, and their potential for collective action.

With the Yiddish theater acting as a kind of raucous chorus, a massive grassroots movement in support of
Beilis had belatedly begun sweeping the United States. The
American Jewish Committee, America’s leading Jewish lobbying organization, remained wary of public protests as possibly counterproductive. (So, too, establishment leaders in Europe. In Germany, the
Jewish Chronicle
reported the
assimilationists to be “furious” at the Zionists for organizing pro-Beilis rallies. In Great Britain,
Lucien Wolf, known as the Jewish community’s “minister of foreign affairs,” wrote that he favored “
discreet diplomacy,” arguing in a private letter that the “protest meetings or other Jewish agitation on the Blood Accusation will only play into the hand of the anti-Semites.”)

The American Jewish Committee organized a letter of protest from prominent Christian clergymen, which it hoped the
State Department would deliver to St. Petersburg through proper channels. But around the nation, countless Jewish congregations and local Jewish organizations began taking action on their own, spontaneously holding rallies and petitioning the White House. They were joined by many local and state governments and a variety of Christian and other groups. The New York and Wisconsin
state legislatures passed resolutions condemning the trial. The House of Deputies of the Episcopal Church called on the Russian Orthodox leaders to declare the ritual-murder charge against the Jews to be false. The New York
Esperantists pledged to instigate a worldwide protest movement and drafted an open letter, in Esperanto, for distribution throughout Europe. The success of the Esperantists was rather limited, but in America the pro-Beilis movement would culminate in some of the largest mass protests of Jews and greatest upsurge of Jewish-Christian solidarity the country had yet seen.

As the eighth day of the trial began, the courtroom was overflowing, the seats filled with “
elegant women and girls of Kiev society, clergymen,
military men, officials,” the
Kiev Opinion
contributor
Bonch-Bruevich said in a dispatch. “Lorgnettes, binoculars (though forbidden)…and a sea of feathers in women’s hats, flutter, shake and obstruct one’s view.” Every court officer with an excuse to be present sat in a row behind the judges’ bench, their
gold buttons gleaming. The crowd was not simply excited, according to one
Kievan
reporter, it was
ravenous. All the spectators wanted to be able to say that they had been there for the testimony of the notorious Vera Cheberyak.

As opening acts, the witnesses preceding her that day were cast to perfection, maintaining the interest of the audience but not upstaging the dark diva herself. Mendel
Beilis made one of his periodic cameo appearances. He never took the stand during the trial, but he did exercise his right under Russian court procedure to give an “explanation” on a specific matter, describing how he had supervised the baking and delivery of matzo for his employer Jonah Zaitsev, an activity that the prosecution presented in the most sinister light. Beilis explained there was no ritual for the production of matzo, just a rabbi present to ensure that the crew observed the rules of kosher baking. “These are just
illiterate Jews,” he told the court. “They roll out the matzo, and then might start eating bread and drinking tea. And that’s strictly forbidden. So [the rabbi] is watching so that … they don’t do that.” A reporter noted that Beilis spoke more loudly than he had on previous occasions and “with a great deal of
gesticulation.” He would still weep from time to time but was becoming more comfortable in the courtroom.

Then Detective Krasovsky’s former assistant,
Adam Polishchuk, an
elegantly dressed young man with a crew cut and short beard, took the stand. Krasovsky had once trusted him, but now Polishchuk was a full-fledged participant in the effort to convict Beilis. Asked his profession, he told the court that he worked for the secret police. When Krasovsky had hired him, he had been an unemployed police officer; presumably his new job was a reward for the service he was about to provide.

Polishchuk, startlingly, proceeded to accuse Krasovsky of murdering Vera Cheberyak’s two children with poisoned pastries, in contradiction to the pathologists’ report that conclusively proved that they had died natural
deaths of dysentery. As for the defendant, Polishchuk suggested that Mendel Beilis had murdered Andrei in league with the hay and straw dealer
Faivel Shneyerson, who took his meals at the Beilises’ home. (The prosecution, in essence, made an unindicted coconspirator
out of Shneyerson, a young man who was supposedly of the noble line of Lubavitcher Hasidic wise men.)

But Polishchuk, prodded by the defense, made his greatest impression with his description of Zhenya Cheberyak’s deathbed scene. In August 1912, while still working for Krasovsky, he had been assigned to watch over the gravely ill boy. Because his original deposition was part of the record, he could not lie about this key episode. He said nothing willingly, forcing the defense to dig for every detail. But even in his halting rendition, the story was chilling. Nothing could blunt the eeriness of how Zhenya’s final thoughts turned to his dead friend, or the attempt by his
mother to persuade her dying boy to exonerate her (“Tell them, little one, that I had nothing to do with it”) and her apparent fear that he would say something to incriminate her, as she silenced him by covering his mouth with kisses.

Eleven-year-old Ludmila Cheberyak, Vera’s only surviving child, her
chestnut hair divided in two braids that reached nearly to her waist, directly preceded her mother on the stand. She possessed not only her mother’s large eyes, dark brows, and long eyelashes, but the same ability to spin tales. She struck observers as having unnatural poise for one so young, yet somehow maintaining an air of childish innocence as she told the nightmarish story of the children’s jaunt to the Zaitsev factory and how
Beilis and two other Jews had supposedly chased them.

The defense had earlier argued the whole story had to be false because, in the fall of 1910, the Zaitsev factory management had put a complete stop to the children’s visits to the clay grinders by erecting an impassable wooden fence. The fence was the subject of endless testimony. The defense probably got the better of the argument, but negatives are notoriously hard to prove and it was a challenge to rule out the possibility that the children had ever found a way through the fence, which made Ludmila’s testimony crucial.

“We were playing on the clay grinders,”
the girl told the court. “After a while the factory manager Mendel”—prosecution witnesses always seemed to give Beilis a promotion—“started chasing us and the others chased us as well.” Her story was well wrought (undoubtedly with the help of her mother and perhaps the prosecution), as if to insulate her from cross-examination. She did not assert that she herself had seen Beilis grab Andrei. Such an account would have opened her to an aggressive line of questioning from the defense. She said she had
only heard Andrei scream as she and the other children were chased off. However, she said her younger sister, Valia, now conveniently deceased, had seen Mendel grab Andrei: “She screamed and told me, ‘Andrusha, Andrusha, they dragged him off.’ ”

The judge then called for an
eye-to-eye confrontation between Ludmila and the shoemaker Nakonechny’s daughter Dunya. Ludmila claimed that Dunya had been playing with her and the boys when the Jews chased after them. When Dunya took her place beside her former friend at the witness stand, she lost no time calling her a liar.

Ludmila started to cry. “Girl, why are you crying?” the judge asked. She answered, “I am afraid.” The prosecutor asked for it to be entered into the record that the girl cried and said she was afraid. He was setting up a main argument of his summation—that a Jewish conspiracy had bribed witnesses to support Beilis, or else had intimidated witnesses into retracting incriminating testimony or maintaining their silence.

Vera
Cheberyak strode to the stand in an eye-catching black velvet hat with a wide brim, trimmed all around in yellowish-orange faux ostrich feathers, from which rose a sort of
feather pom-pom that bobbed distractingly as she moved. Beilis looked at her intently, maintaining his gaze the entire time she testified. Witnesses were supposed to face the judges at all times so, seated where he was, about a dozen feet directly to the right of the stand,
Beilis could stare only at her profile, perhaps focusing on her nose with its small bump and its slight but definite bend to one side. As more than one observer noted, it seemed at this moment as if there were two defendants in the courtroom. Was the real perpetrator sitting in the dock or standing before the judges? Or, a
skeptical reporter asked, was he perhaps somewhere else, laughing at the whole farce?

Cheberyak began with a request to the judge that betrayed both her self-awareness and her anxiety. “
Would you be so kind as to read aloud
my previous testimony?” she asked, meaning her prior statements to investigators. “After all,” she said, “I cannot remember everything.” She clearly was hoping for assistance in her effort to avoid contradicting herself or to smooth over her inconsistencies as best she could. But the judge had no choice but to say no. Previous statements could be read back only after the witness had begun testifying and if one side or the other pointed to a possible discrepancy between different versions. “Whatever you remember,” Judge Boldyrev said, “that is what you will tell the court.”

She started off well enough, though, the words pouring out of her in a steady and forceful stream. After the judge’s usual opening question, her testimony fills seven columns of small print in the transcript, save for one brief interruption. As with her physical appearance, descriptions of her voice are contradictory—it was said to sound both “
metallic” and “melodic,” with an unusual range, hitting high notes and then descending so low the sounds seemed to growl from deep in her chest. (One correspondent compared her to the famed mezzo-soprano Anastasia Vialtseva, beloved for her virtuoso renditions of gypsy songs.)

She spoke well, but perhaps too well, too fluidly. To one correspondent, she seemed to speak “as if she were
running away.” She described the key scene vividly—how
Beilis and the other Jews ran after the children at the brick factory, how Zhenya barely escaped, leaving Andrei behind. It was all very compelling, but suspiciously well-performed for a secondhand account. (She was supposedly only relating Zhenya’s story, after all.). It struck one reporter that only two kinds of people describe scenes so vividly:
eyewitnesses and liars.

Cheberyak recounted her story of the trip with the journalist Stepan Brazul to Kharkov in December 1911 and how Arnold
Margolin, or one of his confederates, offered her the enormous sum of forty thousand rubles to confess to Andrei’s murder, and how she would be spirited out of the country or defended by the best lawyers in the land who would secure her acquittal. Nearly as important for the prosecution was another story she told: how she had
sent Zhenya to buy
milk from Beilis not long before Andrei disappeared, and how the boy supposedly returned, pale with fear, saying two Jews dressed in strange black garments had run after him, but he had gotten away. One of the Jews was old, the other tall and young. According to Cheberyak, her son said one looked like the hay and straw dealer, Shneyerson, the supposed
Hasid of the noble line, and the other could have been Shneyerson’s father. (When Shneyerson testified, he turned out to be a rather surly, self-confident, and clean-shaven young man who did not at all look the part of a nefarious Hasid.)

After the prosecution was done, Gruzenberg began an orderly cross-examination, addressing this potentially most dangerous witness with no hint of confrontation in his voice and in an almost soothing tone. Vera Cheberyak was an impressive witness as long as no one asked her any real questions. Gruzenberg began with a very simple one.

“
Were you questioned many times by the investigators?”

“Yes, many times,” she said, though she couldn’t remember how many.

From that one exchange everything followed. Gruzenberg was leading her step by step until she stood over a trapdoor.

So she had been questioned a number of times. When, Gruzenberg asked her, had she first told the authorities Zhenya’s story about Jews grabbing Andrei at the factory? She insisted that she had first told investigating magistrate Fenenko the story in June 1911, even though there was no record of that.

But in that deposition of June 24, he calmly asked, “did you not tell the investigator that Zhenya did
not
go [out with Andrusha to play]?”

“I don’t remember,” she said.

“And didn’t the investigator question you again, in July?” Gruzenberg asked. In fact, he asked, hadn’t the investigator questioned her several more times?

Again: “I don’t remember.”