Red Love (19 page)

“This was 1915. I was working at the Arrow shirt factory in Williamsburg. I worked on artificial flowers. They taught me how to work on a button sewing machine. Every time I broke a needle they would mark it down and take two cents out of my pay.

“Oh, I wanted to show you a letter my son sent me once.” She handed him a typed page with two quotations on it:

Oh, the comfort, the inexplicable comfort of feeling safe with a person. Having neither to weigh thoughts or measure words, but to pour them all out just as they are, chaff and grain together. 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.

—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 A. Lovell, Jr. to his mother. At the time of its transmission he was 140,000 miles out in space on his way to the moon.

At the bottom of the page was written, “Love, Michael.”

“I wake up and hear him say, ‘Ma?’ I don’t wish it on anyone. See, the thing is, I went to work when he was a baby; a year and a half or two years. I had to get out of the house because I was so unhappy with my husband. He was jealous of me—very. I wasn’t an attractive-looking woman, and he knew beautiful ones. But he was insecure. And I didn’t like humiliation.

“I didn’t realize Michael wanted somebody close to him. His father was always running around. He would take Michael to the park, spread a blanket, and fall asleep.

“I got a letter the other day from Reagan. For Michael. They sent a self-addressed envelope with a stamp and they want a reply. I felt like writing, ‘You should be where he is.’ But I knew Michael voted for Reagan to spite me. He was envious because he knew that I had friends. He didn’t have a life. He learned Morse code by himself, and talked a lot to these people, the C.B.’s. The thing is,” she said, her voice breaking, “he really loved me very dearly.

“He would have been forty-eight years old now,” Sylvia said.

“Then he was—”

“That’s right, young man. He was your age.”

“Did you ever read Khrushchev’s speech in 1956?” he asked her.

“I didn’t bother,” Sylvia said. “Ben Davis said not to, and his vision was deeper than all mankind. Look, I was in the Soviet Union in 1937 when Stalin was president. 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. These bureaucrats had finally reached the day when they had servants and felt like millionaires. I spoke to a lot of people about them. `Their day will come too,’ they said. And it was true. Shortly after I came back here, the Soviet Union had the Moscow trials.”

“How did you feel about the trials?” he asked.

“What could you feel?” Sylvia replied. “I felt there had to be a clean sweep, and there was.”

“But then what did you think when Khrushchev said all those people were innocent, and the trials were rigged?”

“Listen,” Sylvia said, “I don’t think about the individual.”

F.B.I. Agent Goldberg and the Car Thief

Solly’s best friend.

—G. L.

I arrested Davey Lapidus. We got him on car theft. Caught him in the act. Took me where he stole the cars. A real skunk, low class. A thug. Greasy-looking, tough, surly, cheap crook. Head down, slinking around. He said: “I hate cops. I’ll kill any cops in my way.” But he really was a profitable car thief. He made a lot of money.

He asked to see me. Says: “I’m in the same place with Rubell. Maybe you’d like me to ask him some questions.”

I said goodbye. You don’t let a punk like that set you up.

He started telling me about it anyway.

We learned about Rubell through Lapidus.

Solly was weak. Look how he talked to Lapidus, opened his heart to him. Solly opened his heart to a car thief.

Every day I’d write a three-page memo from what Solly told Lapidus.

Solly was that vulnerable. He needed someone to talk to.

The House of Detention was tough in those days. A top Communist, Joe Horton, had his skull bashed in there. Horton had been standing in line for lunch, talking about how he hated the United States. Some little guy called him a son of a bitch, picked up a pipe and hit him. The warden called me up when it happened. There was blood all over the floor. It was a crime on government property.

After the Horton case, the warden and I became friends. He gave me carte blanche.

Ballinzweig was in there too. I asked the warden to bring Ballinzweig up. He was to be brought through the prison door leading to security quarters where prisoners were interviewed.

I was waiting in the interview room. Ballinzweig came through the door. The minute he saw me, he turned and went back to the door, stood there, waiting to be readmitted. Wouldn’t speak to me. He was holding all these engineering papers he worked on while in prison.

Ballinzweig was at least on the same level as Solly. But he didn’t recruit like the Rubells did.

I had dozens of cases like the Rubells.

Dolly was a vibrant recruiter. She worked at it. She was smart. Always talking with people she might be able to use. The squad room talk was that Dolly was the driving force.

We did chalk talks. On a chalkboard. Points. We’d tear up each point that was proposed; try to develop leads. Dolly was always mentioned. She covered her tracks very well. Solly was a wimp. She led his whole life.

Everyone in the office knew she was the driver.

One reason she wasn’t nailed: this was the 1950s—”this is a woman; you’re picking on a woman.”

Women prisoners who go bad are vicious. Men can still be nice guys. Dolly was vicious.

Squad room agents felt if we had gotten them apart, we could have broken him. Dolly seemed to feel that too. She insisted that Solly be executed first. She raised a hell of a row.

They wouldn’t let me talk to Solomon. I think I could have broken him. I’m low key, forthright. I have luck in that regard. Ballinzweig was surly and hostile. With his notebook, his engineering, working on complicated formulas. I didn’t like Ballinzweig

Solly was vulnerable. He knew about Joe Horton. I would have had an edge because he was in jail. I knew that jail. Prisoners had access to each other. Today that jail wouldn’t exist.

It was open and dangerous.

Solly, 1953

He didn’t flutter with the breeze.

—G. L.

Mornings in deep autumn, with the ebbing of his hopes, he noticed the leaves and maple-tree seeds blown by the wind descending slowly like helicopters over the death-house wall. The icy Hudson River wind. He began another letter to his children—”my precious children”—he talked about playing horsie with them and what it was like gathering them in his arms at bedtime, and again, again about his and Dolly’s innocence: “All the government had as evidence, children, were those
Freiheit
thimbles. Thimbles your mommy and I gave to our progressive friends for donating to a peaceful world by reading the
Freiheit.
For this, these cunning madmen plan to kill us.” He tore the letter up, and began another, telling them he hoped they were taking their piano lessons seriously. He told them their mother (alone in the women’s section of the death house) was a diamond, that no amount of government filth could scratch her honor.

The guards led him out into the yard again in the afternoon. The wind stung his ears. He watched a seagull sail upward in wide circles, lifted by the wind, and fly into the wide-open sky until he could no longer see it. And he saw Delancey Street and Columbia Street, the crowd surging by the pushcarts, the chickens in their wooden boxes cackling, the merchants shouting and fighting, and Solly saw himself hurrying home to Dolly and the kids. Rocking them all in his arms, crying out, “It’s over. Everything’s hunky-dory.” His legs almost buckled. He looked at the white streaks of calcium carbonate running in broken lines from brick to brick along the wall. He thought of coal and iron ore dug from the earth, trucks carrying it to the mills, iron and steel pouring from furnaces, parts sent to the prison. Mechanics molding them into an edifice, a death house…. What could he tell his children to make them understand? One parable, one picture. Peekskill, the Scottsboro boys, Gastonia,
Kritstallnacht,
Fuchik’s letters, Spain, Dmitroff’s speech to the Nazi court… . And he remembered something that said it all. The American captain who had told Solly of being on the outskirts of Dusseldorf in early 1945. The captain was preparing with his men a siege to liberate the city from the Nazis. A German worker, a printer wearing an apron, approached the captain. The German had asked the American captain for permission to hold a meeting of his Communist club, the first that would be held since Hitler took power. He handed the captain the written announcement of the meeting for his approval. It contained the date, time, and place, and the words, “Those who fluttered with the breeze are not invited.”

Only a Communist—no, Solly would have to write “progressive”--could have the perspective to call twelve years of Nazism a “breeze.” He sat down to write the letter. My precious children, do you now understand why your parents are dying?

And again Solly could breathe.

The Uncle

Shadow of a moustache.

—G. L.

I met Solly in the fall of 1938 at City College. I knew him for two semesters, in the alcoves mainly. He was there early and late.

He was not too bright.

I could see Solly getting involved with the Russians, trying to help: this aspect of looking for a parent.

A very strange, unhappy young man. Lonely, always there in the alcoves, always away from home.

He didn’t have depth.

When the Springers adopted the kids, they looked for people who had knowledge of the Rubells. They wanted to provide continuity, not treat the parents as outcasts.

I saw the kids quite often after the execution. I played chess with Joseph. He used to play chess with his father. So I was Uncle Henry.

The Springers had a family conference every week where anyone could bring up any subject. They operated by majority vote.

The Jewish community was concerned that Communists were raising the kids. The Jewish Child Care Association came with the police and took them away. Joseph and Amy held hands all the way to Pleasantville, New York, where they were put in a shelter.

Acting purer than the goyim, protecting the good name of the Jews: this is what I call a Jewish judge sentencing the Rubells on the eve of Yom Kippur. I think it was part of a primitive purification rite for him that was very vulgar.

In order to wrest control from the Communists, a WASP, Dean Smyth of the New York School of Social Work, was appointed co-guardian. The kids’ grandmother, Sarah Rubell, was the other co-guardian, but Smyth was main man.

The other grandmother said that if the kids were sent to her, she would throw them out the window.

Sarah Rubell said to the kids: “Look what your mother did to my son.”

The Springers would bring food and clothes for the kids. Sarah would hide them. No American culture, no Eastern European culture either.
Prost,
common.

But this doesn’t get the mood. She would speak against blacks. She would rail against this woman who took her son away. Doing this in front of five- and eight-year-old kids.

Joseph read the
Daily Worker.
After Amy went to sleep, he wanted to engage in political discussion: never a cultural or recreational matter. He announced his desire to become a lawyer. Vindication was the key word.

The adoption process was still under consideration. Dean Smyth allowed the kids to live with the Springers more and more. To me the amazing thing was their continued sanity. Joseph was a consummate actor. When Dean Smyth visited the Springer house, Joseph wanted to demonstrate what excellent adoptive parents they would be. He would eat an apple and say, “You know, Dean, Mrs. Springer says an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” He’d sit down and play the piano and say, “You know, Dean, Mrs. Springer says culture is very important.”

Joseph had a bar mitzvah. The dean needed it to satisfy the Jewish community. But he treated it very seriously. Not really a put-on.

Joseph sang and he recited. Dean Smyth cried like a baby. At the end he told Joseph he was magnificent. He said, “I wish I had taped it.” Joseph said, “I’ll do it all over again.”

The dean arranged for the adoption by the Springers. In the wee hours of the morning they all descended from different parts of the city, pretending they didn’t know each other as they walked up the steps of the court. The dean had pneumonia and came out of a sickbed to get it done. He died the next day.

The community wanted the kids to be punished for what their parents did.

I didn’t have a kid of my own. What do you do with children, you play. I became the uncle. I’d do multiple accents. I’d wear my glasses on my head.

I see Solly’s face before me.

A young guy with a moustache, which struck me as strange. My concept of a
yeshiva bocher,
somebody who had not come of a more cultured background. He wore a suit. Most likely he had one suit.

Now Joseph was growing a little stubble of a moustache. He turned his profile and said, “Who do I look like?” I said, “You look like Joseph.” He said, “No no no.” And I said, “You look like Joseph.” And he said, “Come on now.” I said, “You want me to say you look like Solly? You look like Solly. Does that make you happy?” He said, “Yeah, it does make me happy.”

Surveillance

May I come in?

—G. L.

“For years,” the woman said to the reporter, “I kept a nun’s costume with a magnetic chessboard in a locker in the old Penn Station. I was sure I was going to get swept up when the arrests began. They had concentration camps ready.”

A man watches a cabin in Goldens Bridge, New York, in 1949. He watches the movements of a young couple and their two kids. He watches the father, recognizes the type: a candy-store boy. Both of them,
schleppers.
He observes their comings and goings.

In time, he will knock at their door. He will drop a
Daily Worker
he is holding and, after they react, pick it up sheepishly, as if he is not sure of their response. They will glance at each other, and welcome him instantly. He will drink the couple’s coffee and eat their food, and bounce their children on his lap. He will play the harmonica for them.

The kids flap after the ducks on the lake, calling and laughing. The father carries the little one on his back, playing horsie, and tossing her into the air, sings:

“Fly higher and higher and higher

Our emblem’s the Soviet Star

Let every good comrade shout Red Front!

We’re building the USSR.”

The little one cannot get enough of her father. The boy wants to grow up to be like Ben Davis.

The mother, away from her therapist, the rasping New York streets, is ready to scream. But how she loves her babies. The cold lake water cleanses the smell of fear that she carries with her. Even in the water, sometimes Solly and Dolly look anxiously to the shore to see who is there. There is their neighbor, the advanced thinker, the man with the harmonica.

In the jail bullpen the guard averted his eyes and said in an unnaturally soft voice, “Nick, your mother is here to see you. …”

This was hell! This was worse than frying!

—Knock On Any Door

Willard Motley

The boy read the novel after his parents were executed. To learn how it went.

In 1975, in a very small room of the famous Barr Building on Olive Street in St. Louis, a woman was on her lunch break. She was a newcomer to the city. She noticed a man her age who came into the room from time to time: a thin, stern-looking person with white hair.

One day he told the newcomer that he was one of those who spied on the Rubells. He described the cabin on the beach, the children playing.

The woman told the reporter in 1988: “I left home at twenty-one. When the Communists came around, I was ready to join them.

“I married one of the comrades. He was, like most of the others in the Party, a misfit and a loser. My life was even worse than before. I divorced him and dropped all my old friends.

“Three years later rumors reached me that the F.B.I. were looking for me. They visited me. They did not say I was going to jail but let my own fears work on me.

“They suggested I go back into the Party and spy. I would receive twenty-five dollars a month for expenses. I refused. That was the end of it.

“Later, I was on a picket line for Women Strike for Peace. The Red Squad’s photographer was there. He called me a
schoene maydel
— that meant ‘nice girl.’ This was his way of telling me he knew I was Jewish.

“As time went on I was generally burned out as far as any other activity was concerned. When I met this man and he told me about the Rubells, you can see why I reacted the way I did. It was partly what he did and partly what I had lived through. I don’t know why he even trusted me enough to tell me what he did. I never found out his name. There was nothing about him that made me think he was not telling the truth or that suggested that he was delusional. I have, in my lifetime, met truly delusional persons and he was nothing like them.

“If someone is suspected of spying, I think the government has a right to keep them under surveillance. But to go out of your way to be friends with people, to eat at their table, to maybe hold their children on your lap—and then coldly turn around and hand them over. …

“Well, anyway. Just telling you all this gives me a strange feeling. It makes me tired, if you want to know the truth.”

The older child remembers the apple his mother kept on the windowsill of her cell, and many details about both of them. His father’s arms around him, and his mother’s.

The younger child does not remember them.