“THE NEW YORK TIMES”
14.01.98

“A JEW STALIN KILLED NOW SYMBOLIZES REBIRTH.”

A Moscow festival
Mourns and celebrates
An actor - director.
By Alessandra Stenley.

     MOSCOW, Jan. 13 - In the early hours of Jan 13. 1948, great Yiddish actor and director Solomon Mykhoels was slain by Stalin’s secret police, spelling the death of the Jewish theatre in the Soviet Union.
     At midnight on Monday, some of Russia’s most famous Jewish and non-Jewish artists and performers held a candlelight vigil at the Russia Concert Hall in Mykhoels’s memory - the finale of an extraordinary weeklong tribute to Mykhoels that was both a celebration and a public act of contrition.
     “ I agree with Solzhenitsin, we have not repented enough,” Yevgeny Yevtushenko said . Mr. Yevtushenko, whose famous 1961 poem “ Baby Yar” mourned the Nazi massacre of Jews in Ukraine and Soviet silence about it, was one of dozens of artists who performed during the festival. “ The is repentance for many murdered writers and my two grandfather, who were just discarded”, he said.
     Tens of millions died in Stalin’s purges, but the assassination of Mykhoels, who was also regarded as the greatest Shakespearen actor of his generation in Russian conscience. “The tragedy is that so many great Soviet Jewish figures have been forgotten and eclipsed”, Joshua Rubenstein, the American author of a biography of the journalist Ilya Erenburg. He is researching a book on the 1952 trial and execution of Mykhoels’s closest associates. “ There is little left to reflect what they achieved or tried to achieve”, he said. “they are remembered only for their deaths.”
     The festival’s 17 events began with a star-studded concert at the Bolshoi Theatre on Jan. 5 and included evening on which some of Mykhoels’s former students (who flew in from Israel) sang fragments of song once performed at the theater Mykhoels founded, the State Jewish Theatre. Stalin ordered it closed in November 1948, and it is now known as the Maly Bronnoi Theater.
     All week long were film clips, readings, discussion sessions about Mykhoels and his work, and myriad concert and dance performances. “The Diary of Anne Frank” was performed in Moscow for the first time since the so-called Khrushchev thaw in the early 1960’s. But except for a modern Russian-language adaptation of Mykhoels staging of a musical parable, “The Journey of Benjamin III to the Holy Land”, there were no full revivals of his other legendary productions. Yiddish theatre is an art long buried and only recently revived in Russia.
     “For whom are you going to perform it?” said Mikhail Gluz, director of the Solomon Mykhoel’s International Art Festival in Moscow,. “Yiddish is not a language known or understood by the vast majority of Russian Jews. Even at our theater we only do Yiddish songs and dances, because that people can feel, without understanding the words”.
     There has been enormous revival of Jewish life and culture in Russia since Communism collapsed, ending state-sponsored, anti-Semitism. The Mykhoels festival, which was organized by some of Russia’s most influential banks and businesses, was a reflection of that renaissance. But the vast gaps in memory even among Jewish here only heighten Mykhoels’s contribution and what he came to symbolize in deny.
     He created the first Jewish acting studio two years after the revolution and with support from the Bolshevik Government turned in into the acclaimed State Jewish Theater. Throughout the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s, Jewish and non-Jewish flocked to his theater. His “King Lear”, performed in Yiddish, was legendary. Mykhoels was a Soviet patriot who believed for a time that he could carve a niche for Jewish culture in the new society.
     During World War II, Mykhoels headed the Anti-Fascist Committee, a propaganda unit of the N.K.V.D., or secret police, that promoted the Soviet War effort among Jewish in the West. Mykhoels visited the United State in 1943, the first official representative of Soviet Jewish ever to make the trip, and raised millions of dollars for Russia. He also tried to help Jewish then and latter, using his fame and connections.
     The Soviet Government tolerated the committee’s work during the war, but in the late 1940’s, Stalin, increasingly paranoid and anti-Semitic, turned against it and its leaders. The committee was closed down in November 1948. On Stalin’s order, Mykhoels was killed - run down by a car driven by the N.K.V.D., which eventually became known as the K.G.B. Thirteen of the leading members of the committee were tried and executed in 1953.
     “ It is the tragic paradox of Soviet culture. So many served the system and then were destroyed by it said Alla Gerber, a writer and former member of the Russian Parliament, who at Monday’s show.
     The final tribute to Mykhoels was anything but solemn, however in the vast 2,000-seat Rossiya Concert Hall, the story of Mykhoels’s life, presented in sketches by two well-known actors, was punctuated by variety show dance numbers and songs garish purple lighting, dry ice and strobe light. Along with traditional Jewish songs, there was a strong whiff of Soviet kitsch : a Bolshoi dancer performed the dying swan scene from “ Soviet Lake” to the crooning of Iosif Kobzon, a popular singer. Mr. Kobzon, who is Jewish, sang “ Shalom Aleichem” and was presented with a special certificate naming him the festival’s man of the year.
     “The theme is Mykhoels, everything is dedicated to him ,” Mr. Gluz explained. “But the festival is also about Jewish culture. When we started, even Jewish said to me, keep it small, keep it quit and modest. I said, no, it’s got to be big, it’s got to be on the highest level”.
     The sheer size of the festival the number of famous stars and big-ticket performances, seemed to appeal to many participants. “For those of us who lived through Soviet times, this kind of gala is unimaginable,” said Eduard Topol, a writer of thrillers who moved to New York in the 1980’s and returned to give a reading dedicated to Mykhoels. “Ten years ago, even five, we could ever happen here.”
     Last night’s dramatic highlight came in the final tableau of Mykhoels’s life. Nataliya Gundareva, the actress who played Mykhoels’s wife, Anastasiya walked to the center of the stage and said ,”At this exact time, 50 years ago, Solomon Mykhoels was killed.” Seconds later, a black 1940’s Volga drove onto the stage and to the sound of screeching tires knocked down huge black-and-white photographs of Mykhoels.