Two for the Devil

This searing third novel in the critically acclaimed Small Worlds series records the cruel fate of the villagers of Krimsk as they encounter the twentieth-century's greatest agents of evil, Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler.

It is Rosh Hashanah-the Jewish New Year and Day of Judgment-in Moscow during the Stalinist purges of 1936. In the Lubyanka secret police prison, senior investigator Grisha Shwartzman masterfully pursues the rigorous logic and obsessive legalism of the Soviet witch-hunt. Facing an extraordinary prisoner, Grisha realizes that the Soviet system he has faithfully served is murderously corrupt and that he himself will be the next victim-but not an innocent one. In despair, he flees to his home, where his deranged wife and an unexpected Rosh Hashanah letter from his father-in-law, the enigmatic Krimsker Rebbe in America, await him. The Day of Judgment proves to be a startling experience as Grisha, the once idealistic radical, judges himself, accepts his responsibilities, and is guided to sublime passion and possible redemption by his mad wife, who for twenty years has been patiently awaiting him in a closed wardrobe.

In 1942 a train of imprisoned Jews leaves the Warsaw ghetto for "resettlement in the East." It is Yom Kippur-the Day of Atonement and the holiest day of the Jewish year. In a crowded cattle car stands a lonely, defeated individual who is ashamed that he cannot even remember his own name. During the tortuous journey Yechiel Katzman will overhear a talmudic debate and meet a dull-witted giant who turns out to be none other than Itzik Dribble, also from Krimsk. As they arrive in the death camp of Treblinka, Yechiel remembers not only his name but alsothe Krimsker Rebbe's prophetic curse that exiled him from Krimsk forty years earlier. Yet as death approaches, that curse will prove a blessing.

Stalin and Hitler decree certain death, but Grisha and Yechiel discover Jewish fates. The devil incites loneliness, degradation, despair, and even complicity; through memory, the victims elicit community, dignity, and the awareness of sanctity. Grisha's "Soviet" Rosh Hashanah and Yechiel's "Nazi" Yom Kippur are truly "Days of Awe." Even when death is certain, life can be lived.

Other Details: 256 pages 5 1/4 x 5 1/4"

sap its lifeblood, he would listen.

Who could appreciate that lifeblood better than an old Chekist who had struggled to create the very revolution itself? The very first political institution created following the Great October Revolution was the Cheka—whose initials stood for Extraordinary All-Russian Commission of Struggle against Counterrevolution, Speculation, and Sabotage. Not until a month later did the party establish the Glorious Red Army under Trotsky, that traitor. There was a man who split the party and damaged the state! The Chekists, however, were loyalty itself. The party's founder had enrolled Grisha in the fledgling organization. Oh, Grisha had taught them a thing or two. And now? Chekists themselves were not only suspect but even more suspect than anyone else. Why? Why those who had served so faithfully, the sword and shield of the revolution?

In the past few years, when his head had spun, Grisha had hoped that things would settle down and his head would cease to spin. Everything would fall into place and begin to make sense. He wanted to stifle the swirling chaos he was afflicted with—as a dizzy child reels, stumbling off a carousel—until little by little, the world would stop gyrating and once again only the carousel would revolve, balanced and bright, a large child's toy. Now Grisha realized there might be no climbing off the ever quickening machine. Disoriented, he would inevitably lose his grip and be flung off, to crash against stable objects such as the prison bars of the Lubyanka itself. Or worse, flung into the basement, where the dreaded pistol shots had no echoes.

Colonel Shwartzman had feared for the revolution; now he feared for his life. Others who had ridden the carousel more skillfully—moving to the very center, where the motion was negligible—had been thrown to their deaths. Henrik Yagoda, the chief of the NKVD, had disappeared. Grisha had not been allied with Yagoda; those who had, immediately followed the ex-chief into the basement. Until Yagoda's precipitous fall, Grisha had always assumed that he himself had an insurance policy against casualty. Grisha had served Stalin faithfully from the beginning. Not personally, but he had never made a secret of where his loyalties lay. After beloved Lenin's death, Grisha had understood that Stalin was the only man for the job. But look what had happened to Stalin's man, Yagoda. No, with Stalin there were no insurance policies, only sacrosanct areas where the NKVD would not arrest one of their own. The organs could never admit a mistake; therefore, no NKVD officer could ever be arrested while interrogating a prisoner. As long as the prisoner in front of him remained, Grisha was safe. Two hours ago he should have returned him to his cell. How much longer could he keep him here?

Grisha stared across his desk at his insurance. An experienced prisoner, the man sat erect. Anyone entering the office from behind would never suspect him of sleeping. His eyelids were inflamed and puffy from days without rest. Grisha guessed that his companion was about his own age, slightly over fifty, but the man had been in prison camps before he was returned to the Lubyanka, and he looked considerably older. For all the discomfort of the prisoner's predicament, his unguarded expression revealed something smug, as if the NKVD were not worth losing sleep over. Jealous that the man could rest so innocently, Grisha felt a rush of the old Chekist indignation at the prisoner's contempt for Soviet justice. A Chekist colonel had a sense of pride! Suddenly, Grisha went around the desk and kicked the prisoner in the shin. The man's eyes popped open, and he instinctively began to rub his leg.

"Mock Soviet justice!" Grisha cried indignantly. He wasn't acting. He felt the burning hatred welling up within him as if he had swallowed hot lead.

"We know everything. We know everything about you," Grisha railed: "You!" He wanted to spit out the prisoner's name, as if even pronouncing it left a bad taste in a decent man's mouth, but for the life of him he couldn't remember. He wanted to check the name on the folder lying on his desk, but he thought better of it. The organs were infallible and omniscient.

"You Trotskyite wrecker!" He uttered these words with the abhorrent loathing he felt for all those who had followed that arrogant theoretician. Stalin had gotten that right!

The prisoner looked slightly bewildered. Grisha had caught him with his guard down. Now was the time to press the advantage.

"Do you still deny it?" Grisha snarled.

Perplexed, the prisoner shifted his weight.

"Answer me," Grisha demanded.

"It's not true," the man said in simple honesty and looked strangely at his NKVD antagonist.

Offended, Grisha could see that the man was not the least bit intimidated.

"How can you expect me to believe that?" He twisted his face into a pained expression.

The prisoner began to answer, then hesitated, as if he thought better of it.

"Tell me," Grisha coaxed with a certain gruff sincerity. "We're here to tell the truth."

"For the last week you have been accusing me of Menshevik wrecking through Bukharinist counterrevolutionary circles," the man said with no emotion.

Shamed at his lack of revolutionary vigilance and enraged by the prisoner's lack of fear, Grisha screamed, "I'll squeeze your balls until you piss blood! You'll sign whatever the charge is. And if the charge changes, you'll sign again. You think it makes a difference. You'll sign that your mother was a garbage truck. And it will be true, too!"

Grisha's head was reeling. He had never talked this way. This was the new way, the way his younger colleagues spoke, all vulgar bluster. Ashamed of indulging in such a primitive outburst, and embarrassed—the organs never made a mistake—Grisha wanted to get rid of the prisoner immediately. He rang for the guard to remove him.

While waiting, he took his pen and entered a few meaningless remarks in the file about "double-dealing as a means of wrecking the truth." He didn't want to look at the prisoner until the guard arrived. Grisha wasn't afraid of revealing his own fear, but he was unnerved by the absence of any in the prisoner. The man should have experienced a terrible, debilitating fear that would reduce him to putty in the interrogator's hands, to be molded for the good of the state. Why wasn't he afraid? After all, Grisha really could squeeze his balls until he pissed blood. There were investigators in the building who beat prisoners on the base of their spines until they were crippled, and in some cases without the subtle pretense of serial blows. They simply snapped men's spines. Grisha's vulgar, demeaning threat might have been proved idle, but how could the prisoner, whatever his name was, know that? Grisha felt the shadow of his immediate superior Colonel Nikolai Svetkov hovering over him. Only Svetkov's informer would have nothing to fear. If Grisha popped this old Menshevik into a punishment cell for a week, he might look at things a little differently, but to do so would be admitting his own failure.

Grisha felt weak and vulnerable, which was the best reason not to put this what's-his-name into solitary. If he were in the hold, Grisha would be freed for another insulting assignment. Heaven only knew what Svetkov would come up with next time. In 1936, where in the world had he found a Menshevik? Grisha was probably better off with the case he had, embarrassing as it was. In the early twenties the Mensheviks had been jailed, and by the early thirties most had been exterminated. How could Svetkov swirl in from Kiev to Moscow and find a Menshevik to investigate?

Svetkov's handing the assignment to a colonel was a clear insult. "This calls for the tested eye of an old Chekist," Svetkov had announced with his usual burst of energy. It wasn't clear, however, who was testing whom. And as Grisha heard the guard approaching, he had an overwhelming desire not to be found wanting. Contradicting all his previous thoughts, he had what seemed to be a brilliant solution: he would send the leftover prisoner to a punishment cell for insulting Soviet justice. Yes, in a feverish rush he decided that was the certain way to save himself. It would demonstrate his loyalty, his courage, and the correctness of his beliefs. But another voice screamed that it would leave him naked, exposed to Svetkov's machinations and charges of incompetence. Svetkov would suggest that he had failed by not eliciting a confession from what's-his-name and by wasting a punishment cell that was needed for really dangerous elements. And if Svetkov could find a Menshevik with whom to torture him, what else might he find?

A knock on the door, and two guards entered. Grisha was swept by a wave of terror as the carousel whirled around. So they had come for him, too. Would his last ride be an elevator descent to the basement or a sedan drive to some NKVD woods outside the capital? As his mind split, falling into the basement and flitting to the outskirts of Moscow, his eyes fell onto the ugly, scratched surface of the blocky desk, and the filthy top suddenly fascinated him, with its myriad scratches, abrasions, and dirt; it was altogether unique and worth a lifetime of study. A lifetime he no longer possessed.

While Grisha studied the desk, one guard escorted the Menshevik from the office. The other stepped forward and cleared his throat. Reluctantly, Grisha looked up to discover that his jailer was Yuri, a plodding, dull-witted man whom he had gotten to know well over the past years. He lacked all personal spite, and Grisha looked at him in resignation.

"Colonel Svetkov would like to see you in his office now," Yuri announced.

"Why didn't he telephone?" Grisha asked suspiciously.

Yuri shrugged uncomfortably. It wasn't his job to guess why the new director of investigations did things the way he did. His job was to lock and unlock cells. He shrugged again.

"Who asked you to call me?" Grisha asked.

"The colonel himself," the guard answered.

"Where were you?" Grisha covered his embarrassment with a strong aggressive tone. No longer servile, he fixed his strong gaze on the jailer.

"In his office," the man replied, his discomfort steadily increasing.

"Good, Sergeant, things are working well. The party is doing its job!" Grisha announced with revolutionary bravado.

"Yes, Comrade Colonel," the guard replied with a serious enthusiasm that erased all signs of unease.

Grisha nodded, dismissing him. Comforted by the familiar dogma, Yuri left.

Grisha did not share the dullard's sense of well-being. What did Svetkov want, and why hadn't he used the telephone? Grisha didn't like it. Since he had arrived from Kiev two months ago, Svetkov had been working to isolate Grisha and discredit him. Take this Menshevik, this what's-his-name—and Grisha felt a pang of conscience. An NKVD investigator who spent five nights interrogating a socially hostile element and couldn't remember a name, or even the action of the enemy, discredited himself and should be isolated.

Colonel Shwartzman leaned forward and checked the front of the folder: Sergei Gasparov. Grisha quietly stared at the unfamiliar name. What was it?—a name on a folder in the Lubyanka, a paper tombstone. Grisha shook his head. A Menshevik. Who would have imagined such a thing these days? Realizing that the Mensheviks lacked all understanding of historical necessity and were bourgeois to the core, Lenin himself had begun to root them out. How could Grisha expect to remember a Menshevik? But Grisha couldn't forget Sergei Gasparov's eyes; they revealed no fear. A Menshevik buried alive. How could he not be afraid? His absence made Grisha uncomfortable—he no longer had an insurance policy. He picked up the folder and stood up. His superior, Nikolai Svetkov, wanted to see him.

"Vividly chronicles the extraordinary daily lives of the citizens of Krimsk . . . [Mr. Hoffman's] sympathetic presentation of these characters reveals much about the tension between human desire and belief, about the complexities of conscience and commitment." —New York Times Book Review

"First-rate fiction: reminiscent . . . of such precursors as Sholem Aleichem, but possessed of distinctive individual strengths and firmly rooted in its characters' strange new land and even stranger adventures." —Kirkus Reviews

"Hoffman fashions a haunting, bittersweet story of exile, dislocation and redemption in the Promised Land. . . . Robust humor, insight into human nature and an absence of sentimentality augment Hoffman's storytelling skills."

—-Publishers Weekly starred review

Author Biography: Allen Hoffman, award-winning author of the novels Small Worlds and Big League Dreams, and of the collection Kagan's Superfecta and Other Stories, was born in St. Louis and received his B.A. in American history from Harvard University. He studied the Talmud in yeshivas in New York and Jerusalem, and has taught in New York City schools. He and his wife and four children live in Jerusalem. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Bar-Ilan University.