The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin

By Ala Zuskin Perelman

Described by theater critics as one of the twentieth century’s greatest talents, Benjamin Zuskin (1899–1952) was a star of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. In writing The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin, his daughter, Ala Zuskin Perelman, has rescued from oblivion his story and that of the theater in which he served as performer and, for a period, artistic director. Against the backdrop of the Soviet regime’s effort to stifle any expression of Jewish identity, the Moscow State Jewish Theater—throughout its thirty years of existence (1919–49)—maintained a high level of artistic excellence while also becoming a center of Jewish life and culture. A member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Zuskin was arrested under fabricated charges and eventually executed on August 12, 1952, along with twelve other eminent Soviet Jews and committee members.

Zuskin Perelman’s fascinating chronicle, more than just a personal memoir, conveys the vibrancy and energy of Jewish theater, celebrates the cultural achievements of Soviet Jews, and calls attention to the tragic fate that awaited them. The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin sheds light on Soviet Jewish history through the lens of one of the period’s most influential cultural icons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Mar 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9780815653240

Book preview

PART ONE

1

Prologue

Whirlwind.

A dancing crowd moves unwaveringly from the depths of the stage toward me. It is led by Reb Yekl. He is Badkhen,¹ the spirit of happiness, and a small part of him is the spirit of sadness. This is Benjamin Zuskin; this is my father.

The day, July 23, 1945, two and half months after Nazi Germany was defeated in World War II, the Moscow State Jewish Theater presents the debut performance of Freylekhs (merry dance tune, mostly used to express a wedding joy).

Zuskin sweeps the dancing throng along after him; Zuskin flies. This is not a slip of the tongue: he soars into the air, like the flying figures of Chagall.

I watched the play Freylekhs countless times, because they put it on again and again until the theater itself ceased to exist. And by then I had managed to grow up. That is why it is so easy for me to imagine myself a spectator in the audience, a wondrous legend unfolding before me.

A wedding tune is being played. The tune is growing louder, steadily becoming stronger. It sounds familiar, something that we have not heard for a while and seem to have forgotten, although we have always felt it in our hearts.

Reb Yekl flies and the crowd follows him, dancing and swaying to the music, becoming lighter, swifter, more enthused.

Reb Yekl stops and the crowd freezes in place. Reb Yekl leans on the post of the painted stage-set door. Nothing in this play is meaningless. Behind the doors also and the posts have you set up your memory (Isa. 47:8). Memory is in fact what this wondrous play is about. The voice of Reb Yekl is filled with pain, warmth, and anguish as he turns to the audience and delivers a speech in memory of past suffering, in memory of the souls of relatives and dear ones who are no longer.

And immediately the poignant story is replaced by the story of the forthcoming wedding. Reb Yekl’s words flow from him and he doesn’t forget to fly.

After that he bursts forth in a folk song, There once was Elimelekh/And music he played freylekh [joyously]. And how that song is sung by Zuskin! How he actually lives that character! Elimelekh, of the song, plays his violin or flute and the vocal intonations by Zuskin, his movements, his gestures toward the orchestra—all of these blend with the sounds of the violin or the flute in the orchestra.

As the wedding tune plays in the background, the wedding participants, cups in hand, fill the stage. And this whole spectacle takes place against a magnificent stage set and is accompanied by remarkable music.

Looking down over all of this with mild scorn and fervor, leading, clothing it in spirituality is Reb Yekl.

Zuskin/Yekl leaps and soars, sings and dances, chuckles and laughs. He is the spirit of joy, and he is also the spirit of sorrow who carries on his back the sack of grief. Light of movement and lively as mercury, he knows how to glorify and heighten the expression of the eternal spirit of the Jewish people.

For a quarter of a century now Zuskin has been on stage. In his role as Reb Yekl, he encompasses everything that is of value to him: unbounded theatricality with limitless profundity of thought. Here he is alive once more.

He lives the life of a lyric-tragicomic actor.

Toward the end of the play, he is still weightless and shows no signs of imprecision of speech, movement, song. Mazel tov! Zuskin/Yekl exults with infectious exuberance:

After the grief there will be joy still

Celebrate weddings our people yet will!²

The curtain falls. The audience applauds Zuskin, receiving him with acclamation and cheers. He returns to the stage, bows respectfully to the audience and leaves, tired, drained of the tension that had gripped him only a short moment before. In his dressing room, he sits in his armchair, and before he removes his makeup, he studies himself in the mirror. Perhaps Zuskin, too, like the hero of Poem without a Hero by Anna Akhmatova, does not identify himself in the creature who stares back at him, and perhaps it seems to him, as it did to that hero, that in the depths of the mirror

Is approaching the Twentieth Century

Not the calendar’s, the real one.³

Zuskin was born in 1899 and his age paralleled that of the twentieth century as noted on the calendar, but the real twentieth century would lie in ambush for him when it reached its halfway mark.

CERTIFICATE

The sentence of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR of July 18, 1952, regarding Benjamin Zuskin, born in 1899 in the town of Panievezhys, Lithuany, and condemned to the severest measure of punishment, execution, was carried out on August, 12, 1952.⁴

For Zuskin, the real twentieth century begun actually four and a half years before this unimaginable, intolerable verdict was handed down. It began the night between the 12th and 13th of January in 1948, the night of the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, whose connections with Benjamin Zuskin could not be disentangled.

Zuskin is plagued by insomnia. The doctors hospitalize him in order to cure him with anesthesia; and in their naiveté, they believe that they can cure what appears to them as an illness.

He lies in the hospital bed, wrapped in starched white sheets, and for the first time in many long months, a happy smile lights up his face. This blessed sleep lasts four days out of the ten the doctors prescribed for him. The fourth night arrives, the night between the 23rd and 24th of December 1948.

JUNE 11–12, 1952

TRIAL

TESTIMONY BY BENJAMIN ZUSKIN

CHAIRMAN OF THE MILITARY COLLEGIUM (PRESIDING OFFICER OF THE TRIAL): When were you arrested?

ZUSKIN. On December 24, 1948.

CHAIRMAN: And that same day you gave the testimony that we are talking about now. In that testimony you confessed to being a nationalist.

ZUSKIN. Because I was brought to the interrogation in a complete stupor wearing a hospital gown. I was arrested in the hospital . . . while I was asleep, and it was only . . . when I woke up that I saw that I was in a cell and learned that I had been arrested . . . They said to me that I was a state criminal.⁵

DECEMBER 24, 1948

PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION

INTERROGATION OF BENJAMIN ZUSKIN

ZUSKIN. My arrest is the result of a coincidence.

INVESTIGATOR. It was no coincidence—there were facts about your hostile activity.⁶

JUNE 11–12, 1952

TRIAL

TESTIMONY BY BENJAMIN ZUSKIN

CHAIRMAN: I have your testimony . . . here in front of me.

ZUSKIN. I repudiate all the testimony and am now telling the truth . . . You should judge me not by the interrogation records, but by my deeds . . . ⁷

CHAIRMAN: Get to the point . . .

ZUSKIN. I am an actor.⁸

I’d like to describe . . . things that are not found in the forty-two volumes of the Investigation File.⁹

CHAIRMAN: In brief. You were born where?

ZUSKIN. In Ponievezh.¹⁰

2

Act One

(1899–1920)

Nyomke

On April 28, 1899, in the city of Ponievezh in Lithuania, a son was born to the family of the tailor Leybe Zuskin and his wife Chaya—Binyomin or Nyomke in Yiddish, Benjamin in English, my father.

He was the third son in the family, coming after Abraham, six years old, and Yitshak, three years old. Later, three girls were born—Sarah (Sonia), Menukha, and Frieda. Their livelihood was not plentiful, but this did not prevent the family members from being devoted to each other, good-natured, and outstandingly hospitable. Nyomke grew up in an atmosphere of warmth, compassion, and love.

My father could have presented himself the way Antoine de-Saint Exupéry did: Where am I from? From my childhood.¹ For him childhood was not just an indicator of the beginning of life or a collection of touching memories. Zuskin’s childhood was his ego, and it is spun into his life and the story that the pages of my book tell.

It seems to me that I know my father’s childhood as though I had experienced it myself. When we were together, my father used to ask me, What story shall I tell you? And I would reply, Tell something from ‘ME’! (ME being MEmories of childhood, my father’s). This was a joking byword that we shared between us, only my father and me.

Now I understand how those ME stories were a work of art. Whatever my father absorbed in his childhood lived in him permanently and was incorporated into the ME stories. And not only into them but also—and primarily—into his artistic creation. I was not lucky enough to see my father in many roles, but fate granted me the ME stories as a compensation.

Neither was I fortunate enough to know in reality the people surrounding my father as a boy, but to this very day they take shape before my eyes out of the mist; they are clothed in flesh and blood. I see and hear them, and they speak, they move, they eat and drink, sing, weep, and laugh.

I see a silhouette darting among them, dark as in the black and white films, the silhouette of a small sensitive boy who wants to be everywhere, to see and know and absorb everything and everyone. The silhouette grows before my eyes, it mounts the stage, becomes colorful, its movements become brisk. Gradually it grows blurry, ceases to move, reverts to being a small boy. The silhouette is replaced by that of a man who turns his back to me, his shoulders slumped. A flash of light blinds me; I hear a shot ring out. Fire devours everything. And out of this, scattering the ashes with his feet, the little boy races toward me.

What joy! Father is not busy; he is lying on his dark-green upholstered sofa, his feet on the armrest, and so I am allowed to ask: Daddy, tell something from ME!

And he would begin a story.

Leybe, my father’s father, was a special person. In his youth he dreamed of being a doctor. But his life took a different turn. Leybe’s father forced Leybe to leave school and become a tailor—to continue the dynasty of tailors, lest it come to an end.

In Nyomke’s early youth, his grandparents still lived in his father’s house, and his grandfather worked in some kind of sewing workshop there. The connection with the elderly tailor was the first station on a path that led to Zuskin the actor.

The child saw that the adults were wary around Grandfather even though they were respectful. Although elderly and frail, Grandfather was still able to hurl fire and brimstone at anyone who behaved improperly as he saw it.

However, Nyomke noticed something else. Those crushing statements made by his grandfather were a game! Sometimes he would even pronounce them in rhyme, like a seasoned comedian. At those moments he loved to trill a broad scale of notes from a deep bass to a high, reedy tenor. And to be sure, he knew how to do it. His voice could be warm and jovial, especially when he was engaged in his beloved sewing and he sang his songs. One of them Nyomke was to remember all of his life and even to sing it to me, and I do remember it, as well:

Tell me, my eye: of what do you have more—

Of twinkles for a joy, or tears for a sorrow?

The song is accompanied by the refrain, Tridle-lidle-le-li-li, and by an old man’s and Nyomke’s gestures as in a Russian folk dance. Nyomke’s mother Chaya, toiling near the oven, notices the child repeating all of his grandfather’s tricks and complains to her husband, Look Leybe, your father is infecting the baby with his clowning.

Clowning for its own sake? But no, here is a peerless tradition: a sense for music, the facial expression that seems to speak, imitating intonations, a talent for mimicry, and the understanding that sadness is mixed with joy, and joy with sadness.

Leybe was not cured of his attraction to medicine. When he became advanced in years, and bearing the burden of supporting a family with many children, almost every evening after a day of taxing work, he would sit down and read medical texts. He learned Latin unassisted in order to understand the medical terminology. In the local pharmacy they respected his prescriptions because they knew him and relied on his vast knowledge.

In Ponievezh, as in every small town, everyone knew everyone. In the eyes of the Jews, Russians and Lithuanians, Leybe was a respected and decent man always ready to lend a hand and offer advice at all times. They came to him even from the nearby villages and towns to seek his advice. Relatives and strangers alike came to him.

When they decided in Ponievezh to establish the Charity Society on behalf of the needy sick Jews, Leybe was among its founders.

Nyomke admired his father with all his might. He adopted his father’s readiness to participate in the suffering of others and a sincere interest in each and every person. These characteristics would accompany Nyomke the child, Benjamin the youth, and later would be revealed in Zuskin the actor. Years later Mikhoels would refer to Zuskin with these words: Every human being was for him like a flower for a bee; it has a unique drop of honey in it. The artist will soak up this drop and then incorporate it in his honeycomb, in Zuskin’s beehive.² Meanwhile Nyomke darted between the legs of the adults and collected honey-bearing pollen from everyone around his parents’ house, and they were many and colorful.

Nyomke began to attend the heder³ at the age of five. He knew his teacher Reb Genokh from his parents’ home as a desired and honored guest there. According to my father’s ME stories, Reb Genokh had a rare gift for acting. When he discovered that Nyomke also had an inclination toward acting, a boy of five and an old man of seventy started to entertain an audience of adults. This old man played a colossal role in Nyomke’s life and, to a large extent, led to Benjamin Zuskin the actor. Reb Genokh could not know, of course, while dubbing the kid Nyomke the Jester, that the roles of jesters that would fill his pupil’s life as an actor would include the role of the Fool in a Shakespearean play.

I never met Reb Genokh, but my father knew how to fascinate me as he clothed himself in this character. I could imagine, for example, the elderly teacher taking off his threadbare coat after having a drink, jumping into the center of the parlor, and like a young man, bursting into animated dance. How thrilling it was when my father recreated the dancing teacher using only his gestures, as he remained sprawled on the sofa.

In my mind’s eye a picture appears: Nyomke, a mischievous smile on his face, coming home from heder with a cluster of children and impressing them with his repertoire—I can assume that he was already eager to appear and perform before a crowd—walking on his hands, tumbling like a circus clown, making frightening leaps from a great height.

Once this leap ended badly for him.

They found him with his tongue bleeding and he was incapable of uttering a word. At home they were horrified at the thought that the boy might, God forbid, remain mute. Several hours later, he already managed to say his first words, although they were punctuated by lengthy silences. Periods of stammering continued to plague him intermittently for the rest of his life.

Nyomke did not learn his lesson from the accident and went on as before. Wherever there was a crowd, shouting, laughter, brawling, chattering, Nyomke was always there! Running, climbing, joking, soaking up the atmosphere, taking in a juicy expression from the peddlers in the marketplace, memorizing the melodies of the worshippers, and always coming back to mimic each and every one of them, together and separately.

Still, he did not forget to march in time with the times: In 1905,⁴ when he was six, there was a big demonstration, and policemen made efforts to disperse it. Nyomke’s uncle was then living in their house and sharing a room with Nyomke. The kid pulled the pistol peeking out from under Uncle’s pillow, and ever since—although Uncle immediately took the gun back from him—had become in his own eyes a revolutionary. He scrabbled in his pockets, found a few coins, and at a shop that sold toys, bought a toy pistol.

The day after the demonstration was dispersed, police forces surrounded all of the houses, even the teacher’s house which held the heder, and carried out searches. Master, whispered Nyomke to Reb Genokh, I have a weapon. The child was genuinely frightened. The police officer overheard it, frisked the boy, found the toy gun, and burst into laughter. Later the teacher and the pupil staged a performance based on this incident.

My father told the pistol story many times; it was the crown jewel in the ME series. The first time I heard it was when I was sick, and since the daylight bothered me, I was lying in the dark and imagining that it wasn’t Nyomke who had hidden the pistol under the pillow but I myself, and at any moment, a frightening police officer might appear at the door.

Several years later a search was conducted in our house following my father’s arrest. Those who conducted the search were much more frightening than the police officer in my father’s ME story. As then, I was lying in the dark, this time the dark of night, and the dread that gripped me reminded me of the story of the gun.

Who knows how deeply that pistol story was etched in Father’s soul? That sense of fear that brought a sensitive and vulnerable child to the abyss of despair must have awoken in Zuskin under the conditions of his detention and trial. Is it possible that he mentioned it there when he was granted the right of a free speech?

Shall I talk about days, or nights?

About people? About just things?⁵

Just things, inanimate objects, frequently served as important milestones in my father’s life as though he had entered the colossal world of law-like regularity through the small world of concrete concepts.⁶ And indeed, the ungraspable cannot be grasped.

Nyomke continued his mischievous behavior, a child who had a hand in everything.

At home, too, there was no lack of interesting attractions. At home Reb Genokh danced, many other guests came to visit, the sounds of machinery and the apprentices’ lively chatter drifted in from the sewing workshop.

Occasionally, at home in the evening, when his father Leybe had finally finished his work and perusal of medical texts, he began to read aloud the works of Sholem Aleichem. On those evenings, everyone, including mother, left everything, the apprentices did not rush home, the teacher came, too, and the neighbors. Leybe looked at those surrounding him, excited at the prospect of anticipated pleasure. Listen my children and I will tell you the story of a penknife; a story that is not fiction, but real, that happened to me myself.⁷ The absolute silence that prevailed during the reading was interrupted now and again by a peal of laughter or sighs and sobs.

When Nyomke learned to read, he began to read the stories of Sholem Aleichem aloud in the backyard. No less than reading aloud he loved to observe the expressions on the faces of the listeners. I would ascend the stage and feel the breathing of the audience,⁸ he would confess many years later.

My father’s mother had a very young sister, Minna, who was only slightly older than Nyomke and, thus, was his childhood friend and, afterward, a star in the ME stories. Only when I read her memoirs did I understand that by giving me the content of the Sholem Aleichem stories, my father was actually pointing to his own childhood. The happy times of childhood were the Shabbosim and holidays . . . When one holiday came to an end, we waited for the next one . . . One must read Sholem Aleichem in order to understand this,⁹ writes Minna.

Nyomke found purpose in reading aloud to his illiterate neighbors, but he aspired to more tangible deeds. His father Leybe understood this. The child was young, of course, not even eight years old, but proficient enough in reading, writing, and arithmetic and so it paid to test him. Leybe entrusted Nyomke with managing the account books of his charity society.

The boy was delighted. He not only helped his father, something which by itself filled him with pride, he submerged himself totally in the thick of life, learned to know the people whose existence until now made only a slight impression upon him. Tragedy, pain, poverty, weddings, circumcisions, and a sense of no-exit alongside unbounded cheerfulness—all these passed before him. How many characters there were! What pollen! It would yet become a work of art.

Certainly Zuskin’s childhood and youth were spent at the hub of Jewish lives. In that hub another matter was refined and tested which was important for Zuskin’s future.

The theater.

There was no theater in Ponievezh although there were actors like Grandfather and Reb Genokh; there were holidays and weddings whose customs were very theatrical and were experienced as theater. In addition, at least once a year, on Purim, a circus troupe or itinerant theater company would give a performance. Perhaps all of these inflamed his child’s imagination; perhaps a spark of the dreams had been burning in the depth of his soul from creation, and what he saw and absorbed breathed life into it. This speculation belongs to that same realm of the ungraspable that cannot be grasped.

Nyomke occasionally managed to filch a loaf of bread or delicacy from the kitchen and give it out to the hungry actors who played the supporting roles. He loved to watch the actors as they put on their makeup and got dressed; he also loved to put a wig on his own head or to attach a beard to his face.

Nyomke’s attraction to the theater pleased the actors and actresses, his enthusiasm at their performance flattered them, and his gift for mimicry aroused their excitement. They laughed and said with great approval, This child is going to be an actor yet!

Nyomke staged plays in his house. He received an invitation to play the role of a child in some play. He learned the role by heart, but at the last minute, he got stage fright and ran away. Nyomke would grow up. The boy’s talent would become the adult’s art. But then, too, he would be frightened whenever he had to mount the stage: he would never rid himself of the sense of responsibility nor the lack of confidence.

It was time for Nyomke to become Benjamin, and the family was planning the next stage of his studies. From ME stories I know that because of the shortage of money, Father was the only one of the six children who got an education. Leybe Zuskin was not pious and he hoped that his son would study in a secular school to acquire an occupation that carried prestige—his son should be a doctor. Thus, Nyomke tried to be accepted to the reali school—the secondary school that focused mostly on math and natural science studies. His application was rejected several times because of the numerus clausus system—for every ten non-Jewish students, they accepted one Jewish student, and preferably a wealthy one. He started to give private lessons, but one day Leybe came home and told him, Mazel tov, son, you were accepted to the reali school.

In the heder, Nyomke did not distinguish himself particularly at his studies because he was impatient; now he wanted to prove that he was capable, along the lines of Ah! So you didn’t want me? Look at this! and he became one of the best pupils in the school. He explained to his father, who was surprised by the discipline his fun-loving son had imposed upon himself, I will show them to discriminate against Jews! Although among the teachers there were also anti-Semites, Nyomke rose to the head of the class with a certificate of excellence.

One of the non-anti-Semitic teachers taught Russian language and literature. Benjamin Zuskin was his favorite pupil. The teacher, who dearly loved classical Russian poetry, was filled with amazement at hearing this Jewish boy recite a Russian poem with profound understanding and great feeling. In parallel to his studies at the reali school, the boy acted in a troupe of amateurs.

The young Zuskin who lived in the city, which was largely Jewish (of twenty-seven thousand inhabitants of Ponievezh, twenty-three thousand were Jews), knew about outbursts of anti-Semitism, naturally, but, as I understand it, never considered them other than one facet of life. He first related to anti-Semitism as a phenomenon in 1913 during the Beilis Affair.¹⁰ He knew everything that happened in that trial down to the last detail, since every day he read to his father’s apprentices the reports of the trial as they appeared in the newspapers. The case touched him and he was delighted when Beilis was acquitted of all guilt.

In 1914 World War I broke out, and in June 1915 the Supreme Commander of the Russian Army ordered that the Jewish population be deported from areas near the Russian-German border. Among these towns was Ponievezh.

The Zuskin family arrived at the railroad station and found there a great crowd of people from Ponievezh and from the surrounding towns, but no train. Meanwhile, people were sitting on the ground under the open sky. Night fell and, with it, rain. And the next day was the same.

Nyomke could not settle down, and full of curiosity, he moved among the seated people. Suddenly, not far off, amidst the weeping of the women, the shrieking of those giving birth, the wailing of the children, and the groans of the dying, he heard laughter. As he approached the circle where the laughter burst from, his glance fell upon a tattered pamphlet of the stories of Sholem Aleichem. Someone was reading aloud from it.

And so, the young boy personally experienced the horrors of suffering that Jews undergo only because they are Jews. He learned to understand the spirit of the nation, where pain and joy are mixed, and the everlasting power of creativity.

World War I brought to an end the childhood of Benjamin Zuskin.

Benjamin

A young boy approaches me with quick steps. I look at him. This is Benjamin, who has bid farewell to Nyomke forever.

His childhood in Ponievezh is replaced by a life of wandering.

The Zuskin family arrived in the city of Vitebsk. After a short time, the family was joined by the parents of the mother Chaya and her sister Minna. Even under such conditions, young people found a reason to laugh and to have fun, but not the adults—there was no livelihood, no future. One of Leybe’s acquaintances gave him a letter of recommendation to his relative who owned a clothing store in Penza. The Zuskin family again packed its bags and traveled to Penza.

Penza, which is considered a large city, is located in the eastern part of European Russia, approximately one thousand five hundred kilometers from Ponievezh, which is in western part of Russia. These facts are known to all, but very few know that Penza is a theater town. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was a widespread phenomenon of having in-house theaters on the estates of the Russian nobility. If we are to judge by the number of theaters of this kind, Penza held third place in Russia, after Moscow and St. Petersburg.¹¹ Penza also had a connection to twentieth-century theater, in its prime and in its decline. That was the birthplace and first appearance on stage of a person who was to reveal himself as an innovator in Russian theatrical art, Vsevolod Meyerhold. There, too, mounting the stage, albeit a stage of amateurs, was a person who was to reveal himself as a unique Jewish actor, Benjamin Zuskin. The same end lay in wait for both of them: Meyerhold was executed in 1941, Zuskin in 1952.

When the family arrived in Penza, Benjamin’s father Leybe was offered unreasonable terms of employment. And now fortune smiled on Benjamin’s brother Yitshak; he, too, was a tailor, like his father, and he managed to acquire a sewing machine and the two of them, Leybe and Yitshak, began to work together at home.

The family just has begun to recover from all the blows when an induction order arrived for Yitshak who, with Leybe, was responsible for the family’s livelihood. Now Benjamin had to go to work. And so, along with his studies, he gave private lessons.

At the reali school he was accepted into the ninth grade. He studied languages: Russian, French, and German; mathematics, algebra, and geometry; natural sciences and physics; political economics, draftsmanship, and drawing; as well as the craft of bookbinding.

My father loved to cover my schoolbooks and the results were a work of art. How amazing it was to what extent all of the experiences he had undergone and soaked up in his childhood and adolescence had become so rooted in his innermost soul. Incidentally, as the scion of a dynasty of tailors, he always sewed on his own buttons. Always.

He was recommended as a private teacher at the home of a well-to-do merchant. Now Benjamin had some money and for the first time in his life, he could allow himself to go to a real theater, a good Russian theater where the actors impressed him. From then on he went to the theater regularly, twice a week, and took his place in the upper balcony. Only now did he begin to see professional theater and to understand the nature of the acting profession.

At the same time it was not in his nature to remain a passive spectator, even in a professional theater. In Penza, a city of many refugees, a committee for the refugees was established and theater groups operated alongside it, among these, also groups of Jews. From September 1916 on, Benjamin took part in Yiddish plays.

At the end of 1915 or the beginning of 1916, Benjamin met a lovely modest girl by the name of Rachel Holand. She was also from Lithuania, from the town of Vilkomir. She attended the high school and intended to become a doctor. A spark was lit between them, youthful love.

After the February Revolution of 1917,¹² Benjamin was caught up in the enthusiasm of the events taking place around him. The youth became very active. In Penza they set up a cultural society for young people. This society also had a library and publishing house in the Yiddish language,