Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (61 page)

13
a colleague of Fondaminsky’s
: Vadim Rudnev.

14
BBRY, 441–43.

15
Ibid., 443.

16
the press bureau itself
: Denny, Harold, “Soviet ‘Cleansing’ Sweeps through All Strata of Life,” NYT, September 13, 1937, 1;
had to settle for cooks and nurses
: Denny, 1;
sausage stuffed with strychnine
: “Thirty-one Are Executed,” NYT, October 5, 1937, 10.

17
Scammell, Michael,
Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic
(2009), 158–9.

18
“Coughlin In Error, Kerensky Asserts,” NYT, November 29, 1938, 20. Kerensky pointed out that not a single Jew had been present in the first Provisional Government. Coughlin had millions of weekly listeners at the time and was in the process of republishing the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
in serial form in his own newspaper,
Social Justice
(USHMM:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007244
).

19
One article compared the chaos to G. K. Chesterton’s
The Man Who Was Thursday
, a nightmare novel in which the police are anarchists and anarchists
are police. “Purge of Red Army Hinted in Removal of Four Generals,” NYT, June 10, 1937, 1.

20
knew enough to see through the show trials
: Scammell, 94–95. Ironically, in his last year of university studies at Rostov State University, Solzhenitsyn trans formed the student newspapers, jolting them into relevance, and received a prestigious Stalin scholarship.

21
“
Better Hitler Than Blum
”: Haas, Mark,
The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics
(2007), 130; “
a subtle Talmudist
”: Judt, Tony,
The Burden of Responsibility
(2007), 76;
the Kerensky of France
: Trotsky, Leon, “Whither France? The Decisive Stage,” June 5, 1936.

22
Blum had resigned
: Blum, who had been inspired to enter politics by the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus trial, had maintained an uneasy alliance with the Soviet government despite the news of purges coming out of Russia, but took umbrage when a Soviet finance minister was assassinated in Paris just days before he was to make public revelations about the show trials. Faced with fiscal challenges and attacks from the far right and his own party, Blum was urged to launch a socialist revolution in France, but surrendered power according to the rules and conditions under which he had been given it. See “Foreign News: Stalin, Navachine and Blum,”
Time
magazine, February 8, 1937.

André Gide detailed Soviet human rights abuses
: Gide’s reversal would not change Nabokov’s impression of his writing; he later labeled Gide one of his three most-detested writers (reported in the
Wellesley College News
, mentioned in BBAY, 122).

a group of writers
: Together they formed the American Committee for the Defense of Léon Trotsky. Holding on to the shreds of their earlier revolutionary idealism, the inquiry spawned by the Committee was dedicated to proving Trotsky’s innocence in the Soviet plots attributed to him. Committee members met in Mexico with Trotsky himself. Despite its tendency to caress the exiled revolutionary, the commission managed to gather definitive proof that central pieces of evidence against Soviet party leaders facing execution had been fabricated. A hotel where a key conspiracy was said to have had been hatched turned out to have been torn down years before the supposed rendezvous. A clandestine airplane trip to Norway to meet with Trotsky had landed at an airfield that had been out of service for months at the time of the flight. A report hundreds of pages in length debunked the evidence in the show trials as fraudulent.

23
SM, 272.

24
BBRY, 480.

25
“Nazis to Answer ‘Eternal Road,’” NYT, February 14, 1937, 35.

26
a book: Der Ewige Jude
, Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachfolger GmbH, 1937;
exhibition was condemned
: “Boycott of Jews Reviving in Reich,” NYT, December 29, 1937, 6.

27
Shrayer, Maxim D. “Jewish Questions,”
Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives
, 86.

28
Sachsenhausen would soon hold Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor who defended Jews and publicly denounced Nazi rule.

29
“Hitler Is Pleased to Get Rid of Foes,” NYT, March 27, 1938, 25.

30
McCormick, Anne O’Hare, “Europe,” NYT, July 4, 1938, 12.

31
Newton, Verne,
FDR and the Holocaust
(1996), 131–4.

32
“
assimilable immigrants
”: “Reich Again Urged To Assist éMigréS,” NYT, July 30, 1938, 5;
fleeing Austrian Jews
: “Cold Pogrom in Vienna,” NYT, July 9, 1938, 12.

33
After the conference that fall, Switzerland and Germany worked out a border arrangement whereby all Jews in German territories would have a red “J” stamped on their passport. Any bearer of a J-stamped passport would be denied access to the Swiss border, while Germans considered Aryans could travel freely back and forth without any special visa (see the “J Stamp” entry from
Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution
, 363).

34
shot German Embassy staffer Ernst vom Rath
: A little over a week earlier, Grynszpan’s father, a Polish Jew, had been directed to report to a local police station in Hanover, Germany. From there, he had been held overnight and forc ibly deported to Poland with thousands of other men. See Nicholson Baker’s
Human Smoke
(2008), 94;
Jews would be punished
: “Reich Embassy Aide in Paris Shot To Avenge Expulsions by the Nazis,” NYT, November 8, 1938, 1.

35
USHMM:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005201

36
Schiff, 100.

37
USHMM:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005539

38
essential awkwardness … had never vanished
: Elena Nabokov, in Grossman’s “The Gay Nabokov”;
marriage to her had damaged Vladimir
: Schiff quotes Sergei writing to Nabokov’s ex-fiancée that if she had married Vladimir, “He would never have turned out so badly” (99);
would have been in dire straits
: Schiff, 99.

39
A prize-winning novel called
Silbermann
by Jacques de la Cretelle published in 1922 plumbed French anti-Semitism. A problematic presentation of the issue, it was nonetheless lauded for its humanity at the time and went on to be named one of the best novels of the first half of the twentieth century in 1950 by
Le Figaro
. The Silbermann of the story, savaged by French anti-Semitism and a trial against his father, goes to America to work for his uncle’s business.

40
60 percent of Americans were opposed
: Newton, Verne,
FDR and the Holocaust
, (1996), 57;
without ever receiving a full vote
: Introduced in February 1939, the Wagner-Rogers refugee aid bill was sponsored in the United States Senate by Senator Robert F. Wagner (D-N.Y.). Anti-Semitism on the part of State Depart ment officials also appears to have been part of the reason for the “failure to admit more refugees” under existing quotas (
http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007698
).

41
BBRY, 506.

42
Shrayer, “Jewish Questions,” 76.

43
Grossman, “The Gay Nabokov.”

44
Paragraph 175 was the section of the German code that dealt with homosexual behavior. V. D. Nabokov had supported Hirschfeld’s battle against this part of the code more than a decade before (Dragunoiu, 177).

45
Few stories of homosexual prisoners have been preserved, because they continued to be prosecuted under Paragraph 175 (the law the Nazis had strengthened) even after the war. Karl Gorath was arrested in 1939 and sent to Neuengamme and later to Auschwitz, and survived:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/idcard.php?ModuleId=10006529
.

heightened the risk
: USHMM,
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005261
.

46
The Hour of Decision
and
The Great Age
.

47
three British movies from recentyears
: The three movies were
The Rothschilds, Jew Süss
, and
The Wandering Jew
. Friedlander, Saul,
The Years of Extermina tion: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939–1944
, 20–23. All three targeted films were features, and in two of them the anti-Nazi German film star Conrad Veidt played the lead.

After fleeing Germany with his Jewish wife in the early 1930s, Veidt had immediately set about attacking anti-Semitism in film. Interestingly, the “Eternal Road” exhibition that had spurred the original Nazi Eternal Jew exhibition in 1937 had been put on by Max Reinhardt, the other German superstar who had abandoned his country to speak out against Nazi policies. The Nazis were apparently sensitive to the power of movie stars to generate bad press.

In one of the last scenes of
The Wandering Jew
, Veidt delivers a haunting monologue rebuking his monstrous Inquisitors. Acknowledging his own sin against Christ, he declares that their hatred and ignorance have nonetheless rendered them unfit to judge him.

48
Friedlander, 21–2.

49
Erich Stoll, Hans Winterfeld, and Heinz Kluth worked for Junghans on
Youth of the World
in addition to being cinematographers for
The Eternal Jew
.

50
He was also contributing to the right-wing nationalist newspaper
Aux Ecoutes
, and worked in a minor capacity in the French film industry. He appears to have extended a helping hand to the FBI through the French government, giving them notice that a Nazi agent and friend of Hermann Goering would be heading to New York. (Carl Junghans internment file, USNA.)

51
One from Bunin
: VNSL, 30; Gaiton-Marullo, Thomas,
Ivan Bunin: the twilight of émigré Russia
(2002), 69 and 203;
circus clown
: For an in-depth look at Bunin and Nabokov, see Maxim D. Shrayer’s “Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan Bunin: A Reconstruction,” 339–411;
willing to help
: By now, Bunin’s name was firmly
associated with sympathy for Jews. Parisian anti-Semites from the paper
Renaissance
called him the “kike father.” Gaiton-Marullo, 210.

52
Véra Nabokov’s skills as a domestic
: Schiff, 103;
route for Jews to enter the country
: This was understood to be true in both the U.S. and England, though the his torical analysis has been laid out more clearly in the case of England (see, for example
Whitehall and the Jews
by Louise London, in which London writes that “demand for women to undertake such work appeared inexhaustible”).

53
BBRY, 486–9.

54
Schiff, 104.

55
SM, 192.

56
Vasily Shishkov
: Shishkov was the maiden name of Nabokov’s great-grand mother; “
agreatpoet
”: STOR, 667.

57
BBRY, 511.

58
For more on “Vasily Shishkov,” see Shrayer’s chapter devoted to it in
The World of Nabokov’s Stories
(1999).

59
STOR, 497.

60
themention of his rival’s name
: Berberova, Nina,
The Italics Are Mine
(1999), 258.

61
BBRY, 515.

62
Ibid., 521–2.

63
“
France has been invaded a hundred times and never beaten
”: Diamond, Hanna,
Fleeing Hitler: France 1940
(2007), 8.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT
: A
MERICA

1
fired its guns at a whale
: BBAY, 11;
sailing into New York Harbor
: “French Liner
Champlain
Here,” NYT, May 27, 1940, 25; ship’s records from the 1940 voyages of the S.S.
Champlain
.

2
a note in New York’s Russian-language daily newspaper
: BBAY, 13;
Jewish pas sengers’ home cities
: USCIS files and ship’s records from the S.S.
Champlain
. Nabokov’s USCIS file: C-6556567;Véra’s:C-6556566 and Véra visa file: 3027265.

3
Though the U.S. was not yet in the war, the country had already begun jailing members of the Socialist Workers’ Party, a Trotskyite group that had pub licly taken an anti-war stance and made speeches against democracy. Baker,
Human Smoke
, 351.

4
AFLP, 231; BBAY, 12