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102 9 Stalemate (1965) between the Filmmaker and the Censors Mikhail Kalik’s film Goodbye, Boys! was reluctantly released after a prolonged delay, but his next project, a screenplay set in a Vilnius ghetto, was never even given a chance to become a film. The screenplay was based on a novel entitled Stalemate (Vechnyi Shakh) by Icchokas Meras, which was itself such an extraordinary text that it merits discussion. The novel was first published in 1965, in a popular Soviet literary magazine Druzhba Narodov (Friendship of the Nations), translated from the Lithuanian.1 This was not unusual: the magazine specialized in literature of the Soviet republics, and routinely published translations of ethnic authors. What was unusual was that the novel was written by a Jewish writer and set in a ghetto during the Holocaust. The prominent Russian cultural critic Lev Anninskii recalls the startling effect of Meras’s novel: “When Meras’s star emerged on the Soviet literary horizon of the mid-1960s, there was a sense of something incomprehensible : of stripped skin, bare nerves, above-literary (or super-literary?) level of candor. His writing fit neither stylistic nor ideological canons [of the time]. It invoked an unknown-to-us spiritual form that had not had language yet.”2 This effect is understandable—Stalemate was one of the first novels published in the Soviet Union to speak openly about the Holocaust. It seems that Meras (like Kanovich) was destined to write about the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. Born in 1934 in a town of Kelme, he was a child survivor , having lost his parents in mass executions of 1941. He was saved by ethnic Lithuanians, and for years lived under an assumed Lithuanian name, speaking only Lithuanian. Not until after the war was Meras able to go back to his Jewish name, identity, and Yiddish language. The story of his survival became an inspiration for his first book, Yellow Patch, a cycle of stories.3 Stalemate was his first novel, loosely based on the events that took place in the Vilnius ghetto.4 Stalemate’s main character, Isaac Lipman, is a young chess player in an unnamed ghetto, the youngest son of Avraham Lipman, “a tailor with his fingers covered with pinpricks as a sky is covered with stars.” Isaac is a target of the ambivalent attentions of Shoger, a sadistic ghetto commandant and ardent chess player, who harbors both awe and loathing of the boy’s talent. When the children of the ghetto are threatened with deportation, Isaac is faced with an Between Filmmaker and Censors 103 unusual challenge: Shoger wants him to play a game of chess in front of the entire ghetto; if Isaac wins, the children will remain in the ghetto. But Shoger will kill Isaac. If Isaac loses, he will be spared but the children will be deported. Everyone will be saved only if the game results in a draw. Isaac has a tall order— to bring a game to a draw, which is more difficult than winning. The novel’s chapters follow Isaac’s moves, as the entire ghetto is watching. With each move come his memories, and the novel is structured as a series of flashbacks that tell the story of Isaac’s siblings and friends. Each subchapter about his siblings opens with Avraham’s biblical-sounding words: “I begat a daughter Ina,” “I begat a daughter Rakhil,” “I begat a daughter Basya,” “I begat a son Kasriel,” “I begat a daughter Riva,” and “I begat a daughter Taibele.” Each story gives further insight into yet another aspect of ghetto life: Ina used to be an opera diva famous throughout Europe. Now she is involved in an underground theater production in the ghetto. When she smuggles the notes of Fromental Halevy’s opera, The Jewess, into the ghetto, to be produced as an act of defiance of the Nazi prohibitions, she is caught and shot on the spot. Kasriel is a philosophy student, tempted and threatened by Shoger to spy on the ghetto resistance, but who commits suicide instead of becoming a traitor. Rakhil is a young widow whose beloved husband has just been executed at the killing site in Ponary and who has become an object of Nazi medical experiments . When Rakhil understands that her new baby is the result of such an experiment, she strangles it. There is Isaac’s girlfriend, Ester, for whom Isaac brings flowers to the ghetto, risking his life. There is also their friend, Yanek, a Pole...

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