9/7/93

One Familyג€™s Operation Solomon

A new immigrant and a Jerusalemite find they are related to each other, and to a cultural icon of the old Soviet empire.

This aliya story should be made into a movie.
    Opera singer Solomon Khromchenko's return to his people has the makings of a Hollywood epic, complete with love and death, music, beautiful people, a cameo appearance by a historic figure, even a fantastic coincidence that illustrates the Jewish people's global-village syndrome.
    The movie would begin with a most mundane incident: a bungle by the phone company.
    Pavel and Anna Grandel, a lovely, cultured young couple, fled the Soviet Union in 1989 to seek a safer, more promising life for their three children. When they trudged off the plane at Ben-Gurion Airport, they were alone in a daunting new land.
    One day, the mailman delivered that fateful telephone bill. The Grandels were told of a lawyer who offered free assistance to new immigrants. Grandel went out into the strange streets to find Yonatan Livny.
    Livny, communicating with Grandel in a mixture of simple Hebrew and Yiddish, promised to help. Grandel turned to leave, stopped at the door, and asked Livny if he was a sabra. The lawyer replied that he was. "Then how do you know Yiddish?" Livny explained that his mother's family originated in Russia, leaving for England at the beginning of World War I.
    "Where in Russia?"
    "A tiny shtetl in Ukraine, not even on the map. It was called Zlatopol," Livny responded.
    Grandel gasped. "What was the family name?" he asked hoarsely.
    The name, Livny explained, was unusual, not what one would expect a Jewish family to be called. The name, he said, was Khromchenko.
    Grandel clutched the office desk, stunned. "Incredible!" he cried, "Incredible! My wife's family is from Zlatopol - and their name was Khromchenko!"
    Livny rushed the Grandels to the home of his thunderstruck mother, Sara Schacter. London-born and raised, 77-year-old Schacter has spent most of her life here since she first came to Palestine as a pioneer in 1937.
    Schacter, an impassioned, throwback Zionist, had wanted to get involved in the unfolding drama of the Soviet-Jewish aliya. Now, she had a needy family all her own, not just merely Russian, but family, a Khromchenko from Zlatopol.
    Scene II opens in a Moscow apartment about a year earlier. It is the home of a refusenik, where a fearful clutch of Jews is gathered. In defiance of the authorities, they have brought a group of Canadians who came to show solidarity with their persecuted kinsmen.
One of the visitors is Rose Wolfson of Toronto - Sara Schacter's sister. Well into the evening, Wolfson asks if anyone has ever heard of a man named Solomon Khromchenko, a long-lost cousin she had heard about from her father and whom she understands to have been well-known. Certainly, everyone in the apartment has heard of him; but no one knows if he is still alive.
    The following evening, during a visit to another refusenik, she is beckoned to a room. "Mrs. Wolfson, we found him." Standing there, smiling warmly, is a tall, dashing, old gent. "This is your cousin, Solomon Khromchenko." They fall into each other's arms and weep.
"It was courageous of Solomon to go there," relates Schacter. "He risked a lot by entering the home of a refusenik. He was not at all involved in Jewish life, and certainly not with the refuseniks."
    The rendezvous would alter the course of Khromchenko's life. That evening, he could not have imagined he would soon surrender his status as Soviet cultural icon for that of a simple immigrant to a country he knew nothing about.
    He had never given Israel much thought until, a few months later, he received a letter from Jerusalem. His newfound cousin Sara - their fathers were brothers - wrote: "I don't know if we'll ever meet, because we don't have much time left."
    But the curtain had already begun to fall on the Iron Curtain, and Sara and Solomon started the long, frustrating, bureaucratic process to get permission for him to travel abroad.
Before that permit was to arrive, Solomon's wife died. They had been married for 60 years.
Two months later, Sara's husband died at 94.
    Khromchenko, who holds the title "Honored Artist of the Soviet Union," began his musical career at the age of 11. Four years earlier, his family had escaped a pogrom in Zlatopol, a suburban shtetl of Kiev in the Pale of Settlement. Refuge in Odessa was not much better, as the city was in the throes of starvation. It was the last year of the Great War.
Young Solomon sang in the choir of an Odessa synagogue and received payment in sugar, flour and conserves. Even at that age, his voice was turning heads.
    When he was 27, he journeyed to Moscow for a singing position in the Bolshoi Theater. The weightiest baggage he took with him was his first name, which branded him undeniably as a Jew, but he stubbornly resisted the temptation to change it.
    A lyrical tenor with a pure, powerful, riveting voice, the young Khromchenko made great strides in a country crazed for cultural heroes. Yet his career would soon come to hang by the thread of one terrifying performance, and of one man in the audience: Josef Stalin.
    When World War II ended, the Soviets celebrated the defeat of Nazism with a massive victory concert in May 1945 at the Kremlin. Khromchenko, then 38, was invited, along with other artists of the Bolshoi, to sing solo for the uppermost echelon of the ruling and military classes.
    Khromchenko, the Jewish soloist, sang to Stalin, the dreaded tyrant. If the Soviet leader didn't like him, Solomon might never be heard - or heard from - again.
    The top brass were seated with their backs to the stage. Stalin and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov were deep in conversation throughout Khromchenko's first couplet, a patriotic Tchaikovsky number. They weren't paying any attention to the singer. Everyone was watching Stalin for the cue, and when he didn't respond at the end of the song, the huge hall remained quiet.
    Towards the end of the second number, a Neapolitan love song, Stalin broke off his conversation with Molotov, and the two of them slowly turned to look at Khromchenko as the song concluded.
    After a horrific moment of silence, Stalin put his hands together and applauded, and everyone else - Leningrad party chief Nikita Khrushchev, Lazar Kaganovitch of the Politburo, secret-police chief Lavrenti Beria, Marshal Vassily Voroshilov - the who's who of the Soviet Union plus hundreds of invited guests - took the cue and rose to a clamorous ovation for Solomon Khromchenko.
    Two years later, the singer survived Stalin's notorious purge of Jewish artists, though for three days a rumor circulated Moscow that he had, in fact, been taken away. One who had been was his friend, legendary Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels.
    Throughout his career, Khromchenko was largely unaffected by antisemitism, as well as, for that matter, by Jewish life. He had as a youngster been sensitized to the dangers by the Zlatopol pogrom, and occasionally he felt it necessary to lie low for a few days. Yet, he was one Jew who made it to the top.
    After a magnificent career as an opera singer, Khromchenko went on to become a professor of voice training for 32 years at the Gnessin Institute, the Moscow equivalent of New York's Juilliard School.
    Seldom has there been as naive a tourist to Israel as Khromchenko on his first visit, in 1989. "These Palestinians," he said to Schacter on one of his first days here, "are they Jewish?" He had been curious about Israel, not from the point of view of a Jew, but to see how a small country like this functioned, what sort of government it had, and how it managed to take in so many immigrants. Just about his first impression was bedazzlement at the "magnificent" highway to Jerusalem. He hadn't really expected to see such civilized roads.
    It was on this initial visit that Anna Grandel met her famous relative for the first time. She and Pavel were proud of the family connection, but Solomon was completely unaware of this branch of his family.
    Music must be a family trait: Anna is a piano teacher and conducts a choir, and her son is a gifted trumpeter who performs in an IDF troupe. Another relative, still in Moscow, is a celebrated violinist.
    Solomon was delighted at the serendipity: Here, in distant Jerusalem, a Khromchenko, beautiful and talented, endowed with the joy of music.
    He went back to Moscow deeply moved by the warmth of the people here and the beauty of the country.
    Sara went to see Solomon in Moscow. "I saw what things were like there," she relates. "I wanted to get him out of there."
    Recalling that her husband Harry had also been a tenor of sorts, she muses, "I have a weakness for old tenors."
    On his second visit, in 1991, Solomon began to wonder if he could possibly leave Russia, forgoing all the privileges, perks and protektzia that go with his celebrity status. He began to wonder if he could possibly live here. He was greatly encouraged that the Grandels were so wonderfully integrated in Israeli society in so short a time.
    Then, fate struck again. While he was in Jerusalem, his homeland was thrown into turmoil when Mikhail Gorbachev was overthrown in a stunning putsch. Though the status quo ante did return, it was an uncomfortable omen. Soon after, Khromchenko returned to Moscow, where he said goodbye to his two sons, aged 61 and 45, then came back to become a new Israeli citizen.
    Scene III. Sara Schacter's well-appointed Jerusalem apartment, Solomon Khromchenko's new home. Even at the age of 85, he cuts an imposing figure - he's 1.82 meters tall - but his large, broad face exudes a gentle sweetness.
    The great tenor is leaning on the side of a white piano, cajoling a bright-eyed young South African student named Ezra to follow him up a scale. They have no common language, as Khromchenko speaks only Russian and Yiddish. Truth is, they don't need a common language.
    Sara is in the living room, chatting with Yoel, a convert to Orthodox Judaism with startling Hollywood good looks and a brilliant voice. He has come to ask Khromchenko to take him as a student. The master hears the young talent, and manages to squeeze him into his busy schedule.
    Khromchenko did not come here to retire, he came here to work, a master with much to give his new country.
    In the short time since his aliya last year, Khromchenko has won a position on the professorial staff of both the Rubin Academy of Music and the School of Hazanut in Tel Aviv. He has 15 students under his tutelage, including haredim from Mea She'arim, women, modern Orthodox, newly Orthodox, newly Jewish, Russians. "They range from men with peyot who won't even look at me when they come into my home for lessons, to others who walk in and give me a big hug," Schacter says.
    Some of the poorer students pay what they can afford - Khromchenko is uncomfortable taking money - and their 45-minute sessions routinely carry on for an hour and a half, because "Solomon gives them what he feels they need."
    The vocal industry is bristling with excitement at his arrival. Israeli critics less daunting than Stalin but more discerning have been astonished at both his voice and his teaching techniques.
    One established Rehovot cantor was moved to tears upon hearing him sing.
    Another renowned singer, tenor Ya'acov Zamir, had developed a problem with his voice and was referred to Khromchenko, who was able to correct it. The old professor then listened to Zamir's wife Rahel, a developing soprano, and helped bring her voice out. "Khromchenko," Zamir later said, "is God's gift to Israel."
    Happily, he hasn't been forgotten in the old country. Moscow Radio had a special 85th-birthday program on Khromchenko and his music after he emigrated. The retrospective included everything from Russian opera to Yiddish folk ditties. An elderly lady who used to sing with him was interviewed and said, "I recently had a letter from him. He is there." She wouldn't mention Israel by name.
    Khromchenko is There.