A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (24 page)

Margolin did not share with Esther and Aaron that he still had some small concern that this strange case would go forward. In any event, he was not one for complacency. Beilis’s release could not be taken for granted and he set about organizing a defense, in the unlikely event that one should become necessary. He arranged a meeting with Vasily Fenenko, the investigating magistrate, whom he knew quite well. Fenenko was eager to talk, and what he told Margolin was at once reassuring and worrisome. Fenenko wanted it known that he believed Beilis to be
innocent, and he asked Margolin to inform Jewish leaders privately of his view of the case. It was a matter of his honor, the magistrate implied. “The evidence against Beilis is laughable and absurd,”
Fenenko emphatically told Margolin, according to the latter’s memoir. “I am convinced he will be released within a few days.” He told the
defense attorney that he believed the murder was the work of a gang of professional thieves. Fenenko, reasonable man that he was, still could not believe the case would go forward.

Margolin found it troubling that Beilis had been arrested over Fenenko’s extreme objections. He quickly secured the consent of Kiev’s Jewish leaders to form a defense committee. Members included Rabbi Shlomo Ha-Cohen Aronson, Kiev’s leading “spiritual rabbi” (as opposed to the official “crown rabbi” whose salary was paid by the state); Mark Zaitsev, the son of Jonah Zaitsev, founder of the family’s sugar refining business; Dr. G. B. Bykhovsky, the senior physician of the Zaitsev hospital; and three lawyers, including Margolin. One of the committee’s first actions was to send a telegram to Russia’s leading Jewish defense attorney, Oskar Gruzenberg, asking him to come to Kiev as soon as possible. Gruzenberg was best known for his political cases. He had defended the revolutionary
Leon Trotsky, a leader of the 1905 revolution (he was sentenced to internal exile, from which he easily escaped) and represented the writer Maxim Gorky when he was accused of inciting armed insurrection. Among his fellow attorneys, he was greatly respected for his courtroom skills in appeals cases, which required the most airtight arguments based on fine points of the law. For this new case, he had unmatched practical experience, having successfully defended the Vilna barber
David Blondes, who had been accused of attempted ritual murder a decade earlier. Gruzenberg came to Kiev and met with the defense committee to discuss a course of action should Beilis be formally charged with murder. In the following weeks, in the fall of 1911, he traveled to Kiev periodically to consult on the case.

Gruzenberg and Margolin respected each other greatly but had a fundamental difference from the beginning over how to proceed. Margolin was chronically frustrated by what he regarded as the passivity of Jewish leaders in the face of threats from outside. They “were very honorable men,” he later wrote in his memoir, “but rather
indecisive and timid whenever it was a question of showing some initiative in defending Jewish interests” against tsarist acts of repression. Margolin favored an active defense on all fronts—in public and behind the scenes. Gruzenberg, on the other hand, was confident that, if worse
came to worst, no jury would convict a defendant, even a Jew, based on such preposterous evidence as existed. “In truth,” Gruzenberg later wrote in his own memoirs, “I was most concerned about the Jews doing
something foolish.” In his book he refrained from mentioning his colleague’s name, but when it came to foolishness that could wreck the defense, it was Margolin who most worried him.

The deep differences between Gruzenberg and Margolin over the case may have stemmed from their different backgrounds and relationships toward their Jewishness. Gruzenberg was as Russified as a Jew could be without actually converting to Russian Orthodoxy. A decade older than Margolin, he was born in 1866 in the
Ukrainian city of Ekaterinoslav (now Dniepropetrovsk) but grew up in Kiev before moving to
St. Petersburg to practice law. He had an intense and lifelong love of the Russian language and culture. (The opening line of his memoirs, written decades after the trial: “
The first word that reached my consciousness was Russian.”) He had no comparable affection for Jewish culture. Gruzenberg’s father, a well-to-do merchant, had been an ardent follower of the
Haskalah,
or movement for Jewish enlightenment, that sought to modernize Judaism and Jewish life. The son could not speak Yiddish and had little religious education. But his father also enjoined him never to abandon his Jewish heritage. By adulthood, the mixed imperative had left Gruzenberg
spiritually stranded, conflicted, and bereft of a sense of belonging. He did not feel a connection to the Jewish people and expressed antipathy to religiosity in general, disliking its “theatrical character.”

It would take two traumatic experiences to awaken Gruzenberg’s sense of obligation to the Jewish people. When he was a student in Kiev, his home was raided in the middle of the night by policemen looking for Jews living in the city illegally, without residence permits. By the time of the raid, his father had died, the family had run out of money, and his mother was living in his household. Gruzenberg’s papers were in order, but his mother’s were not, or so the police insisted.
The poor woman was led off to the police station and spent a night in jail. Gruzenberg managed to obtain her release and avert her deportation to the
Pale of Settlement thanks only to the intervention of a wealthy acquaintance.

The incident ingrained in Gruzenberg a determination to fight autocratic tyranny—but it took the
funeral of his first child, who died in infancy, to bring him to a feeling of special responsibility toward his
people. Years later he still recalled with distaste the pious Jews, his supposed brethren, who descended on his home after his son’s death and took possession of the body. “Strangers,” he called them, “wearing long sidelocks and dressed in long robes, dirty with grease.” He found these men, and the ritual they imposed on him and on his son’s body, unnerving and almost grotesque. Yet, to his confusion, he was struck with a profound sense that these men had a claim on him that could not be denied. “Along with my child,” he wrote, “they had also taken my soul.” He asked himself why it was he felt these religious men had a claim on him. He began to read books about Judaism and at first decided that while the Jews have suffered, so have all peoples. He considered himself to be an enlightened man, above national feeling, but then found himself asking whether such an attitude was not a kind of egoism. In this moment of self-examination he came to understand a simple truth: Jews needed to help their fellow Jews. If they did not, then very likely no one else would, and they would be lost.

Margolin, too,
struggled with his religious and national identity. He later summed up his early years: “Jewish background and synagogue; Russian [native] language and school; Ukrainian village and song … I was tossing in pain for a long time, trying to find a synthesis of these impressions and feelings.” But Margolin’s father—who, like Gruzenberg’s, was one of the
maskilim,
adherents of the
Haskalah
—more successfully balanced enlightenment and religion. The son attended a Russian gymnasium, but the household was strictly observant; Margolin studied Hebrew and at the age of thirteen read from the Torah in his synagogue as a bar mitzvah. At the same time his affection for his city and for Ukraine ran deep. “I loved my native city Kiev, from my earliest days,” he recalled, “loved the Dnieper, the Ukrainian village with its housetops of straw, the cherry trees, and the golden yellow fields of the country.” By adulthood he had resolved his inner contradictions, and his various cultural attachments lived in harmony. Unlike Gruzenberg, he was entirely comfortable in his modern Jewishness. Though a thoroughly secular man, he maintained a lifelong affection for his religion, the sight of any synagogue always stirring in him a deep feeling of connection.

No one could say that Gruzenberg did not fight for Jewish rights, but he did so strictly within the conventional bounds of his profession. His weapon was his mastery, as he put it, of “the
iron whip of the law.” Margolin, on the other hand, was by nature an activist. Law was just
one weapon in his arsenal. He was coming to the conclusion that Mendel Beilis needed more than an ordinary defense. It was not enough to show that the defendant was
not
the culprit. “It was necessary,” he later explained, “to respond to the prosecution not with a defense, but with
an offensive.” Margolin decided he must turn detective and find the real killers.

Vera Cheberyak did not know of Margolin’s plan, but she had reason enough to feel cornered. The sneering references to her in the pro-Beilis press had not abated; her name had become a byword for villainy. (“Vera Cheberyak, a woman of a certain
reputation,” the
Kievan
referred to her with delicate scorn.) Now that her gang was mostly in jail or under police surveillance, she had been deprived of her capacity to intimidate. People were willing to testify against her. She was under investigation for at least four crimes, including robbery, fencing stolen goods, and fraud, and she was fearful that her friends—if they ever truly were her friends—would go to the police and inform on her about more of her crimes. When she learned that an acquaintance was going to be questioned by the police, she tested the woman’s reliability in an unusual way. She took her to a store and asked her to pick out a pair of gloves. Then she asked her: “If I took those gloves, if I stole them, would you tell on me?” The woman said no, she wouldn’t. “And if they beat you?” Cheberyak asked. The woman admitted that then, yes, she might. “You,” Cheberyak told her, “are a
bad friend.”

Above all, Cheberyak was concerned that some way would be found to tie her to Andrei’s murder. Of some comfort was the fact that her archenemy, Nikolai Krasovsky, was gone from the scene. His temporary assignment in Kiev had been allowed to lapse on September 8, and he returned to his post in the city of Khodorkov. Krasovsky did not fight to stay on the case. He did not want to see an
innocent man in jail but had lost the heart to deal with the case any longer, having proved all too correct in his original prediction that the case would cause him nothing but trouble. But he was mistaken in believing that his departure from Kiev would bring an end to the intrigues against him. Within a few months he would be drawn into the case again, as he was compelled to struggle for his own freedom as well as that of Mendel Beilis. But for now he savored the relief of returning home to his quiet provincial post.

Krasovsky’s able protégé, Officer
Evtikhy Kirichenko, was still on
the case in Kiev and actively pursuing Cheberyak. Kirichenko could not get out of his mind the chilling image of Cheberyak possessed by rage and fear at the mention of Andrei’s name as he questioned her dying son, Zhenya. Kirichenko went back over ground that he and Krasovsky had previously covered, reinterviewing people who might spark fresh leads. Within a few weeks he turned up the piece of the case against Cheberyak that had been missing: a witness to the crime.

Or at least a witness of sorts.
Zinaida
Malitskaya lived directly below Vera Cheberyak at no. 40 Upper Yurkovskaya Street. She and Cheberyak had once been friends, but their relationship had devolved into intense mutual hatred. Kirichenko had witnessed the two women’s antagonism in May when Cheberyak assaulted Malitskaya for taunting her when her
home was searched. At the time, he had talked to Malitskaya briefly and she had told him she had something to say about Cheberyak, but she ended up being questioned by another investigator, to whom she only said that Cheberyak was “a
dubious person” and that she had little doubt she would end up at hard labor. Kirichenko was nagged by a sense that Malitskaya might know more than she was telling. On November 10, he questioned her again. This time she revealed that, on a morning some days before Andrei’s body was discovered, she had heard suspicious noises overhead. Kirichenko immediately arranged for a formal deposition of her to be taken by Investigator Fenenko.

The layout of Malitskaya’s ground-floor apartment, which adjoined the state liquor store she ran, was exactly the same as that of the Cheberyaks’—a vestibule with a kitchen and a small room on the left, another small room on the right, and a large room at the back. She had no difficulty pinpointing the location of every footstep above her, she said. On the morning in question in March, at around eleven a.m., when her store was empty of customers, she took a moment to step into her apartment. Overhead, she heard Vera’s front door slam and then a few footsteps resound near the door. She claimed she could recognize the footsteps of all the Cheberyaks and she was confident the woman at the door was Vera Cheberyak. Then, she said:

The steps of the adults around the boy, after they had caught up with him, were clearly audible. The boy’s steps whispered only a brief while on the floor before fading out. She had the impression that a child had been grabbed and something had been done with him, but she had not seen any reason to be especially alarmed. Malitskaya said she then went back to her store and complained to a woman customer about the noise upstairs. The Cheberyaks were always making noise, she said. The woman told her that she saw the children leaving the house earlier, so she thought Malitskaya might get some peace. Malitskaya was puzzled about why, then, she had heard a child upstairs.

Fenenko knew there were problems with Malitskaya as a witness. She hated Cheberyak and fought with her, but then it was hard to find anyone in Lukianovka who knew Cheberyak and had not. She had waited months to come forward with her story. She explained she had been afraid of Cheberyak and guessed the police would eventually figure everything out, but her husband told her she had an obligation to tell what she knew. Her husband, Fyodor, backed up her story, telling Fenenko he had told her weeks earlier to reveal what she had heard. Fenenko went to Cheberyak’s old apartment with another officer and verified that footsteps and muffled voices really could be heard downstairs. Malitskaya seemed credible to Fenenko, which strengthened his conviction that Cheberyak and her gang were behind Andrei’s murder.