Avner Landes discusses his new book ‘The Delegation,’ an account of the adventures – and dark fates – of an actor and poet sent to raise money from coreligionists in the West
By JANICE WEIZMAN
In 1943, as World War II raged with no end in sight, Joseph Stalin sent two Jews on an international fundraising tour to raise money for the Red Army from their fellow Jews in the West. The trip was also to be a charm offensive, with the hopes that it would boost political support for the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany.
“The Delegation,” a quasi-fictional novel by Avner Landes published in April, tells the story of those two emissaries, Yiddish-language actor Solomon Mikhoels and party apparatchik (and sometime poet) Itzik Feffer.
The book takes readers inside the hearts and minds of Mikhoels and Feffer as they encounter the United States, American Jews, famous figures such as Paul Robeson and Albert Einstein, Soviet spies and more. Ultimately, however, the pair are forced to confront their own complicity in a sinister system in which everyone is expendable and the ends always justify the means.
Landes’s first novel, “Meiselman,” is a comic tale of envy and rivalry between librarian Meiselman and novelist Izzy Shenkenberg. In a virtuoso trick of metafiction, that same Shenkenberg appears in “The Delegation” — not only as a character but also as its author.
Accompanying the story of Mikhoels and Feffer is a “note from the author” by Shenkenberg in which he describes his struggles in writing “The Delegation,” his difficult relationship with his father, and his concerns about the problems of historical perspective. Together with footnotes on Shenkenberg’s author note, the novel unfolds as a three-tiered narrative.
The story is equal parts madcap adventure and reckoning with a pivotal moment in Jewish history, written from the jaundiced perspective of our own era of political and ethical chaos.
Landes was born in Chicago but now lives in a suburb of Tel Aviv with his wife and two children. He holds MFAs from Bar-Ilan and Columbia universities, and when he’s not working on his own material, he edits and ghostwrites for others.
This reporter has known Landes from her own time at Bar-Ilan 20 years ago, and spoke with him at her office in Petah Tikva about how and why he wrote the novel, and what it’s like being an American Jewish author in post-October 7 Israel.
The Times of Israel: Your story of Mikhoels and Feffer’s trip to America is based on actual people and true events. What drew you to write about this story?
Avner Landes: I heard about this trip taken by two Soviet Jewish artists, Itzik Feffer and Solomon Mikhoels, in 1943 to the United States, Canada, and the UK, for the purpose of rallying support for the Soviet Union and the Red Army. What intrigued me was the question: Why did Stalin do it? But what really drew me to the story were these two characters.
Feffer was a middling Yiddish-language poet, he was a party member, and he basically wrote propaganda for the Soviet Union, although he was respected in Yiddish circles. Mikhoels — who was not a party member — was probably the biggest actor of the time in the Soviet Union, and Feffer was sent in order to act as Mikhoels’s minder. I was very intrigued by this relationship. Feffer wasn’t always a party man. When he was younger, he was a revolutionary. So then, how does the revolutionary become the party man? How is it that as a young man, he’s someone who is causing trouble and going against the status quo, but then as a 40-year-old, he is someone who follows the status quo and works to maintain it?
In one of the book’s key scenes, Mikhoels and Feffer visit Einstein’s home at Princeton to ask for his support, and they end up discussing plans for the compilation of a “Black Book” to gather testimony relating to Nazi atrocities against Jews — and the participation of Russian collaborators. Can you say a little about that episode?
The part with Einstein is an important scene, and as with a lot of the scenes in the book, I started with an idea and then after writing it, I did the research. I saw a photograph of Mikhoels and Feffer with Einstein in his backyard in Princeton, New Jersey, and right away I had this idea for a scene with the three of them.
Most fictional accounts of Einstein tend to kind of look at him as a physicist prize winner, but I was more interested in Einstein the womanizer. History tends to remember people for their ideas and not for their personalities, and we don’t take how much their personalities played into them becoming historical phenomena.
When I researched the scene, I learned that Einstein had brought up this idea to Mikhoels and Feffer of compiling a “black book” that would account for everything that was lost by the Jews, all the Jews that were murdered, who murdered them, who collaborated. They actually took this idea back to the Soviet Union and the book was compiled. The writer Vassily Grossman was one of the editors.
You bring the American actor Paul Robeson, a lifelong communist, into the novel. What is his significance in this story?
My interest in this story stemmed from an episode involving Robeson, which I recount in the book. The gist of the story is that while imprisoned, Feffer warned Robeson that Feffer and many other prominent Jews were slated to be executed and pleaded with Robeson to alert the world. Yet, Robeson kept this information to himself, not telling anyone of this great injustice and not allowing the injustice to alter his belief in the promise of Stalin and the Soviet Union. His fervor for the Soviet project wouldn’t allow him to accept conflicting evidence.
This moral failure, this blindness, shocked me. But as I dug deeper into this story and the lives of these Jewish Soviet artists, I saw that each of them displayed a similar intransigence at some point. Their fellow Jews were being imprisoned and killed for being Jewish, and they refused to see that they would be next, instead choosing to believe that their co-nationalists were killed for justifiable reasons — for anything but being Jewish.
In the midst of writing “The Delegation,” Shenkenberg experiences a “crisis of chutzpah,” because “The work no longer feels worthwhile... the pursuit suddenly feels delusional.” Is this feeling based on your own firsthand experience of writing novels?
When you’re writing historical fiction, the question of boundaries and cutoff points becomes urgent. Where does history begin? Where does it end? I mean, where does the story of Soviet Jewish artists really begin? Does it start at the revolution? Or maybe it starts earlier — with antisemitism at the time of the tsars? Am I short-changing the history by making an arbitrary decision of when to start? That question was driving me mad. The more you research, the wider the frame becomes.
Since moving to Israel several years ago, you’ve published two Jewish-themed novels in English. What are some of the challenges of being an English-language author in Israel?
I basically wrote my first book while I was still living in New York City. It’s a really unique place in that it’s such a literary culture, and there are so many writers living there. Personally, I found it a little suffocating. There’s a competitive feel to it. One of the things I appreciated about moving here and the community that I now live in is that there are no writers here, and most people don’t read fiction.
I think it’s important for writers to live in the world as much as possible because when you’re holed up in a room all day just typing in front of a keyboard, it’s very hard to gain access to the way people actually live and think. It’s important to have friends who work in different types of fields. I think that’s really healthy for a writer. Also, I always wonder about the issue of language — that is, not living in your language, or in the language that you’re writing in. I think it forces me also to access my memories more. I definitely tapped into my time living in New York, the feel of it. And also my memories of the old-time Jews I knew growing up. If I tried to write about the culture I’m living in, I would be very anxious about going for accuracy, and I don’t really want to go for accuracy. For me, it’s more interesting to think, “What do I remember? What are the small, peculiar things in a culture or a setting?”
At the writing program at Bar-Ilan, there was a lot of talk about what it means to be a Jewish writer. What’s your take on that these days?
Jewish writers don’t like these labels, but if I’m looking at this as a non-writer, I would say yes, these labels are important; it’s important for communities to have their books and to have their writings. We create conversations around these books, and when I look at the current state of publishing and Jewish fiction, I see a community that doesn’t care anymore about the stories being told by Jewish fiction writers.
There was a time when Yeshiva University invited Philip Roth to come and speak. That, I think, is very hard to imagine in the year 2025. My father tells me that when a new Philip Roth novel would come out, or a new Saul Bellow book came out, everyone in the community would read it. Many in the country bought it, and there was that conversation, but also within the community, there would be a conversation about those books.
Someone like Cynthia Ozick was always being published in Commentary, but how often is Commentary now publishing writers of fiction? The Jewish Review of Books publishes two book reviews per issue. The Forward almost doesn’t review books. And then what are the conversations we end up having? They end up being around pundits, and that’s it. We live in a soulless kind of existence — everything revolves around “the news,” and that’s really deadening.
Given the complexity of writing Jewish-themed work after October 7 and the difficulty of finding a publisher for such work, can you say a little about your own experience with these issues?
I had the idea for this book and started doing research for it years before I started writing it. In May 2021, during the previous war, it was my first time back in Israel with rockets and sirens, and it was emotionally challenging in the sense that I became very aware that some friends of mine in the US were calling and saying, “I see what’s happening on the news — are you okay?” But other people weren’t engaging me at all, and I think that does really coincide with launching me into this novel.
So much of the book is about how we create narratives to get us through life, and how we become resistant to information that conflicts with these narratives. Feffer and Mikhoels are resistant to any information that contradicts the narrative they’ve created. That’s the idea of the three-tiered narrative in the novel — how much does information in one of the sections conflict with the information in the other sections? That became my way into the story.
I finished writing the book on October 6, and I planned to start editing immediately. But the next day the war started, and then I didn’t write for an entire month. It was very eerie for me. Just as I was getting ready to edit the book, the same kind of feelings that launched me into the book — the idea that we often resist information that doesn’t work with our worldview — were back again, and I was thinking, yeah, this is what the book is really about.
October 7 happens, and then a few weeks later, you start to see that there are a lot of Feffers in the world.
