A Child of Christian Blood by Edmund Levin

Author:Edmund Levin [Levin, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4324-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-02-25T05:00:00+00:00

Krasovsky, a key witness for the defense, had spent the better part of a year under relentless judicial assault. He had been arrested in mid-July 1912; after his release six weeks later, he went through endless hearings and at least two trials. The state had pressed a total of five charges against him. (The original charge—that he stole a winning lottery ticket from someone during a search—appears to have been dropped.) On February 5, a court acquitted him of improperly destroying official correspondence regarding the assessment of an unpaid tax of sixteen kopeks. Krasovsky’s wife finally found the missing papers in a trunk they had packed for their journey back home from Kiev; they were duly forwarded to the proper authorities and Krasovsky was exonerated. He was also acquitted in the case of his alleged illegal detention of the peasant Kovbasa and on three other charges whose exact nature is not known. Over half a year’s time, the state had tried to destroy Krasovsky and it had failed.

February 8 brought more good news for the defense. Vera Cheberyak, the prospective star witness for the prosecution, was convicted of forgery in a fraud case involving her local grocer and sentenced to eight months in prison, later reduced to five. The conviction was an indignity to her in three respects. For the first time in her life she had been found guilty of a crime: the infamous Cheberiachka was now, officially, a crook and a convict. Second, the crime of which she was convicted was unworthy of her reputation. This was the woman whose den of thieves reputedly organized spectacular robberies—the woman who, according to rumor, had so filled her apartment with plunder during the Kiev pogrom of 1905 that she fueled her hearth with bolts of silk fabric looted from Jewish stores. The charges that finally brought her down were pitiful: the jury found her guilty of making seventy-six erasures in an account book of money she owed, changing “1 ruble 73 kopeks to 1 ruble 19 kopeks; 2 rubles 13 kopeks to 13 kopeks … 70 kopeks to 10 kopeks,” and so forth. The swindle netted her only a few dozen rubles. And Vera Cheberyak suffered a third humiliation: she lost her name. In the course of the proceedings the court discovered her true origins. She was stripped of the patronymic “Vladimirovna,” to which she was legally not entitled. The woman sentenced to prison in court documents was recorded as “Vera Illegitimate Cheberyak.” She was now branded with the same middle name that had haunted Andrei Yushchinsky to the end of his life.

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