AMERICA
Max Wallach was born in July 1876 and died seventy-five years later on December 31, having lived most of his life not as Meir Henoch Mojszewicz Wallach-Finkelstein, but Maxim Litvinov, called Papasha in the Party and “Stalin’s standard-bearer for peace” in the newspapers. The son of a minor bank official, he began life in a Jewish family in Bialystok, went to cheder, and eventually rose to the position of cashier-accountant. All his life, he remembered the pogroms, considered himself Russian, and adored his mother, whom he, nonetheless, never mentioned because he had left her behind, together with the rest of his past, retaining only a bundle of family letters and his favorite dish — fried herring under a poached egg (which made his wife flee the room with her nose plugged wheneve
