second front. (Although some of them may have heard the call of blood too: the head of the Soviet external propaganda apparatus, Solomon Lozovsky, was himself an ethnic Jew, as were the Soviet ambassadors to Great Britain and the United States, I. M. Maisky and K. A. Umansky, who met with Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion in 1941 as part of the Soviet effort to court world Jewish organizations.) In late 1941–early 1942, the Soviet Bureau of Information created a special Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Its purpose (like that of several others formed at the same time: the Women’s, Scholars’, Slavic, and Youth Committees) was to cultivate a specialized overseas constituency for the benefit of the Soviet war effort. The JAFC’s main task was to raise money in the United States. The committee’s leaders were Mikhoels, Soviet Jewry’s most recognizable face, and Shakhno Epstein, a journalist, the Party’s Jewish Section veteran, and a former Soviet secret agent in the United States. 119 During World War II, the Soviet state received around $45 million from various Jewish organizations, most of them U.S.-based. The greatest fund-raising effort of all was the North American tour undertaken in the summer and fall of 1943 by Mikhoels and a member of JAFC’s presidium, Itsik Fefer, a Yiddish writer and secret police informer. Mikhoels and Fefer spoke at mass rallies (the one at the Polo Grounds in New York was attended by about fifty thousand people); negotiated with the leaders of the World Jewish Congress and World Zionist Organization (in ways that had been approved by Soviet officials); and met with—among many others—Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Eddie Cantor, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Mann, and Yehudi Menuhin. The visit was enormously successful: American audiences responded eagerly to the Soviet Jewish appeals, and both Mikhoels and Fefer were greatly impressed by the wealth, influence, and generosity of American Jewish organizations. The tour’s chief organizer was Ben-Zion Goldberg, a pro-Soviet Yiddish journalist, immigrant from the Russian Empire, and Sholem Aleichem’s son-in-law. Some of Tevye’s surviving children and grandchildren were finally getting together again. 120 Within the Soviet Union, Tevye’s surviving children and grandchildren— including those, like Viktor Shtrum, who had never considered themselves Jewish—were finally getting together again, in ways that threatened to overwhelm the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. As Perets Markish stated at the JAFC Second Plenary Session in February 1943, “A colonel from one of the tank units came up to me a while ago. ‘I am a Jew,’ he said, ‘and I would like to fight as a Jew. I would like to contact the appropriate authorities to suggest forming separate Jewish units.’ . . . Then I asked him: ‘How effective do you think such