by David Laskin
In the pure white temple of knowledge, the bochurim prayed through the minutes and hours and weeks and months of the Jewish year. They believed that their devotion sustained the world that Hashem had summoned out of darkness and given to the sons of Adam. “Hashem, His will, and His word are all one and the same,” declared the founder. The bochurim devoted their lives to fathoming His word: His will was beyond them.
CHAPTER TWO
THE MOVE TO RAKOV
It was a time when angels glimmered before the righteous in the watches of the night. The Gaon of Vilna was studying on one such night when an angel appeared and offered to reveal the secrets of Torah without struggle—a flash in the mind and he would know all. Sleepless and fierce as ever, the Gaon sent the angel back to heaven. “I have no desire for any understanding of Hashem’s Torah that comes through any intermediary,” he declared. “My eyes are lifted only to Hashem, that He reveal my portion in His Torah, according to my own lifelong efforts.”
Lifelong effort powered the Gaon, but to truly worship Hashem, joy was also required. In Volozhin, every Shabbat and every holiday, the sound of voices singing and chanting in unison pulsed through the walls of the yeshiva and out into the streets and courtyards beyond. When the last echoes died, the bochurim began to dance. They whirled into the square outside the yeshiva and in a triumphant line crossed the marketplace, marched to the house of the Netziv, called him forth to join them, and danced him back to the yeshiva to resume their studies. Dance, song, blessing, celebration—all joy always led back to study.
On cold winter nights, the children of Shimon Dov could see the light of hundreds of candles falling onto the snow from the high windows of the yeshiva. Volozhin may have been poor and shabby, but the candlelight burned gold on the white courtyard and flashed jewels from the surface of the drifts. The scribe’s children felt as if they lived in an enchanted holy realm, a true “Jewish kingdom of strength and purity.”
One night when he was six years old, Shalom Tvi, the third son, was walking home from his cheder—Jewish elementary school—when he came upon a stooped old man staggering along with a cane. The high holidays had passed; autumn was well advanced; the streets were dark and wet and covered with fallen leaves. Young as he was, Shalom Tvi could see that the man was lost. “Grandpa, give me your hand,” the boy said kindly, “and I’ll take you home.” Shalom Tvi took the man’s cold dry palm in one hand and with the other he held his lantern high. Only when they reached his house did the old man let go; then he turned to the boy and said slowly in Yiddish, “Thank you very much. I am going to give you a blessing. May you have light your entire life, light throughout your journey.” Shalom Tvi never forgot. And indeed the blessing was received on high. From that time forward the boy had his own angel watching over him.
The children of the scribe needed all the heavenly help they could get. Money came seldom to God’s secretary; trouble overtook them despite their righteous deeds. When Shalom Tvi was nine and Avram Akiva nineteen, the Russian tsar was assassinated and rioters fell on the Jews. Alexander II had freed the serfs and abolished the twenty-five-year mandatory military service for Jewish boys—but radicals hated him and, after many attempts on his life, finally cut him down with a bomb in St. Petersburg in March of 1881. Jews were blamed (two Jewish women were involved in the plot) and in the ensuing months vicious pogroms flared throughout the Pale. The next year the new tsar, Alexander III, enacted the so-called May laws, forbidding Jews to live, or own land, in agricultural villages. Uprooted rural Jews poured into the already overcrowded shtetlach and city slums. One of the tsar’s advisers stepped forward with a bold new solution to the empire’s “Jewish problem”: one third will die, one third will emigrate, one third “will be completely dissolved into the surrounding population.” There were some 5 million Jews living in the Pale at that time: the tsar’s councilor was dreaming of ethnic cleansing on an unprecedented scale.
But life went on. The year the May laws were enacted, Avram Akiva wed at the age of twenty and left Volozhin to settle in the nearby shtetl of Rakov, the home of his new wife, Gishe Sore. The newlyweds shared the names of the first Jewish couple—Abraham and Sarah (Sore is the Yiddish form of the Hebrew name Sarah). Like her husband, Gishe Sore had been born to the priestly caste—the family went by the name Kagan and they had roots in Rakov going back at least to the eighteenth century. Gishe Sore, the oldest of three children, was born in 1862, the same year as her future husband; she was small, sharp, competent, and pious—in short, an excellent wife for the learned son of the Volozhin scribe. Avram Akiva found his wife’s shtetl a step down from the yeshiva town where he had grown up, but in time he came to appreciate its advantages. With three thousand residents (two thirds of them Jews), Rakov was small and sleepy, but proximity to the regional center of Minsk made it more convenient and more prosperous than Volozhin. There was plenty of work for the young scribe, and when it came time to pray, he had his choice of four synagogues, all clustered together in a compound near the market. Rakov’s market square boasted seventy shops, most of them owned by Jews. Avram Akiva soon became accustomed to the racket and dust of the twice-weekly markets, Monday and Friday, when peasants converged on the town to buy, sell, and drink. At the Friday market, as the sun neared the western horizon, a man came striding through the square shouting, “It’s Shabbat!” and all the Jewish shopkeepers closed up and went home. At one end of town, a dreamy lake reflected the twin brick towers of the Catholic church; at the other end, an ancient Jewish cemetery dozed in a grove of twisted pines. Even the humbler families had big gardens bursting with cucumbers, carrots, potatoes, and sorrel, and a clump of fragrant peonies to brighten the spring. Rakov’s soil was sandier than Volozhin’s and the countryside around it was flatter—fields of grain and dense green woods rolled out to the horizon in every direction. On summer Shabbat afternoons, after shul, Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore strolled out of town on Granary Lane past apple and pear orchards and into the dappled forest where children gathered mushrooms under the firs and poplars. The land belonged to gentiles, but a Jew could own the sky and the intoxicating smells that rose from the earth.
The young couple took a house by the lake and settled in for a long marriage. Theirs was a good match. Avram Akiva, though poor, was respected for his knowledge of Torah, for his name, his trade, and his standing as the firstborn son of a Kohain. Fierce and unyielding on the Word of God, he was mild in everything else—a tolerant, generous man, content with little, comfortable in his skin, wise beyond his years. Gishe Sore was expected to serve as his intermediary with the world and she stepped up briskly to the task. While Avram Akiva devoted himself to Torah, she ran the household and earned the money. She milked the cow each morning; every spring she planted a large vegetable garden around the house and tended it through the warm months. And like her mother-in-law, she went into business, running a general store that catered to the neighborhood families and the peasants who flocked to Rakov on market days. A barrel of herring and a barrel of kerosene held pride of place in the center of Gishe Sore’s shop; cupboards, drawers, and shelves were crammed with flax oil, tobacco of various grades, matches, clay pipes, needles, thread, buttons, kerosene lamps, and sharp little knives cased in red pouches. If your boot soles flapped, you paid for a dab of the tar she kept ready in a pitcher for quick repairs. Like all Jewish shopkeepers, Gishe Sore extended credit—sooner or later, everyone paid, and if they didn’t she could chalk it up as a mitzvah. Her store was not in the central marketplace but near the lake that the family lived on—a picturesque spot on sunny days with views of the Catholic church rising from the green glassy water. A small river with the marvelous name Svishloshz drained the lake. In the winter blocks of ice were cut from the river, and every spring Jews came here to dip out the clearest, cleanest water to use in making their Passover matzo. Idlers fished from the bridge and in the summer children swam naked in the shallows. Since it was miles to the nearest train station at Olechnowi
cze, everything and everyone arrived or departed by foot or cart. The newspaper from Minsk that Gishe Sore subscribed to—she was the only woman on her street to take a daily—carried stale news, but it was better than no news.
In any case, the news that mattered most concerned the family. In the middle of March 1883, word came that Avram Akiva’s forty-two-year-old mother had given birth to a healthy baby boy. On the first day of spring, Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore went to Volozhin to attend the bris of his new brother, Herman. When the mohel had done his work and the baby was soothed and tucked into his cradle, the family sat long over cake and schnapps. There was much talk that day about the strange doings at the yeshiva. The current crop of bochurim seemed to be fired up with new passions, grievances, and laments. The students had organized a boycott of the town butchers and bakers, who they claimed were depriving them of the proceeds from a tax on yeast; things had grown so heated that a few irate butchers had threatened the students with cleavers. But there was more. All of a sudden, the yeshiva was mad for Palestine. This was not the first upwelling in Volozhin of fervor for the Land. Chaim the Volozhiner and the Vilna Gaon had been early supporters of what came to be known as Zionism, breaking ranks with traditionalists who argued that the return must wait until after the Messiah had come. At Chaim’s urging, Jews from Volozhin and the surroundings raised money to support a colony of the pious in the holy city of Tzvat (Safed) in the Galilee. But the young hotheads of 1883 were rallying around something entirely different: return not for the sake of prayer but to build a self-sustaining Jewish homeland. A year earlier a group named Hovevei Zion—Lovers of Zion—had dispatched a tiny band of idealists to plant the first Jewish agricultural colony near Jaffa. Rishon LeZion—First to Zion—was now barely clinging to life, but that only goaded the zeal of the Volozhin students. Even the Netziv, though he officially banned Zionist organizations on the grounds that “one does not suspend Torah study for the sake of a mitzvah that can be done by others,” privately sympathized with the cause. The patriarch kept his views to himself, but his older sons were clearly intrigued by these rumblings of Jewish life beyond the Pale.
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God blessed Gishe Sore with a child on July 20, 1884, but Itka, as they named the daughter, did not survive infancy. Many years later, Gishe Sore confided to one of her daughters-in-law that she had accidentally smothered a baby to death when she rolled over in her sleep—and this may have been how Itka died.
A year and a half later, on January 9, 1886, Gishe Sore bore Avram Akiva another daughter. This one they named Itel. Itka and Itel are apparently variants of the Hebrew name Esther, so Itel was likely chosen to remind her parents of the daughter they had lost. The new baby was healthy and robust in every way except size. Even in a family so chronically compact, Itel was tiny—maybe four feet eleven at her zenith—with a mass of unruly dark hair, deep-set eyes, and a rounded solidity that would always tend toward stoutness. But in character Itel more than made up for her stature.
Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore were faithful servants of the Lord. They eschewed the so-called Jewish Enlightenment—Haskalah—that had spread to the Pale from Germany. Not for them the heretical fads—folkism, socialism, Yiddishism, assimilationism—that godless youths shouted about in the cities. The scribe and his wife preferred it quiet. What their fathers and mothers had done before them, they did now. What God demanded, they gave. So why did Hashem in his infinite wisdom decree that the first surviving fruit of their marriage should be a revolutionary?
Practically from birth, Itel defied all expectations of what a Jewish child, and especially a Jewish daughter, should be in the waning years of the nineteenth century. If the parents were hoping for sweet, pious, yielding, and obedient, they were sorely disappointed. Seven more children followed in rapid succession (another daughter, three sons, two more daughters, and a baby who died in infancy), though none ever challenged Itel’s will, daring, and absolute authority. Itel knew that she was right about everything that mattered, and she laid down the law in the two children’s bedrooms. In time, not even the parents stood up to her. “Don’t manage me,” Itel once told a friend. “My parents couldn’t do it and neither can you.”
Gishe Sore was a famously bad cook. Her matzo balls were like glue, her chickens raw. When she baked, the children left the center of the bread untouched because it had the consistency of wet paper. The mother wheedled; the children defied her. Such a scandal—a Jewish child wasting food. So Itel took charge. On her mother’s behalf, she commanded that every crumb must be consumed, and the younger ones cleaned their plates. When she caught her mother watering the cow’s milk to make it go further, Itel made her stop. Milk, after all, was one of the few palatable things that came out of Gishe Sore’s kitchen.
Only Avram Akiva was untouchable. Itel did not always follow her father’s dictates, but she knew better than to challenge him to his face. Apparently, Avram Akiva did not challenge her too much either. By force of character, Itel got a pass, even from a very early age. It didn’t matter that she was tiny and clearly not destined to be a beauty. It didn’t matter that the family was large and their means small. It didn’t matter that she was born into a world where Jews had few rights and Jewish women fewer still. Itel, without asking permission, gave herself rights. She assumed the privilege of speaking her mind, making her own rules, acting on her own beliefs. And her parents wisely—or helplessly—did not stand in her way.
Childhood was brief in those days, pleasures scanty. In the summer Itel and her sisters swam naked in the lake (well screened from the prying eyes of boys). She carried water from the lake to the house in a pair of buckets yoked across her shoulders and milked the cow in the shed out back. When her three brothers were old enough they went to cheder, but Itel and the sisters stayed home. No matter how bright or curious, girls were not admitted to cheder—and certainly not to yeshiva. What early education Itel got, she picked up from her mother, and she learned about life in the streets and shops and fields of Rakov. Especially the shops.
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In 1898, when Itel was twelve, the family’s business interests in Rakov doubled. That March, Avram Akiva’s younger brother Shalom Tvi married a young Rakov woman named Beyle Botwinik, who had inherited a thriving company that manufactured and wholesaled animal hides. Shalom Tvi, twenty-six at the time of his marriage, moved to Rakov and joined his wife in running the leather business. At a stroke, the affable, dimpled, good-looking third brother became the wealthiest member of the HaKohen family. Avram Akiva, though a decade older, was delighted to have his brother in town, and the two grew close during these years. In time, some of their children grew close as well.
Shalom Tvi was a lucky man, for his bride was pious and rich and she connected him with a Rakov family of substance, imagination, enterprise, and many members. Beyle herself was one of fourteen children, and among her relations there were scholars and Zionists, revolutionaries and philanthropists, even one young man who fought beside Trotsky during the Russian Revolution. Four years younger than her husband, Beyle at twenty-two already had the calm demeanor and steadiness of a mature woman. Her features were fine, her figure tidy, her eyes alight with a sterling character. “My mother was a tzadeke—a very charitable God-fearing woman,” one of her daughters said years later. “She would bake challot on Fridays which she would distribute to all of the poor. There were very poor people in Rakov, and I would go and give them out. Each person would bless me.”
So Shalom Tvi had done well for himself. The dimples just discernible beneath his neatly trimmed beard were much in evidence in those days. Beyle’s parents and uncle lived in a compound of houses on a large oblong piece of property on Kashalna Street—the lane that ran between the marketplace and the Catholic church—and they gave the newlyweds a corner of their lot to build on. The young couple put up a nice new house with two bedrooms, a living room and dining room, and even a water barrel in the kitchen that Shalom Tvi, always clever with g
adgets, equipped with a faucet. Their children would remember the house and garden, even the outhouse that their father built, as bathed in golden light. A gentile maid came in to clean, fetch water in pails from the communal well, and do the laundry. In her ample fenced yard Beyle grew fruit and vegetables—and what the family didn’t eat fresh she pickled and stored in the cellar. In the hall outside the kitchen stood a tall cabinet stocked with glass jars of preserves, and at the top of the house they had a boidem (storage attic) with racks and hooks for hanging laundry. Every morning Beyle walked through her garden and opened the gate to the courtyard that she shared with her parents and her uncle and aunt. Every night the gate was shut, the porch was swept, and the couple had their gleaming house to themselves. Many years later, when a rare sweet evening breeze blew over the desert of Palestine where she lived, their daughter Sonia would breathe deeply and murmur, “It smells like Rakov.”
Beyle and Shalom ran their business with the traditional division of labor: Beyle looked after the shop in the Rakov market and schmoozed customers, Shalom Tvi traveled the countryside buying hides and tinkered with the machines in the small factory. Though the business was hers originally, Beyle let her husband have top billing in the company name—Kaganovich and Rubilnik Leather Goods (Kaganovich is the Russian form of the name HaKohen). But she remained as active as ever, even after she had children. Like her sister-in-law Gishe Sore, like wives of scholars and scribes and teachers and small businessmen and peddlers all over the Pale, Beyle was a member of the sisterhood of the working Jewish mother. Gishe Sore was a terrible cook, because between the grocery store, the garden, the cow, the laundry, the seven children, and the duties to her husband the scribe, who had time to stand around a sizzling pan? Beyle’s children later complained that her letters were never more than three lines, but where would she find the time to write more? Itel grew up watching women spend the day on their feet in perpetual motion while men sat, nodded their heads, and moved only their fingers, their eyes, and sometimes their lips. No wonder the women’s section of the shul resounded with laughter and chatter every Shabbat: it was the one time in the week when they could sit and relax. Women had no urge to argue with angels in the middle of the night—they were grateful if they could grab five hours’ sleep. Jewish mothers in the Pale were efficient managers, brilliant improvisers, shrewd negotiators, practiced schmoozers, nimble stretchers of every kopek. They juggled multiple tasks. They toted columns of figures in their heads. They rolled with market conditions beyond their control. They learned from past mistakes and planned for an uncertain future. In short, they were ideal models for how to succeed in business, and their lessons were not lost on bright girls like Itel.
