by David Laskin
—
On Friday, February 12, 1904, Itel’s grandmother, Beyle, died in Volozhin at the age of sixty-three. Beyle (she shared the name with her daughter-in-law, Shalom Tvi’s wife) had been lovely in her youth, with pale sad eyes that sloped down at the corners, high cheekbones, and a full finely chiseled mouth—and as an older woman she carried herself with serenity and pious resignation. A good wife for Shimon Dov, a good mother to her sons and daughter, a member in good standing of the Volozhin synagogue. With Beyle’s passing, the scribe had only a son and a daughter left in Volozhin—the rest of the family was either in Rakov or the United States.
The day after Beyle’s death was the Shabbat of Mishpatim—the Sabbath of the laws—when the faithful gather to read the section of Exodus (chapters 21 to 24) devoted to Jewish law. If a man come presumptuously upon his neighbor, to slay him with guile; thou shalt take him from Mine altar, that he may die. . . . I will send my terror before thee, and will discomfit the people to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee.
At the appointed moment before the service ended, Shimon Dov stood and keened and recited the mourner’s kaddish for his wife.
—
That same month Russia went to war with Japan and the world of bearded scribes and wooden synagogues was shoved another step closer to the brink. The Russo-Japanese war was a classic imperialist face-off—senseless, blundering, impelled not by opposing ideologies or ethnic rancor but by the naked greed of neighboring powers competing over resources. Russia provoked; Japan reacted; obstinacy on both sides prevailed; and a year and a half of bloodshed ensued. For Russia, it was a disaster, and the herald of worse disasters to come. The tsar, deluded by the vastness of his empire and the swagger of his army, promised his people a swift shining victory and instead handed them military disgrace, diplomatic embarrassment, economic slump, and political chaos. Japan astounded the world by taking out more than half the Russian naval fleet at the start of hostilities—and went on to inflict a series of military humiliations on land and sea. With the tsar’s forces crumpling, popular opinion in Russia swung rapidly from patriotic fervor to disillusionment to revolutionary ferment. Workers grew restive as the military drained off manpower and deprived families of much-needed seasonal income. The assassination of the minister of internal affairs in July 1904 threw the government into turmoil. With every setback on the battlefield and policy zigzag at home, the autocracy appeared shakier.
All of this was pure oxygen for radicals. By the late summer of 1904, Russian cities and towns were astir with meetings, rallies, political banquets, and proclamations. Could the end of the empire be at hand at last? Bundists, socialists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks prayed devoutly at their godless shrines and organized feverishly.
For Itel and Wolf, it was a moment when everything blissful seemed to converge—power, youth, love, sex, new knowledge, revolution. Cramped at home, Itel escaped to the Rosenthals’ house where the atmosphere was freer and the views more liberal. The Rosenthals displayed a portrait of Moses Mendelssohn, leading light of the Haskalah, in their parlor, and beneath the philosopher’s humane, clean-shaven gaze, Itel and Wolf endlessly discussed and argued, plotted and exulted. Wolf’s father was a great Talmudic scholar, a teacher, and a maskil (a proponent of the Haskalah) who read widely in both Hebrew and secular literature, collected books on a range of subjects, professed liberal political views, and, to the disgust of his Bundist offspring, embraced Zionism. With the Rosenthal library at her disposal, Itel embarked on an ambitious course of study—not in the Talmud but in the works of the towering figures of world literature: Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky in Russian; I. L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, and Mendele Mocher Sforim in Yiddish; and foreign authors like Jules Verne, Zola, and James Fenimore Cooper in Yiddish translation. (Years later Wolf’s youngest brother, Moe, then living in America, was amazed to find Twenty Leagues Under the Sea in an English “translation”: he had read the book in his father’s library and assumed it was a Yiddish classic.) Chaim Yasef, Itel’s younger brother, though only eleven years old, got wind of the riches of the Rosenthals’ library and began tagging along to borrow books and eavesdrop.
As the war with Japan dragged on and the revolutionary fervor mounted, Itel and Wolf and their fellow Bundists began stockpiling weapons in preparation for the uprising they knew was imminent. Caches of knives, clubs, and guns were hidden away under beds and at the back of closets. Trips were made to Minsk to proselytize Jewish workers. Wolf’s oldest brother and the brother’s fiancée lived in Minsk and kept a printing press on which they ran off revolutionary pamphlets and broadsides. The young people were playing a dangerous game and they knew it. Police spies were everywhere, and Bundists were being arrested in droves—4,467 of them rounded up and imprisoned between June 1903 and July 1904. Wolf’s brother and his fiancée were arrested when their landlord falsely told the police that they were using the press to print counterfeit bills. Sentenced to three years in Siberia, the couple married hastily in prison so they could remain together.
Danger “only raised the level of enthusiasm,” Wolf recalled half a century later. Being “persecuted, suppressed, and hunted down by the authorities” gave the endeavor “the halo of heroism.” Besides, the political crisis was coming to a head. All over Russia, revolutionaries, Jewish and gentile alike, but overwhelmingly gentile, were on the move. Intellectuals and workers were banding together in unions. Students took to the streets in Moscow, Kharkov, Odessa, Kiev, and St. Petersburg to call for an end to the war and to demand free elections open to all. In the capital, a shadowy charismatic priest named Father Gapon was gathering support from oppressed factory workers, common laborers, and rootless peasants. Father Gapon was something of an enigma. Some whispered that he was in the pay of the tsar’s secret police. Others dismissed him as a charlatan. But his heroic stature among the disaffected masses grew steadily. That summer and autumn, the Rakov Bundists held secret meetings in houses at the edge of town and in the surrounding woods where they could talk without being overheard and practice firing their weapons without accidentally killing someone. “A forest of pine trees, green and fragrant, a clear brook, the chirping of the birds on the treetops—here was the cradle of the Bund in Rakov,” one comrade recollected. “Here we held our meetings, and here the young men of Rakov first heard about the revolution and about socialism. Here, also, were our first loves.” Itel learned how to shoot a gun. Wolf’s oldest sister did too. Even if revolution never came, the knowledge of weapons would be useful in the event of a pogrom.
This was something unheard of in the Russian Pale. Not since classical antiquity had Jews taken up arms to combat oppression and change the world they had been born into.
—
Then disaster struck: Wolf was drafted. Having suffered defeat after defeat during 1904, the Russian army was hungry for manpower, and young Jewish men, though unworthy of every other civil right, were deemed good enough to swell the ranks of the doomed defenders of Port Arthur in Manchuria. Wolf knew what happened to Jews in the tsar’s army. Like every Jewish child in Russia, he had grown up hearing stories of the “military martyrdom” inflicted on his kind: boys as young as twelve called up for terms that stretched to twenty-five years (since then reduced), brutalization at the hands of gentile recruits and sadistic Russian officers, censorship and confiscation of letters from home, religious observance and identity beaten out of them, promotion into the officer corps strictly barred. Bund leaders, fearful that Jews would be accused of treason if they resisted or deserted en masse, called on its members to report for duty when they were drafted and then to agitate from within the ranks. But Wolf had other ideas.
Wolf duly reported to training camp, bringing with him a trunk and a few spare rubles. When the time was right, he distributed the rubles where they would be most useful, grabbed his trunk, and quietly strolled through the camp gates. At the first opportunity, he stripped of
f the soldier’s tunic and trousers, unpacked the civilian clothes that he and Itel had carefully folded into the trunk, made the change, and continued on his way—his brief stint in the tsar’s army over. Wolf had arranged for a final rendezvous with Itel—hastily and in secret. After promising his undying love and extracting her promise of the same, he slipped across the border and made his way west to Rotterdam. Young Jewish draftees were doing the same all over the empire. A few coins in the right hands, a word whispered by a comrade in a border town, and many a deserting Jewish soldier was tucked into a load of hay or bundled on the back of a peasant’s cart. By the start of the new year, 1905, Wolf, along with 2,350 other passengers, was on board the Rotterdam bound for New York.
But by then, the situation in Russia had changed dramatically. At the end of December, a massive strike at a St. Petersburg munitions plant had triggered a chain reaction of sympathy strikes and by the first week of January the capital was without electricity or newspapers. Father Gapon chose this moment to stage a mass demonstration. On the morning of January 9, 1905, which happened to be Itel’s nineteenth birthday, Father Gapon led a march of the oppressed through the streets of the capital. The plan was for six columns of protesters—striking factory workers and their families, students, peasants—to converge on the vast cobbled square before the Winter Palace, where the priest hoped to present a petition to the tsar. The demonstrators began assembling in the city outskirts around dawn. Checkpoints were set up to screen for weapons, and the presence of women and children carrying icons and chanting the mournful hymns of the Orthodox church added a calming note. To the poor of Russia, at least the non-Jews, the tsar was still a revered figure—more father than king—and they had turned out on this winter Sunday to beg for his mercy in the presence of God. When Father Gapon and his column reached the Narva Arch—a Roman-style monument that commemorates Alexander I’s victory over Napoléon with an arch straddling a major arterial south of the Winter Palace—they paused. Facing them were ranks of soldiers, mounted and on foot, with rifles loaded and cocked. The officer in charge gave the order and a bugle was sounded—the command to open fire—but none of the protesters heard it over the singing and chanting and shuffling of feet. In any case, the shots rang out before the crowd could possibly have dispersed. Thirty fell dead in the first volley, including members of Gapon’s guard, though the priest himself escaped unharmed. The slaughter continued all afternoon as marchers en route to the Winter Palace were stomped, shot, and bayoneted by the tsar’s army, then trampled by their fleeing comrades.
By conservative estimates, some 1,000 people were killed or wounded on Bloody Sunday (the official government count was 130 dead and some 300 wounded, but journalists put the number of casualties at 4,600). The bullets, hooves, and blades of the tsar’s protectors had also killed his people’s faith. Their father had betrayed them. Their petition was unread; their demands were ignored; their grievances dismissed. Russia’s Jews had never had any illusions about the benevolence of their ruler, but the empire’s vast gentile population had always held the tsar blameless for their suffering. No longer. From the blood of Bloody Sunday rose the Revolution of 1905—and from 1905 came the Revolution of 1917. The fate of an empire was sealed in an afternoon.
The fact that Bloody Sunday fell on Itel’s nineteenth birthday was a coincidence. Who could blame her, though, if she took it as a sign? All over Russia, young revolutionaries were on fire at the news. Bloody Sunday was the moment they had been waiting for. In the immediate aftermath, strikes broke out—some four hundred thousand workers in the major cities walked off their jobs in protest within hours of the slaughter. The numbers were most impressive and solidarity most intense in the Bund strongholds of the northern and western sections of the Pale. Warsaw, Vilna, Lodz, cities with large well-organized Bundist operations, were all but shut down. Bund organizers moved swiftly to capitalize on the popular outrage. “Comrades! We have flooded the earth of Russia with our blood, and now freedom is blooming from this earth,” one Bund leader exhorted the ranks of the new “soldiers of the revolution.” “Attack the stores where arms are sold! Everyone get a gun, a revolver, a sword, an ax, a knife! Arm yourselves! . . . Let us give up the blood of our hearts and receive the rights of human beings!” It was the zenith of the Bund’s power and influence and glamour.
In Rakov, the local Bund came out of hiding and organized strikes at some of the larger factories; Rakov workers declared their solidarity with revolutionaries in the bloodstained streets of the capital. Thanks to the Bund, Rakov’s Jews had weapons; thanks to the uprising, they had political will and momentum. Now what they needed was a leader. With Wolf in America—he had arrived at Ellis Island on January 26 with $1.50 to his name and the address of an uncle in Manhattan in his pocket—Itel stepped up to the task. Every Monday and Friday—Rakov’s market days—Itel stood in the market square to rail against the injustice of the autocracy. Commanding beyond her years and height, she was a fiery orator and a born leader. And her moment—the moment of all Russia’s downtrodden workers—was at hand.
The strikes continued into February and March. The peasants joined the uprising. There were rumblings of mutiny in the army. Riga, Warsaw, Lodz saw bloody street battles. Students shut down the universities; doctors and lawyers and journalists voiced their support for the workers. Pogroms, always the shadow of upheaval in Russia, erupted in the Pale—though in many places armed Bundists were able to counter the violence. In fact, the Bund seemed to be unstoppable in those first magnificent months of 1905. “It could achieve everything, reach everyone,” one Bundist declared with fierce, hopeful pride. “The word of the Bund was law; its stamp worked like hypnosis. . . . It was legendary.”
Sadly, the legend was no match for the flypaper of custom and the noose of authority. In the way of small towns, Rakov’s police chief was a customer at Gishe Sore’s shop, and he strolled in one day to give her a bit of friendly advice. Either her rabble-rouser of a daughter stop making speeches in the marketplace or he would personally have the brat arrested, spanked, and thrown in jail.
Itel had no intention of rotting in Siberia like Wolf’s brother and sister-in-law. And anyway, her heart was in New York.
In April of 1905, as the last patches of snow retreated to the depths of the pine woods, Itel left Russia and its revolution in the care of her fellow Bundists. She packed up what she could call her own, tucked away a slip of paper with the address of her uncle Joseph in Hoboken, and bid farewell to her mother, father, three younger brothers, and two small sisters. A horse-drawn wagon brought her to the nearby town of Olechnowicze and there she boarded a train that took her, after many changes and border crossings, to Rotterdam, the same port Wolf had embarked from three months earlier. “I couldn’t live without him,” Itel confessed later. It was like something out of a novel: they were each other’s first love and only love. They would never be apart again.
Together, Itel and Wolf would bring revolution to America—though it proved to be a very different kind of revolution than the one they had fled.
—
The year of revolution was a year of tragedy for the family of Shalom Tvi. Worldly and easygoing, Shalom Tvi had settled comfortably into his new life in Rakov. His wife’s family was rich, the leather business brought in a tidy income, there was enough work to keep him busy but not so much that he couldn’t enjoy life. And enjoying life was important to Shalom Tvi. Not a scholar like his brother Avram Akiva, not a revolutionary like his niece, not a restless seeker after fortune like the relatives in America, Shalom Tvi was a charming, faithful, self-possessed man, and he and Beyle should have reaped the blessings of a large, loving family.
It was not to be. In the first years of their marriage, Beyle bore her husband two daughters—Shula, named for Beyle’s mother, in 1900; and Doba, round and adorable, three years later. But in the year of revolution, Shula died. No record survives of what disease or accident carried off the firstborn child
or the exact date of her passing. More than a century later she is still faintly, sadly, remembered.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE BOYS
The 1905 revolution went on without Itel and Wolf. All spring and summer, demonstrations, mutiny, and assassinations were rampant in Russia. Since the uprising had blown the lid off government censorship, newspapers were free to report on the protesters’ demands and the growing solidarity between workers and intellectuals. Every day, there was a fresh account of a policeman or government official gunned down or ripped to pieces by a bomb. The countryside was literally on fire as peasants torched the manor houses of the great landowners and divided the estates. As the year went on, spontaneous local flare-ups spread and merged until they took on the character of a true national revolution. The climax came in October, when a general strike spread from Moscow and St. Petersburg to the far reaches of the empire, shutting down the railroads and crippling the economy. Cornered and desperate, the tsar issued a series of concessions known as the October Manifesto granting his subjects limited democratic representation along with an array of civil liberties, including freedom of religion. Bundists hailed the “Days of Freedom,” but the violence continued unchecked.
Then the violence metastasized. A group calling itself the Black Hundreds—a proto-fascist confederation of die-hard tsarists, Russian Orthodox zealots, arch-nationalists, ethnic purists, urban workers, displaced peasants, and drunken thugs—took to the streets in counterrevolution. Once more, Jews were targeted. “The root of all evil, the root of all our misfortunes is the Jews,” proclaimed one of the insidious leaflets that circulated through Russia’s cities. “Soon, soon a new time will come, friends, when there will be no Jews.” In October and November of 1905, the Black Hundreds instigated the deadliest pogroms in Russian history. Over one thousand Jews were slain in some six hundred communities, primarily in Ukraine. For three days the anti-Semitic violence raged in Odessa. Scores died in Kiev, Zhitomir, Ekaterinoslav. Kishinev exploded again. Isaac Babel, who lived through the Odessa pogrom as a boy of eleven, described the ecstatic release of anti-Semitic rage in his sketch “The Story of My Dovecote”:
