The Family

by David Laskin

  A young muzhik [Russian peasant] was smashing a window frame in the house of Khariton Efrussi [a wealthy Jewish wheat merchant]. He was smashing it with a wooden hammer, his whole body steeped in the movement. He breathed in deeply, smiled in all directions the gentle smile of drunkenness, of sweat and hearty strength. The whole street was filled with the crackling, crashing song of shattering wood. . . . Old men with painted beards were carrying the portrait of a neatly combed Tsar, banners with sepulchral saints fluttered above the religious procession, inflamed old women were running in front of it. When the muzhik in the vest saw the procession, he pressed the hammer to his chest and went running after the banners. . . .

  Though Bundists fought back, they were no match for the Russian mob. The revolution had become “drenched in a torrent of Jewish blood,” one Bundist wrote in despair.

  —

  Fearing that violence would spread to their own shtetl, Rakov Bundists dispatched a delegation to Minsk to purchase more weapons—two Finnish knives and seventy rubber clubs—but Itel’s brothers stayed out of it. One revolutionary was enough for the family. The three sons of Avram Akiva—Hersch now seventeen, Shmuel sixteen, and Chaim Yasef thirteen—were not inclined to make speeches in the marketplace or fire guns in the forest. The boys were becoming men in a world that was splitting beneath their feet, but they were still Kohanim, descendants of Aaron, the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of priests and scribes. A daughter might play at insurrection; it was a son’s duty to protect his father’s name and the family reputation. But what future could they expect in a country where a thousand Jews were slaughtered in the street while their king tutted about the “brazen, insolent way” of the victims? The boys looked around at the shul, the market, the fields, and the woods and saw no future for themselves. To work as a butcher, carpenter, tailor, shoemaker was out of the question for the sons of the scribe. But they were too restless and ambitious to settle down to a life of Torah. “It would please the parents,” Chaim Yasef wrote, “but the sons were not agreeable.” And so, between tradition and revolution, they chose a middle course. They learned to fix watches.

  Hersch was apprenticed to a watchmaker in the nearby town of Smargon, and in 1906 his younger brother Chaim Yasef joined him. The brothers rented a room in the house of a local freight carrier (“the conveyance was his own back”) and on every morning but the Sabbath they went off together to Mr. Rudnick’s little shop, in the center of town, to master the craft of repairing clocks and watches. Hersch, with a bit of experience under his belt, was paid two rubles a week; Chaim Yasef a quarter of that. The boys worked hard, dined on crumbs, and lived like monks—but during the year they spent together in Smargon they forged a bond that endured all their lives. The apprenticeship was like boot camp, and the brothers emerged from it comrades—though they never ceased to be rivals.

  Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore’s seven surviving children were arrayed symmetrically by gender—two girls, then three boys, then two more girls. Having three sons one after another in the space of four years is a sure formula for internecine warfare, and the Kaganovich boys were no exception. Whenever they were together under one roof, the atmosphere turned stormy. Hersch, the first son, was a born diplomat—funny, calm, soft-spoken, nice-looking—but where Hersch put out fires, Chaim Yasef, the domineering youngest son, started them. Where Hersch negotiated, Chaim Yasef provoked. Once he truly became a man, Chaim Yasef had a rough barking voice, which he used, mercilessly, on those he considered his inferiors. If you quailed, Chaim Yasef barked more; if you barked back, he backed off. The person Chaim Yasef barked at the most was Shmuel, the middle brother. He was born to be insulted. Thin-skinned and bighearted, Shmuel was tense, stocky, loyal, and volatile. Shmuel grew up to be the most pious of Avram Akiva’s children—he was the only one of the sons who learned the art of the scribe from his father—but being close to God did not make him serene or confident. Little things set him off, especially things done by his brothers, and then you never heard the end of it. Later in life, Shmuel became intensely jealous, even a touch paranoid, about the bond between his brothers. That jealousy first became acute during the year when Hersch and Chaim Yasef lived together in Smargon. For whatever reasons, the family decided that Shmuel, instead of apprenticing with the other boys, should follow his older sisters to America. And so, in 1906, Shmuel sailed for New York and missed out on the ticktock boot camp. He never really broke into the rough easy camaraderie that Hersch and Chaim Yasef developed in Smargon. He was a good Jew, a hard worker, and an upright man. But he was not the favorite son or the favorite brother, and he knew it.

  —

  Premature death touched the family again in the year the boys left Rakov for apprenticeship and America. Avram Akiva’s brother Arie died in Volozhin at the age of thirty-one. The only one of Shimon Dov’s five sons who had chosen to remain in Volozhin, Arie was married and the father of two small children—a daughter, Chana, and a son, Yishayahu (the Hebrew form of the name Isaiah). But in 1906, with his wife Leah nine months pregnant with their third child, something happened—whether disease or accident has been erased by time. When the baby was born, they named him Chaim—life—after Shimon Dov’s father. But Arie died before his new son was a week old. Chaim’s bris took place during his father’s shiva—an inauspicious way for a Jewish son to come into the world.

  —

  “Repairing watches or clocks is fascinating and interesting, to those who love the work,” Chaim Yasef wrote of his apprenticeship in Smargon. “You get to revive a dead watch or clock by adjusting and replacing worn or broken parts (which part you had to make yourself). There was no such thing in those days or in that town as replacements parts, so when you finished your work and brought the watch back to normal, useful life, you got a great feeling of professional pride.” However gratifying, dead clocks were not enough to keep Chaim Yasef’s brother Hersch in Smargon very long. In June 1907, the oldest Kaganovich son put apprenticeship behind him and made his way to Antwerp, where he boarded the Red Star Line’s Samland and set sail for New York. His older sister Itel, now Mrs. Ida Rosenthal, paid the fare, and she and Wolf, now William, were on hand to meet Hersch when he arrived at Ellis Island on June 28. Harry Cohen, as Hersch Kaganovich promptly restyled himself, was eighteen years old and five feet three inches tall, with dark hair and brown eyes. Bent on becoming an American as quickly as he could, he moved in with his relatives and went to work.

  That left fourteen-year-old Chaim Yasef alone in Smargon, the last of Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore’s sons in the Russian Pale. To save money, Chaim Yasef gave up the room in the freight carrier’s house and set up a folding cot in the watch repair shop. “I became my own chambermaid. As companions I had the repaired clocks that struck the hour and half hour and the repaired alarm clocks that would go off at all hours of the night. The shop was located in the building where the owner lived so I was given the privilege of heating water on his stove to make breakfast usually consisting of a roll and tea.”

  Chaim Yasef was a proud, lonely, brooding teenager in Smargon. He took umbrage at the snobbish aunt who offered to pay him to stay away lest her pampered children be contaminated by a poor watchmaker’s apprentice who slept in the shop. He dreamed of landing a job at a fancy clock shop in Moscow or Petersburg. Preoccupied with his own sensitive feelings and glittering prospects, the boy failed to notice that all thinking people in the Pale were plunged in blank despair that year. By 1907 it was apparent that the revolution had failed utterly: after the Days of Freedom came the Years of Reaction, when hope of reform was crushed, pogroms raged, the Bund withered, and the net of surveillance tightened. Though the tsar had agreed in 1906 to an elected assembly—the Duma—it was dissolved after a few months of mostly ineffective debate and toothless investigation of official corruption. Freedom withdrawn is worse than no freedom at all. Now, in the aftermath of revolt, a drizzle of ash settled over the land. Hooligans of the Black Hundreds prowled
city streets like wolves. The economy stagnated. Those who suffered and those responsible for the suffering blamed the Jews for everything—the incitement to revolution, its failure, the sour revulsion that followed. Infected by the general virus, Rakov sweated, shivered, and cracked its aching joints. “The economic situation in our town is bad,” wrote one of the Botwiniks. “Poverty is on the increase, and emigration is getting stronger from day to day.” New Catholic churches were built in the neighboring villages—seemingly a matter of indifference to Jews, but in fact it hit the Kaganovich family hard. As Polish and Belarusian peasants flocked to churches closer to their farms, attendance at Rakov’s church fell off—with the result that there was less traffic at Gishe Sore’s general store. A Catholic merchant opened up a competing store in town—and priests urged their parishioners to boycott Jewish shops and buy only from their fellow Catholics. Business declined further.

  Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore agonized about joining the exodus to America. Itel, Ettel, Hersch, and Shmuel—now calling themselves Ida, Ethel, Harry, and Sam—were already in New Jersey and urging them to sell out, pack up, and get out of Russia. The American children did the math—they had become very skilled with numbers: if the parents sold out in Rakov, if the sisters and brothers pooled their earnings, if the younger ones got jobs, if they all worked hard, if God smiled on them and gave them health, then they could live comfortably in America. They could live free—and they could live together.

  Concern for their next-to-youngest daughter also factored in. Chana had developed an alarming cough—possibly a reaction to the damp atmosphere near the lake. The Rakov doctor thought a change of climate would do her good, and maybe there were better doctors in the New World.

  The parents turned to Chaim Yasef, the oldest child still at home, for advice. “I see no future here,” the boy intoned with the wisdom of his seventeen years. “If I stay, it will not be in this town. One thing Rakov does not need is another watchmaker.”

  By the spring of 1909, they had made up their minds. Gishe Sore and Avram Akiva found a buyer for the house by the lake, the cow, the calf, the garden. Rubles changed hands and the store that had fed the family for so many years passed to another shopkeeper. Avram Akiva assembled all the bits of parchment he had on hand—tiny scrolls for the mezuzot, pages for the Passover Haggadoth and Purim megillahs, beautifully lettered prayers—and sold them to pious friends. The family went to Volozhin to say farewell to Shimon Dov. They found the patriarch hale but wizened and more alone than ever after Arie’s death. Avram Akiva asked for and received his father’s blessing. The men prayed together for the souls of the dead and the health of the living. Father and son must have known that they would never see each other again.

  Before their departure, Rakov’s mayor, who lived on the same street, made a state visit to wish them Godspeed and to announce solemnly that he had never seen a more upstanding shopkeeper or finer homemaker than Gishe Sore (he had clearly never tasted her cooking). Most painful was the parting with Shalom Tvi. The brothers had become inseparable during their decade together in Rakov, and despite their differences, they were alike in the ways that mattered. Once Avram Akiva and his family left, Shalom Tvi, Beyle, and their two daughters (Doba was six and the baby, Etl, was two) would have to keep the Kaganovich name alive in Rakov on their own. Shalom Tvi promised to visit one day. Avram Akiva promised him a clean bed and a place to say his prayers in New York.

  The end was a rapid blur. The last walk to synagogue. The last reading from the Torah. The last tears shed at the graves of the two babies Gishe Sore had lost and buried in the Rakov cemetery. The last meal in the creaking wooden house by the lake. The last breath of the blue and white lilacs that bloomed in profusion all over town. Finally the day of departure was upon them. A horse and wagon dragged them through green meadows and dark pine woods to the rail station at Olechnowicze. A train took them northwest toward the coast. There was a fifteen-minute stop at the Smargon station, and the uncle (but not the aunt) came to the platform to bid them farewell and praise young Chaim Yasef for his hard work and ambition. Like everyone, the uncle said he hoped to visit them one day. In America.

  The train rattled through Vilna with its many magnificent synagogues and narrow streets teeming with Jewish workers, teachers, beggars, and revolutionaries. Through Kaunas crouched behind its immense brick fortresses. Through the grain fields that in a decade would cease to be Russia. As the land flattened and the trees grew stubbier, they could sense the pull of the sea. And then, all at once, through the train windows, there it was—the Baltic—430 miles across from Stockholm to Petersburg, tinged with gray even at the balmy cusp of summer, as if winter were curled beneath its surface.

  No time to marvel at the miracle of horizonless water or explore the beckoning chaos of the dockside streets of Libau. The Russian-American Line’s Russia—a sleek black barracuda of a ship—was waiting to carry them to New York.

  It was the season of lingering twilight and the heavy perfume of fruit trees. But no flower’s scent could penetrate the acrid smoke rising from the Russia’s funnels or the reek of oil, wet cloth, rancid food, and vomit that permeated its steerage. Europe faded to a brown smudge. The continent had been the family’s home for a thousand years—probably more. None of them ever again set foot on Russian soil.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LOWER EAST SIDE

  Gishe Sore thought she knew about America from her children’s letters, from the bits and pieces that appeared in the Yiddish and Russian newspapers, from the gossip she picked up in the store and the rumors that spread from neighbor to neighbor. But now she saw that she hadn’t understood the first thing. Who knew that New York was islands—one tiny island for the colossal statue, another for the immigrants, a long narrow blade of an island for the millions of people who had come before her and the new ones pouring in beside her from every corner of the world?

  The crossing in the Russia’s third-class compartment had made them all sick. The ship stank; the food was worse than anything she cooked. But now that they had trudged up and down the endless stairs in the palace of the immigrants, had their eyes and hair examined, sworn they were neither bigamists nor anarchists, received the coveted stamp on their papers, found their luggage, piled through the door marked “Push to New York,” and fallen into the arms of their American children, Gishe Sore’s insides had settled at last. Now, on the morning of June 1, 1909, with her shoes touching American soil for the first time, she was terrified.

  Her American children—not children anymore but glossy adults in expensive clothes—took charge of everything. Gishe Sore let herself be guided to the dock at the edge of Ellis Island, where a ferry was waiting to take them across the harbor to Manhattan. She looked where the American children pointed. She listened to them explain: that was New York City—Manhattan—their new home. She stared at the treeless forest rising from the point of land surrounded by slopping brown water. To her it didn’t look like a place where people lived, but she submitted. What choice did she have? One hour in America and already everything was topsy-turvy: the children led, the parents shuffled along behind.

  The ferry docked at the Battery and all the new immigrants spilled out with their luggage, their baskets, their screaming children, their heavy reeking foreign clothes. Gishe Sore waited and sweated while the American children found a taxicab. It took an eternity to cover the couple of miles from Ellis Island to their flat. She gazed through the cab window at the shadowed canyons where dark-suited people milled on every corner and rushed along the margins of every street and disappeared into or emerged from gaping holes in the pavement. The canyon walls shrank block by block as they inched their way across the tip of Manhattan—but as the buildings became humbler, the life on the streets grew denser. They passed beneath the ramps leading up to the Brooklyn Bridge and crossed into the Lower East Side. East Broadway, Catherine Street, Allen Street, Henry, Madison—their street. Instead of houses set in f
enced gardens, there were just buildings, ugly brown and gray and black buildings, all more or less the same height, all perforated by dirty opaque rectangular windows, all pushed together with no air or light between them. Every street, every housefront, every roof, every corner was perfectly, drably geometrical—not a curve or curl to soften the right angles—but the effect was shoddy, haphazard, sprawling, and dirty beyond belief. Hebrew letters painted on awnings and stenciled on shopwindows brought no comfort—the signs were too pressing, the messages too clamorous. Outside the storefronts more stuff for sale spilled out onto the streets—food, clothing, household items, cast-off junk heaped on pushcarts and rickety tables or hauled around by plodding blinkered horses. The ugly buildings were defaced by ugly grillwork—fire escapes strewn with laundry, children, boxes, crates, stray bundles, broken furniture, more junk. Not a green leaf or patch of brown earth anywhere; not a wisp of shade in the profligate light of June, not a path to walk down or a bench to sit on and chat with the neighbors. And such neighbors—in such numbers. Gishe Sore would be lost forever the first time she ventured out alone. She would be robbed, cheated, pushed into an alley, or tripped down cellar stairs. She would die and no one would ever find her.

  They pulled up to 195 Madison Street—a tall narrow six-story redbrick and limestone-trimmed tenement house indistinguishable from all the tenement houses on all the other streets of tenements. The bars and ladders of a fire escape ran up the left side of the building; sooty stone scrolls, shields, and flowers framed the second- and third-story windows. This was the place where they had to live? Two blocks from the commercial madness of East Broadway; two blocks from the filthy snout of the East River, smelling of fish, ships, and garbage; three blocks from the brain-rattling racket of the elevated train; three blocks from the playground of the Henry Street Settlement; practically in the shadow of the construction site of the twin-towered Manhattan Bridge. Every three blocks they passed more people than the entire population of Rakov. Half a million Jews packed the one and a half square miles of the Lower East Side in 1909: 702 people per acre in the densest acres. It was one of the most crowded places on earth, and all of them seemed to be swarming outdoors on the June afternoon that Gishe Sore and her family arrived. Aside from the crisscross steel girders of the Manhattan Bridge at the end of the street, it was all tenement houses as far as she could see. Tenements and bodies. In every room of every building, bodies fought for a ray of light and a sip of air. Bodies slept four to a bed and on two chairs pushed together; bodies sat hunched over sewing machines in parlors and sunless back bedrooms and at kitchen tables heaped with cloth and thread; bodies ate, slept, woke, and cleared out for the next shift of bodies to cycle through. Toilets in the hall or in courtyard outhouses; windows opening, if they opened at all, onto fetid air shafts; no privacy; no escape from the racket and smell of neighbors; no relief from summer heat or blasting winter furnaces. This was the place her American children had brought them to live?