by David Laskin
All of the seamstresses knew that Itel and William would never let a dress go out the door unless every stitch was perfect, uniform, and invisible. If there was the smallest flaw, it was ripped and repaired.
The girls worked hard—six days a week from eight in the morning to six at night for a dollar a day, an hour for lunch, and the month of August off—but Itel and William worked harder. Itel did evening fittings for women who were occupied during the day; she and William were in the shop most Sundays to catch up on paperwork and tie up the thousand loose ends of running a small business. William, more of a Jewish mother than his wife, took enough time off from work to make sure that Lewis was clean, healthy, well fed, well loved, and put to bed every night with a story and a kiss. He even learned to cook on the maid’s day off. Itel got the glory, and naturally she and William got the lion’s share of the money—but the seamstresses knew they were comparatively well paid and well treated. Itel could be cold and calculating but she was also charismatic: she deployed what one relative called her “flamboyant charm” to maximum advantage with both customers and employees. She didn’t just want to be the most successful dressmaker in Hoboken—she wanted to be the best. She expected nothing short of perfection and she got it.
Success spurred Itel to reinvent herself—at least outwardly. She would never be a beauty—she was too short, too stocky, too penetrating and quizzical in her expression—but she learned to make the most of what she had. She started taming her frizzy dark hair into smooth waves that framed her round fleshy face and she took to wearing stylish black satin dresses. She and William had always been readers, and now they added the works of Mark Twain, Jack London, and Shakespeare to their shelves of Yiddish and Russian classics. When they could tear themselves away from the shop, they crossed the river to attend Yiddish plays and variety shows on the Lower East Side and the occasional performance at the old Metropolitan Opera house on Thirty-ninth and Broadway.
The two of them were naturalized in 1912 and that November William cast his first vote in a presidential election, for the perennial Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs (women in New Jersey were not granted the vote in presidential elections until 1920). It was a proud moment when William, along with more than 900,000 other socialists (nearly 6 percent of the total vote), marked his ballot for Debs in the historic four-way contest that swept Democrat Woodrow Wilson into office over Republican incumbent William Howard Taft and Bull Moose Party candidate Teddy Roosevelt. The Rosenthals may have become small business owners with money in the bank and workers on the payroll, but they hadn’t abandoned the political ideals for which they had been hounded out of Russia seven years earlier. Itel was still a socialist—a socialist in a black satin dress. The Forward was their newspaper; immigrant lawyers/politicians Morris Hillquit and Meyer London were their heroes; left-wing political rallies and lectures their milieu. “I am a socialist because I cannot be anything else,” proclaimed the brilliant, eloquent Hillquit, who took 21.23 percent of the vote in his 1908 run for Congress in New York’s Ninth District. “I cannot accept the ugly world of capitalism, with its brutal struggles and needless suffering, its archaic and irrational economic structure. . . . If I were alone, all alone in the whole country and the whole world, I could not help opposing capitalism and pleading for a better and saner order, pleading for socialism.” So pleaded firebrand seamstress Clara Lemlich when she led 20,000 fellow shirtwaist operators out on a general strike that shut down sweatshops and factories all over the city for weeks in the fall and winter of 1909. So pleaded union leader Rose Schneiderman at a memorial for the 146 workers, most of them Jewish and Italian immigrant girls in their teens and twenties, who burned or jumped to their deaths when the ten-story Triangle Waist Company building on Washington Place caught fire on March 25, 1911. So pleaded Itel and William and tens of thousands of like-minded Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Hoboken, and Jersey City. It was the heyday of Jewish socialism in America and every shade of revolutionary radicalism from anarchism to Socialist-Zionism flourished wherever Jews lived and worked. On May Day, tenement fire escapes blossomed with red flags; on March 28, union halls rang with the “Marseillaise” to commemorate the short-lived Paris commune of 1871; every election season the Jewish streets and auditoriums filled with foot-stomping fist-clenched rallies for socialist candidates.
The high-water mark came in the midterm elections of 1914. On the evening of November 3, a crowd of fifty thousand gathered in Seward Park across from the Forward Building to await the results of the battle for the Twelfth District congressional seat between Democratic incumbent Henry M. Goldfogle and Socialist Party challenger Meyer London. The crowd stood fast through the night as rumors swirled and special editions of the Yiddish newspapers posted conflicting results. Finally, around 2 A.M., the Forward issued an extra proclaiming that Meyer London, a poor Jew born in a Ukrainian shtetl, had become the first Socialist Party member to be elected to the United States Congress, and the crowd went wild. Ten thousand delirious socialists, singing and dancing to the strains of the “Marseillaise,” stormed the Forward Building. Editor Abe Cahan, toiling through the night in the editorial office, was summoned to make a speech. Dawn had broken when a car bearing London inched its way through the tenement-lined streets. The crowd was so thick on East Broadway that the car had to stop before it reached the Forward headquarters; London climbed on the roof to deliver his acceptance speech. “Organize, friends. Carry on the great struggle for the liberation of the working class. Build strong unions. Join the Socialist Party and carry on the fight for freedom till the final victory.” The crowd celebrated until 8 A.M. Then they slowly dispersed to put in another day in the sweatshops, factories, storefronts, and pushcarts.
This was the political climate that Itel and William lived in and breathed. Though the Bund had outposts in America, they preferred the Workmen’s Circle—the Arbeter Ring in Yiddish—a Jewish fraternal order that fostered socialist ideology, Jewish values, education for needy children, and affordable health insurance for working people. Itel and William signed on with the Workmen’s Circle Rakov chapter, attended lectures, supported strikes and unions, and more or less practiced what they preached in their dress shop. They didn’t turn the business into a collective, but they did pay the seamstresses a fair wage and treated them humanely. Itel cut a striking figure at raucous, sweaty union hall rallies—but in those days Jewish socialists came from all walks of life, every rung on the social ladder, and every shade of religious belief or disbelief. Socialism was the norm in enlightened Jewish America in the decade before the Great War. It was what bright kids, striving workers, and cultured, self-made immigrants subscribed to. It gave Itel and William a touch of ramparts glamour, and it connected them to the world outside Hoboken—indeed, to the world outside of the United States, since socialism was always aimed at “workers of the world.” William’s ties with former Bundist comrades would draw him back to Rakov for a final visit in the 1930s.
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“A man either had God or socialism or he was in business,” one Lower East Side immigrant wrote, “but then, with some intellectual and psychological variants, he could be involved in all three and not feel contradictory.” Itel and William were involved in two of the three without feeling contradictory. Itel’s brothers across the river pretty much limited themselves to business. Socialism was not for them and God was their father’s affair, but if Itel wanted to wave the red flag, who were they to judge? In America, success spoke louder than politics and faith—and Itel and William were by any measure successful, certainly more successful than Harry, Sam, and Hyman. Itel was hobnobbing with upper-crust ladies, or at least taking their measurements and money, while the boys squeezed nickels out of pawnbrokers and peddlers on Hester Street. By Jewish custom and tradition, the sons were supposed to be the heavenly bodies around which the mother and daughters orbited, but that’s not how it was in the Cohen family. Itel, the socialist capitalist, was
the star, and the rest of them trailed along behind her. She wouldn’t have had it any other way.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FIRST WORLD WAR
Shimon Dov expected the world to end in a burst of divine radiance. There would be a knock on his door and he would open to utter clarity, absolute knowledge, perfect peace, and overwhelming joy: the Messiah had come at last! The scribe and his offspring in Volozhin and Rakov and New York and New Jersey, and all the Jews in Russia and Europe, in Vilna and Warsaw, Berlin and Moscow, London and Rome and Vienna, even the Jews in China and Africa and Australia and South America would rush to their synagogues to praise God and then stream as one people, one redeemed body, back to Jerusalem, where the Temple would stand again in all its holiness and might.
Shimon Dov did not expect his world to end with a bullet fired from an assassin’s rifle into the proud pampered body of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. For Shimon Dov, for Europe’s Jews, the assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand, on June 28, 1914, ushered in the age of the anti-Messiah. It took three decades to complete the mission—and when it was done, the earth, at least one smoldering chunk of it, was emptied of justice, joy, clarity, light, and love. Shimon Dov at the age of seventy-nine saw it begin. He was blessed that he did not live to see it end.
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When the news reached Volozhin that Germany, on August 1, had declared war on Russia, three old friends—Fayve the tailor, Oyzer the postman, Naftoli the bookbinder—were gathered as usual in the Klayzl synagogue on Vilna Street. The talk, of course, turned to the future. Their country was now at war with the most powerful, most modern, most heavily armed nation in Europe. What would happen to them, to their families, to their beloved shtetl? Nothing to worry about, Oyzer the postman told his friends resolutely. Russia was not only immense but immensely strong. So strong that she could choose to fight where she wanted. Siberia, the Caucasus, the fertile plains of Ukraine, the deserts of Manchuria: the tsar controlled all of this territory and he would fight where his commanders advised him to fight. Volozhin was safe—they could all relax. With a huge empire under his belt why would the emperor pick their little town for a battlefield?
While Oyzer held forth, Nahumke, a graduate of the yeshiva, was sitting nearby, ostensibly immersed in a book. But the yeshiva man looked up when there was a pause and launched into a story—a true story he insisted: There once was a poor Jew in Volozhin with six ugly daughters, one nastier than the next, all of them impossible to marry off. One day the shadken—the matchmaker—appeared at the house of the poor Jewish father to announce that he had found a most impressive match: the only son and heir of Count Tyshkevitch, the nobleman who owned forty thousand acres of estates and forests surrounding Volozhin. There was just one problem: the prospective groom was a goy. The poor Jew was outraged, but his wife was intrigued—and so, after much soul-searching and beard-tugging, he summoned the shadken back and gave his consent. “Wonderful,” replied the shadken. “Now we have to go see if the count and his son are agreeable.”
“The moral of the story,” Nahumke told his friends, “is that even though Russia may claim she will fight where she chooses to fight, first she needs to get the consent of Germany and Austria. Are you sure that they would agree to do battle in those precise places and not here in Volozhin?”
Nahumke was prophetic. A little more than a year later, the German army was virtually on their doorstep.
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Shimon Dov was convinced they had been spared. When Russia mobilized, half a million Jews were called up to fight in the tsar’s army, but his sons and grandsons were not among them. Avram Akiva and his three boys were safe in America. The same with Yasef Bear, Leah Golda (who had emigrated with her family in 1911), Herman, and all of their sons. Arie was dead, and Arie’s two sons, Yishayahu and Chaim, were too young to be drafted. The only ones left within range of the imperial recruiting officers were Shalom Tvi and his family in Rakov. But, praise God, Shalom Tvi had only daughters—four of them once Feigele, the youngest, was born in 1912, two years after Sonia. Shalom Tvi himself was forty-two the summer war was declared—too old for the army. The news was dire—immense battles were being fought in the Pale, shtetlach were on fire, Jews were being evacuated, robbed, killed, denounced as traitors—but at least the family was safe.
Shimon Dov clung to this belief for as long as he could before the reality of the Great War closed in. In the initial chaotic months, the opposing armies had made a series of rapid advances and retreats in the borderlands of Eastern Europe, “swaying back and forth in Poland and in Galicia,” as one Yiddish daily reported, and fighting “every inch of ground in Jewish towns and villages.” But in the spring of 1915, the swaying stopped and the movement turned decisively in one direction: east. The Germans mounted a push into Russian territory and the tsar’s army was powerless to halt it. The heavily fortified Lithuanian city of Kaunas fell in the middle of August; Smargon, where Harry and Hyman had done their apprenticeship, was overrun at the start of September; and Vilna, the regional capital, with its large cultured Jewish population, was in German hands by the middle of September. At the end of September the Eastern Front congealed along a line that sliced south through the Pale from the Baltic to the Red Sea.
The line fell so close to Volozhin that on maps the name was bisected. The yeshiva town was now a besieged outpost on the Eastern Front—still inside Russia but close enough to the line of battle that Shimon Dov was within range of artillery and in earshot of machine-gun fire. At night the eighty-year-old patriarch awoke to the repeating earthquake of exploding shells. Week after week, he watched two endless currents flow in opposite directions along the town’s main street: Russian soldiers and Cossacks moving west with their supply wagons and unwieldy artillery pieces mounted on limbers, while refugees from evacuated towns and villages streamed east. The Volozhin marketplace filled with the homeless, the wretched, the hungry and dispossessed. Yeshiva boys were routinely dragged from the school by Russian military police, marched off in shackles to Minsk, and thrown into the Russian army—or prison. The tsar’s government, deeming all Jews potential traitors, ordered mass deportations from shtetlach at the front. Some 600,000 Jews were sent packing into the Russian interior, and as many as 200,000 Jewish civilians were killed behind the Russian line. Peasants from the surrounding farm villages were also being evacuated en masse. With winter looming, those remaining in Volozhin wondered where they were going to get food.
The neighbors warned Shimon Dov that it was now a capital offense to speak Yiddish in public. The Russians had noticed that Germans could understand Yiddish—which is essentially a German dialect—and they accused Jews at the front of passing secrets to the enemy. Yiddish speakers were suspected of spying, and spies were shot on sight.
Behind their hands, the neighbors whispered that the shtetlach that had fallen to the Germans were the lucky ones. Russian soldiers raped, plundered, and torched Jewish homes, just as they always had. Cossacks were desecrating synagogues, smashing headstones, digging up Jewish graves because they believed that Jews buried their dead with their money. But the Germans were different. German soldiers were civilized, law-abiding. When they wanted something, they paid for it. Or so they thought in Volozhin.
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Rakov, twenty-five miles east of Volozhin, was a day’s march from the front—far enough that Shalom Tvi did not have to worry about forced evacuation, but close enough to absorb the shock waves. It turned out that Shalom Tvi was wrong when he assumed he was too old to be drafted. After the losses of 1915, the desperately depleted Russian army was pressing every able-bodied man under fifty into service. Rakov was picked clean, but somehow Shalom Tvi escaped. Maybe his leather business was considered critical to the war effort (saddles, straps, coats, gloves); maybe he secured an exemption because he had four small children to feed; maybe his angel interceded on his behalf. Whatever the reason, Shalom Tvi managed to remain at home during the wa
r to look after his family and their business.
Rakov families that could afford it sent their wives and daughters to Minsk “lest they fall prey, Heaven forbid, to the lust of the soldiers and Cossacks,” as one resident wrote. Shalom Tvi and Beyle had no relatives in Minsk and lacked the means to pay for lodging, so it’s likely that the mother and daughters stayed put. Day by day, they watched the town swell with refugees. “Old and young, men and women, were carried by the huge wave, heading to the interior of Russia. And they all passed through Rakov,” wrote one of their neighbors. “They would congregate in the market square, blocking the roads with their wagons, boxes, sacks, furniture, and bundles. Bundles upon bundles, of all kinds, holding the poverty which was somehow saved from the jaws of destruction. Sighing and choked weeping filled the air. They would sit, like mourners, on the ground, hungry and thirsty.” Shalom Tvi listened in horror as the refugees told how Jews in the opposing armies were forced to fight against their fellow Jews—brother against brother. Again and again, a story was repeated of a Jewish soldier who was about to make the fatal plunge with his bayonet when he heard the enemy cry out in Hebrew, “Shema Yisrael!”—“Hear O Israel”—the first words of the most essential Jewish prayer. Had Shalom Tvi been drafted, this might have been his fate.
No record has come down of how Shalom Tvi and Beyle survived the first years of war. That the business suffered is certain. “The World War brought complete ruin and destruction to the industry of Rakov,” wrote a shtetl historian. “Because of the economic difficulties and the drafting of the farm workers, the farmers and estate owners stopped buying the agricultural machinery which was produced in Rakov. Many of the factory owners (or as they were called: ‘Mechanikers’) were drafted into the army; others left Rakov and were spread all over the globe. As a result, factories were shut down, and the end came to the industry of which Rakov was famous for generations.” By January 1916, with the front line more or less fixed, the flow of refugees ceased and Rakov surrendered to its winter torpor. Occasionally a convoy of ambulances careered through town bearing wounded or frostbitten soldiers; then the frozen silence closed in again.
