by David Laskin
July 18, the first day of the Battle of Soissons, was long and grueling. German resistance stiffened through the morning hours. Enemy machine guns spat at them from every rise and from behind every stone farm building. Casualties mounted. In their few months of combat, Americans had learned to hate German machine gunners. Word was that Boche officers ordered their machine gunners to chain themselves to their weapons and keep shooting until they were killed. They mowed down your buddies in perfect rows and then, when you were about to take them out, they jumped up with their hands in the air shouting “Kamarad!” Even though artillery killed more men in the Great War, machine guns aroused more fear and rage among the troops.
Through the endless hours of daylight, Hyman listened to the peculiar “zeep-zeep” of machine-gun bullets whizzing past him “like insects fleeing to the rear.” That night, he bedded down in a shell crater for a few hours of sleep, and the next day he and the other guys who had made it through were up and at it again. Captain Robert S. Gill, who had replaced Joseph Quesenberry as commander of Company K, told his men they had advanced farther into hostile territory than any other unit in the sector. Now they had to do it all over. Their objective—the heights of Buzancy, south of Soissons—was still seven miles away.
The second day, July 19, went badly. Resistance was ferocious, forward motion painful. Those German machine gunners were living up to their reputation. Hyman and his comrades in Company K were now so far out ahead of the rest of the division that they were taking horrific flanking fire from the left. Cover was all but nonexistent in the wheat. By day’s end, 60 percent of the regiment’s officers were gone—dead, wounded, missing, captured—and nearly all the noncommissioned officers (the corporals and sergeants who were in charge of the individual platoons) had fallen. Even doughty Colonel Parker, shaken by the number of casualties, begged to be relieved. Another officer complained that his men were “so exhausted . . . that it was often necessary to take hold of them and shake them to get their attention.” But First Division commander Major General Charles P. Summerall was implacable. The assault continued.
July 20, the third day, fell on the Sabbath. Hyman was still in the wheat. He was still being savaged by machine-gun and artillery fire. Sometime in the course of that bright hot summer day Hyman’s luck ran out. He was gassed with mustard.
They called it mustard because it reeked of garlic and mustard, and they called it a gas, but in fact mustard gas is a thick oily amber-colored liquid like toxic molasses that volatilizes above freezing. Of the three types of poison gas introduced during the Great War, mustard was the most insidious, the most excruciating, and by far the most lethal. It was delivered in glass bottles packed inside artillery shells: when the bottle burst, the mustard escaped and transformed itself into a heavy vapor that crept along the ground and oozed into trenches and dugouts. By the time Hyman smelled the reek and got his gas mask on, it was too late. Mustard, as Hyman quickly discovered, did not have to be inhaled to inflict pain and injury and death: the gas ate at any piece of flesh it came in contact with, inside or outside his body. The vapor fixed itself to the sweat on Hyman’s neck and raised excruciating blisters that swelled and broke and wept plasma for days and refused to heal. Had he not been wearing his mask, the mustard would have blinded him and flayed away his bronchial tubes. Men who inhaled it vomited and bled internally; they choked and gagged and gasped for breath. The pain was so intense that victims had to be strapped to their beds or they would tear at themselves or bash their head against the wall. The oily vapor saturated clothing and refused to dissipate, so doctors and nurses were gassed with mustard when they treated soldiers who had been gassed. Those who died suffered for a month or more before death released them.
Hyman never talked about the agony he suffered. “On the third day, we were attacked with mustard gas,” he wrote later. “I became a casualty. Taken to the field hospital, put in an army ambulance to a railroad station; put in a hospital train and sent to a French hospital in the city of Angers, far from the front.”
The Battle of Soissons raged on without him for one more day. At the end of Sunday, July 21, the fourth day of fighting, the American soldiers still in action accomplished their mission of cutting German supply routes at the neck of the salient and driving the Germans back to a line running south from Soissons; the German retreat from the salient would continue for another month. Soissons was chalked up as a success—but the price was ruinous. A thousand men in the regiment’s Third Battalion had gone into battle alongside Hyman on the morning of July 18; only seventy-nine returned when the regiment was withdrawn on July 22. The First Division Infantry as a whole suffered casualty rates (dead, wounded, gassed, missing) of 50 percent, and 75 percent of the infantry’s field officers were knocked out. “The flower of the American Army had been cut to ribbons,” wrote one soldier in the regiment.
The generals, however, had cause to celebrate. For the first time since September 1914, the German high command had ordered a general retreat. Appalling as the casualties were, Soissons proved to be the beginning of the end of the war.
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For Hyman, the war was over. “It would be foolish for me to say that I am well for this letter is written in a Hospital,” he wrote home on July 22. Two days later, he elaborated a bit—though he was clearly distraught and disoriented. “I am not well enough just now to go under the same strain that I was under recently while at the front. . . . I lived through days that a fellow does not have to make [illegible] to remember and if God will be as kind to me in future operations, as he has been in the last, then [these] days will always live in my memories.” Whatever memories he carried, Hyman never again wrote or spoke of them. “What’s done is done,” he told the family.
The blisters raised by the mustard gas eventually closed and healed, though he would always have scars on the lower part of his chin and on his neck behind his left ear. Hyman remained in French military hospitals long enough to get thoroughly bored and restless. While nurses changed his dressings, he argued with the other wounded guys about which American state was the best (“I certainly have a heck of a time when I tell the Westerners and Southerners that New York is the only place”). In September he was well enough to go to Yom Kippur services. He boasted in a letter to his parents that “it is a known fact the First Division has done wonderful work.” It shamed him that the division was still in combat while he convalesced behind the lines. Indeed Company K, its decimated ranks filled out with replacement soldiers, fought at Saint-Mihiel and the Argonne, the massive American engagement that brought the war to an end on November 11, 1918.
Hyman finally returned to the States in February 1919. He went back to work in the business, married Anna, fathered two children. But in ways that counted, ways he would never speak of, Hyman’s life was not the same. He had been in war. He had seen men get torn apart by exploding shells and bleed to death in a wheat field; he had marched into machine-gun fire and shot his rifle at enemy soldiers; he had been burned and scarred by poison gas. Hyman had passed a test that every man wonders about. His uncles and cousins in Russia had endured occupation and revolution, but they had not been in the army; his brothers in America had spent the war building the business. Hyman alone had worn the uniform. It wasn’t his choice to be a soldier. But he did his duty and was proud that he had. “What’s done is done,” Hyman said when his family asked about the war. But that wasn’t the whole story. To soldiers like Hyman—Jews, immigrants, naturalized Americans—the war made a critical difference. They all knew the stereotypes—pants presser, watchmaker, pale-faced scholar, slacker, coward. They knew the skepticism of the likes of Captain Quesenberry and Colonel Parker and Major General Summerall. Is it possible to make soldiers of these fellows? Hyman had seen for himself the new respect in the eyes of his officers and comrades after he returned from battle. It was a point of honor that the percentage of Jews in the U.S. Army was higher than in the civilian population. Two thousand
American Jews were killed in action in the Great War; Jewish American casualties topped ten thousand; 72 percent of Jews in uniform served in combat units. Sarah had been devastated when her son was drafted, but she wept tears of pride when he came home to Brooklyn safe and mostly sound. Hyman’s service bound the entire Cohen family more closely to America. One of their own was a Doughboy. When the Purple Heart—the American military medal bestowed on those wounded or killed in action—was reinstituted in 1932, Hyman was awarded one retroactively. He wore it proudly all his life.
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It was different for the children and grandchildren of Shimon Dov who remained in the Old Country. An armistice was declared, a treaty was signed, but in Rakov and Volozhin, revolution and civil war continued. Indeed, the treaties that formalized the cessation of hostilities in 1919 proved to be less the end of the Great War than the beginning of the next one.
CHAPTER NINE
PIONEERS
On November 2, 1917, British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote a letter to Walter Rothschild, Second Baron Rothschild, informing him with “much pleasure” that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Balfour vowed that his government would “use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
The Balfour Declaration, as Britain’s new stance on the Middle East came to be known, transformed Zionism, at the stroke of a pen, from collective dream to political reality. World events hastened its realization. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed during the Great War, the British took control of a huge swath of the Middle East, including all of Palestine and Jordan. Under the terms of the British Mandate for Palestine, Britain became the de facto governor of the Holy Land, and the Balfour Declaration became state policy. Zionist claims and aspirations remained controversial, even in the Jewish community, but they would henceforth play a part in all negotiations over the future of the region.
The Balfour Declaration marked a turning point with immense consequences for the lives of millions of people, including two of Shimon Dov HaKohen’s grandchildren. Balfour’s brusque, three-paragraph letter was addressed to “Dear Lord Rothschild,” but Shimon Dov’s grandson Chaim and granddaughter Sonia would count themselves among its recipients.
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When the United States entered the Great War, the American army was rudimentary, its arsenal skeletal. The War Department was so famished for steel that its hungry eye fell on women’s corsets. The hourglass figure then in vogue called for constriction of the waist and elevation of the bosom, and such feminine engineering required steel ribbing. Because bayonet blades and shell casings required steel too, there wasn’t enough for both weapons and corsets. Bernard Baruch, the Jewish financier who managed the nation’s flow of military equipment and supplies through the War Industries Board, issued a plea for American women to abandon their corsets. Some twenty-eight thousand tons of metal, enough to construct a battleship, were thus diverted to the war effort.
Once fashionable women shed their ribs of steel, there was no going back.
The corset ban altered not only the way women dressed but how they walked and danced and worked and ultimately how they lived their lives. From a tear in the fabric of history emerged new fashion, new economy, new mores, new freedom, new lifestyle. And Itel, with her uncanny knack for being ahead of the curve, in this case literally, was on hand to make the most of it.
The Balfour Declaration and the passing of the corset, events connected only by time and war, would redraw the map of the world for a generation of young Jewish cousins just coming into their own.
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The Great War was still raging in Europe in the winter of 1918 when Itel broke off diplomatic ties with the city of Hoboken. The breach was precipitated by a blizzard—two feet of snow with waist-high drifts dumped on the East Coast during a stretch of frigid weather. Snow is always inconvenient for the small business owner—but this was worse than usual because William was stranded in Manhattan and Itel had to fend for herself. When a Hoboken cop told her she had to promptly clear the considerable expanse of sidewalk that wrapped around her corner house/dress shop, Itel hit the roof. “I couldn’t ask a maid to do it, she would have quit,” she fumed. The cop refused to lend her a hand. So that left four-feet-eleven-inch Itel to battle the drifts by herself. “I was not built for snow shoveling,” she noted drily. “I resolved right then that I wouldn’t spend another winter in Hoboken.” And she didn’t.
Itel and William gathered Lewis, now eleven, their two-year-old daughter, Beatrice, and the child’s nursemaid and crossed the river to Manhattan; sewing machines, dress forms, ironing boards, and bobbins followed behind in a horse-drawn wagon. They set up shop and housekeeping at 611 West 141st Street, between Broadway and Riverside Drive, nine blocks south of where Itel’s brother Harry was living. Officially, the neighborhood was called Hamilton Heights after its most illustrious former resident, founding father Alexander Hamilton, who’d had a farm here at the turn of the nineteenth century, but people thought of it as Harlem. Not the elegant Harlem of Sugar Hill brownstones or the flashy louche Harlem of Lenox Avenue jazz clubs or the slum Harlem of tenements filling up with poor blacks from other parts of the city and the rural South: West 141st Street was immigrant Harlem, meat-and-potatoes Harlem, drab industrious Harlem of six-story brick apartment buildings and wide sidewalks shoveled by someone other than Itel. Itel and William turned the living and dining rooms of their ground-floor apartment into the dress shop, installed the children and maid in the back bedrooms, and got down to work. “Mrs. W. Rosenthal, Gowns,” read her business card. They even had a telephone—Audubon 6917. Most of the Hoboken clients remained loyal, and new ones came knocking soon enough. Friends had been urging Itel for years to relocate to Manhattan. Now she realized they were right. Thirty-two years old, crackling with energy and itching with ambition, Itel was now a New York dressmaker. Her dresses, their skirts growing shorter by the month, were selling for as much as eighteen dollars each. The big pond suited her.
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Itel’s timing was impeccable. When the war ended and the 1920s began to roar, she was firmly ensconced in Manhattan with her platoon of seamstresses ready to make beautiful uncorseted New York women even more beautiful. One of those women was the director of the nursery school that Beatrice, called Bea, attended. This was clearly a nursery school director with taste and style and ready cash, for not only did she employ Itel to make her dresses but when she needed a hat she frequented Ferlé Heller’s ultra chic millinery on West Fifty-seventh Street, just a few steps away from the posh precincts of Bergdorf’s, Bendel’s, and Jay Thorpe.
One day in 1921 the nursery director was browsing Ferlé Heller’s latest confections when a small elegant woman with a musical English accent accosted her. Where on earth had she picked up the divine dress she was wearing? Such craftsmanship, such detail and flair. Who was the dressmaker and how could she find her? The bedazzled Englishwoman was Enid Bissett, the proprietress of a dress concession called Enid Frocks, which occupied a corner of Ferlé Heller’s millinery. Mrs. Bissett’s praise was not bestowed lightly, for she had seen plenty of lovely dresses in her day. In her youth, she had waltzed and shimmied her way across the vaudeville palaces of Europe as the female half of the Dancing Bissetts. When she crossed the Atlantic with her husband, Joe, she glided from show biz to couture, though she still had many useful connections in the theater. Refined and beguiling, Enid Bissett was one of those naturally stylish women whom people with more money and less taste like to have around. Though no longer in her first youth, she had the slender angular figure that looked wonderful in the sheath dresses just coming into fashion. Fifth Avenue socialite
s, Broadway starlets, society-page matrons, and flapper demimondaines who wanted to look like her flocked to Enid Frocks. Sophisticated ladies with money to spare paid Mrs. Bissett to make them look and feel beautiful.
Now, thanks to little Bea’s nursery school principal, Mrs. Bissett had discovered Itel. A meeting was duly arranged and Mrs. Bissett made her way uptown to Hamilton Heights. She had a look around the dress shop, the whirring Singers, the girls bent over their works in progress. She liked what she saw, she liked Itel, she liked the intense quiet industry of the workshop. She decided to see how Itel did with some Vogue patterns for suits and dresses—essentially work on spec. Itel delivered, and Mrs. Bissett was more impressed than ever. “That little woman on 141st Street makes the others look like amateurs,” Mrs. Bissett confided. Itel was pleased but not surprised. She had never had any doubts about her superiority.
Mrs. Bissett made a proposal: she would provide the designs and fabrics; Itel would transform them into flawless dresses. The tastemaker and the dressmaker were perfectly suited to be partners. Mrs. Bissett had the contacts, Itel had the drive. Mrs. Bissett knew how to make a splash, Itel knew how to make clothing—or rather, at this stage, how to get other skilled women to make clothing to her order. Neither of them was afraid to try something new, as long as impeccable standards were maintained. They were a winning duo and their moment was at hand. Every fashionable woman in New York, it seemed, wanted an Enid Frock executed in the workshop of the Jewish seamstress with the golden hands. As the orders rapidly piled up, Mrs. Bissett came back with another proposal: they would go into business together on the condition that Itel give up her own customers and devote her workshop entirely to Enid Frocks. To seal the deal, Itel would need to pay in a cash investment of four thousand dollars.
