The Family

by David Laskin

  Four thousand dollars was just about all the money she and William had. Her brothers advised against it. Fashion was notoriously fickle. What if the fancy ladies moved on and Enid Frocks fell from favor? Itel was a seamstress—what did she know from business? Even Ferlé Heller thought it made no sense for Itel to stake so much of her money and security. “Enid can afford it,” the milliner told her, “but you will sink whatever you have.”

  Itel had a powerful instinct for opportunity and to her this looked like opportunity supreme. It was her chance to leapfrog the jobbers, the schleppers, the sweaty crowded middle and go right to the glittering peak of money and glamour.

  She weighed the risks, calculated the potential profit, and made her decision. In the summer of 1922, Itel and William Rosenthal and Enid Bissett became equal shareholders in a newly incorporated company called Enid Frocks, Inc.

  Business was good from the start and it just kept getting better. Day in, day out, the shop door of the stone-clad, vaguely French Renaissance building at 36 West Fifty-seventh Street would swing open and another lovely customer—patroness, Mrs. Bissett liked to say—breezed in. Rich, of course, fashionable, bobbed, cloche-hatted, displaying the requisite inches of ankle and lower calf. The ideal Enid Frocks type. Alas, Itel knew at a glance that, when the dress was done, neither she nor the new patroness would be 100 percent happy. The problem was the patroness’s bust. The problem, to be precise, was that she had a bust. Soft yet firm, full and swelling, round, smooth, perfectly symmetrical, the perfumed essence of American femininity made flesh—this lovely pair of breasts was doomed to be squashed into submission by the dictates of 1920s fashion. The flapper style du jour called for dresses to drop with barely a bulge or curve from neck to knee, and in order to achieve this sticklike silhouette a woman wore a flattener—“a towel with hooks in the back,” as Itel described it. These hideous mammary mashers were marketed under the trade name Boyish Form, which pretty much said it all. Itel knew from sad experience that no Enid Frock ever looked right when worn over a Boyish Form bandeau. It was a crime and shame for a chic well-endowed lady to spend upward of three hundred dollars, a fortune in those days, for her Enid Frock and come away with a less-than-perfect fit because of the cursed flattener. “It was a very sad story,” Itel sighed. “Our cheapest dress sold for a hundred and a quarter, and it just didn’t fit right. Women were told to look like their brothers—that was just not possible. Nature made women with a bosom, so nature thought it was important. Why argue with nature?”

  Mrs. Bissett had a brainstorm. She grabbed a Boyish Form bandeau, sliced it down the middle of the front with a pair of scissors, took the two edges and shirred each one to a small bridge of elastic so that they formed a pair of slightly bulging pockets. William was summoned to take a look. “If you want to wear something like that,” he harrumphed, “at least let me make you a nice one.” William was an artist, a male artist, and by the time he was done, it was very nice indeed. Satin shoulder straps were added; the pockets—the primordial cups—were fashioned of fine ivory-pink cotton net trimmed with silk rosebuds in pink and jade; the elastic center piece was shiny and striated; three tiny hooks were affixed to the back. Mrs. Bissett christened the garment Maiden Form to distinguish it from the hateful Boyish Form bandeau.

  Itel saw at once that her frocks fit better with a Maiden Form brassiere sewn into the bust or worn separately underneath, but it took the partners a while to realize what a hot commodity they had on their hands. At first every woman who purchased an Enid Frock got a Maiden Form bra for free. When the ladies came back marveling at how good the bit of mesh and elastic made them look and feel, Itel offered to whip one up custom for twenty-five to fifty dollars a pop. She also kept a bowl of one-dollar ready-made bras on a table in the shop. The dress business kept booming—bras were just a sideline, a novelty item that the seamstresses ran off in their spare time. It was Broadway that made Maiden Form a star.

  Mrs. Bissett may have moved uptown to cater to the carriage trade, but she and her husband, Joe, were still chummy with Broadway actors and actresses (especially the latter in Joe’s case)—and Joe’s female chums became the brassiere pioneers. Broadway had been lit up with energy and hot jazzy new music since the Great War ended, and it was ablaze the year the bra was born. Jerome Kern, Florenz Ziegfeld, Oscar Hammerstein II, and George and Ira Gershwin were cranking out one hit after another. Singing-dancing-shimmying starlets like Marilyn Miller, Billie Burke, Josephine Baker, and Adelaide Hall reigned as showbiz princesses (royalty without civil rights in the case of Baker and Hall, who were black). Chorus girls who strutted onstage half naked in George White’s Scandals at the Globe Theater or Ziegfeld Follies of 1922 at the New Amsterdam had no qualms about trying out a slinky new undergarment that made them look sexy, even if it broke with fashion. “The acting trade were the first customers because they were brave enough to uplift,” Moses (Moe) Rosenthal, William’s brother and later the company’s general manager, said. Where brave busty showgirls led, ordinary busty women were sure to follow. Transgression was in the air in 1922. Women had won the right to vote two years earlier; they smoked in public and no one batted an eye (Itel herself put away four packs a day); they scandalized their mothers with their clothes, dances, drinks (illegal as of January 1919), and love affairs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned was a best seller that year, and he and Zelda were the toast of the town. Nowhere was the spirit of transgression headier and more pungent than on New York’s Forty-second Street. What better locale to kick up a lingerie revolution? Joe Bissett hit every specialty shop between Forty-second and Fifth-ninth streets. He placed Maiden Form bras and racy little counter cards touting their virtues in the Astor Shop, in the Hotel Astor, and the Regina Shop, abutting the renowned Palace Theater vaudeville house. If a manager was reluctant to place an order, Joe got one of his chorine pals to sashay into the shop, demand a Maiden Form, and storm out in disgust when told they didn’t carry them. The next day a salesman came calling. “It was an extreme product but was accepted there [the theater district],” said one of the early salesmen.

  Getting it accepted elsewhere required greater powers of persuasion. “I would take it out, and when I showed them this little bit of bra, all hell would break loose,” recalled Jack Zizmor, who became a top salesman. “If it were the husband, he would call to his wife, ‘Come over here and see what this crazy guy is trying to sell me!’ They laughed and they ridiculed us, and said, ‘This is a fly-by-night thing. It will die out next week, next month, next year.’” They didn’t laugh for long. Within months the company was doing enough business that Itel and Mrs. Bissett had to take over the top two floors of the West Fifty-seventh Street building—the fifth floor for a workshop and the sixth-floor attic for processing and shipping orders. Ten employees were hired, most of them in sales. William, who had eleven siblings, put the arm on brothers and sisters. In 1923 the company had to relocate four times; that’s how fast it was expanding. In 1924 they registered the name Maiden Form as their trademark.

  The Maiden Form bra was the quintessence of the 1920s—fun, novel, vaguely risqué, easy to mass-produce, perfectly promotable, seemingly frivolous but in fact eminently practical and instantly indispensable. No one had heard of a brassiere in 1920. By 1924, all the fashionable women had to have one. The daughter and granddaughter of scribes had stumbled on one of the pure products of America.

  —

  Nineteen twenty-four, the year that cemented the cornerstone of Itel’s fortune, was also the year that the first of Shimon Dov’s grandchildren made aliyah—literally “ascent”—to the Holy Land. After two thousand years, a Kohen returned to the place where Jews had become Jews.

  Itel was not the only revolutionary in the family. In Volozhin, her first cousin Chaim, the third child of Shimon Dov’s son Arie, fomented revolution by deciding all by himself that the time had come to end the exile. Chaim would not spend his life poring over sacred texts or dri
pping gallnut ink onto parchment. He shunned laws decreed by strangers and customs enforced by a stateless people. America—increasingly difficult to enter after the tight new immigration quotas imposed that year—held no appeal either. Eighteen-year-old Chaim wanted revolution, but not in Russia. Zion alone consumed his young heart.

  Though he was barely shaving, Chaim was ready to be a pioneer. He tossed out the kippah (skullcap) and the boxes and straps of the tefillin. He exchanged the somber garb of the ghetto for a farmer’s rough open-necked shirt and a pair of sandals. He sang but he refused to pray. Prayer was for shtetl Jews. Love and contempt—pure, unmediated—propelled the boy out of exile and into the Holy Land. With him the line of the scribe blazed a third road.

  Impulsiveness, stubbornness, and self-reliance came naturally to Chaim. He had taken his first breath in the shadow of tragedy, and turmoil was all he had known. Born in 1906, when Russia was still in the throes of the 1905 revolution, Chaim lost his thirty-one-year-old father, Arie, before he was a week old. Arie’s widow, Leah, was left with three children—a daughter named Chana, a toddler son, Yishayahu, and the newborn, Chaim. Leah remarried and bore her second husband a son, Shlomo. So Chaim grew up a middle child in a broken and mended family, a stepson raised beside a full son. He was eight years old when the Great War began and Volozhin starved and trembled on the front line. The war ended the year he turned twelve. The year of his bar mitzvah, another war broke out: Soviet Russia and newly reunited Poland clashed over their boundary, and Volozhin promptly fell to the advancing Polish army—though later the Russians regained control only to lose it again. After living under five different governments in the first dozen years of his life, Chaim became a citizen of Poland under Chief of State Józef Piłsudski. Rakov was also on the Polish side of the border after the Polish-Soviet war, and Vilna was absorbed into Poland in 1922 after much wrangling with the newly formed nation of Lithuania. To Chaim and his family, Polish sovereignty made no difference. Polish, Russian, Bolshevik, capitalist—it was all the same. Chaim was a proud, lonely, defiant kid with a jut to his jaw and large liquid brown eyes peering out at a world not even sages could comprehend. Jews died and Jewish homes burned under Piłsudski just as they had under Lenin, Kerensky, Nicholas, and Alexander—“same old story,” as Isaac Babel wrote: “. . . shrieks, whips cracking, shouts of ‘dirty Yid.’”

  In Volozhin, devout Jews cautiously reopened the yeshiva, which had been shuttered since 1915. But Chaim chose to study in Vilna at the Tarbut Gymnasium (Zionist high school), where instruction was in Hebrew and love of the Land wafted through the classrooms like the scent of Jaffa oranges. Devout old men muttered that it was a sin to speak the sacred tongue outside of shul, but Chaim didn’t care. He never went to shul anyway. Yiddish was the language of oppression and fear. When he made his ascent to the Land, he would speak only Hebrew.

  Chaim was aware that he couldn’t simply pack up and leave the way his cousins had when they immigrated to America. To live in the Land, you had to train; you had to prepare; you had to be part of a group. By 1920, two generations of Zionist settlers had been trying to survive in Palestine. The first waves had come close to disaster because they knew nothing about farming, about finding work, about the climate, the food, the Arabs. They brought their dreams but they had no idea how harsh reality was. Chaim was determined not to make those mistakes. He didn’t just declare himself a Zionist: he transformed himself into a pioneer. After the Great War, Zionism raged through Eastern Europe the way Hasidism had raged through the Pale at the end of the eighteenth century. Volozhin and Rakov and a thousand other shtetlach like them were full of headstrong boys and girls bent on returning to the Jewish homeland as farmers, swamp drainers, road builders. A score of Zionist organizations sprang up to absorb and channel all this ardor—youth groups; political parties; secular, religious, and quasi-military factions; bands of like-minded idealists who pledged to learn and practice and sing and dance together and one day to make aliyah together. Chaim chose to join HeHalutz. “The Pioneer” is the usual translation for HeHalutz, but in a Zionist context the word connotes something much more romantic—not just an agricultural settler but an ecstatic acolyte bent on mystical union with the Jewish soil through the sacrament of labor. Chaim and his pals started a HeHalutz chapter in Volozhin. They put out a newspaper called Der Shtekel-Dreier denouncing the degeneracy of life in exile and heralding the glorious national homeland that awaited them in Palestine. A photo of Zionist leader Theodore Herzl hung on Chaim’s wall, but his true hero was Joseph Trumpeldor, the handsome, one-armed Russian army officer who had founded HeHalutz. “I am not a person,” Trumpeldor declared after making aliyah in 1911. “I am the pure embodiment of service, prepared for everything. I have no ties. I know only one command: Build.” Chaim’s ardor grew all the fiercer after Trumpeldor was killed at the age of thirty-nine while fighting off Arabs in the Upper Galilee. In his dreams, Chaim would take the hero’s place. He would plow and plant and make the desert bloom; if necessary he would water the crops with his blood. But first he must learn how to work. Not the degrading Diaspora work of keeping shop, peddling merchandise, brokering, smuggling. Chaim must master the noble labor of the halutz.

  He and his group took up residence in the house of Bernshteyn the blacksmith. They hardened themselves by working at the Volozhin sawmill. They spoke and sang in Hebrew. They worked the soil, albeit Polish soil. Chaim was short and boxy but lean with broad shoulders, thick dark hair combed straight back from his forehead, and a stern, commanding demeanor. His olive skin would not burn under the fierce sun of Palestine; his stubbornness and passion would serve him well. Chaim toughened up like a soldier in boot camp. He was among the first of his comrades to win the certificate confirming his readiness to make aliyah. Now came the moment of truth. The halutzim believed that you could not be a Zionist in exile: the only true Zionists were Zionists in the Land, in Eretz Israel.

  In the late autumn of 1924, at the glorious, precipitous age of eighteen, Chaim departed Poland for the Holy Land. He never set foot in Europe again.

  —

  The voyage began with horse and cart and song. Trailed by friends and families, Chaim and his fellow halutzim set out in a long convoy of wagons. The birch groves were yellowing, the pines black and dripping in the misty air. At the outskirts of town, a peasant stopped his work, stared at the procession, and shouted across the autumn stubble, “Damn Jews, to Palestine!” They were going! They were going as fast as they could and precisely so they would never hear such a shout again. To hell with ignorant peasants. To hell with churches full of pious supplicants spitting at pictures of the dirty Jew. To hell with snow and mud and jackboots kicking in the door. Chaim and his comrades raised their voices even louder to the strains of “Artza Alinu”—a Hebrew folk melody powered by a toe-tapping rhythm: We ascended to the land, we’ve ploughed already and sown too, but we have not yet reaped.

  At the town of Horod’k they parted ways: the halutzim climbed aboard the train bound for Warsaw; the friends and family members stood on the platform and waved their handkerchiefs. Then in a cloud of smoke and soot, Chaim lurched into his future.

  He had never been farther from home than Vilna. He had never seen the sea. He had never looked out at a horizon that wasn’t low, green, smooth, settled. No matter. The images in the train window went by in a rattling indifferent blur. He felt not the slightest twinge of curiosity or nostalgia. It had required a terrific effort of will for Chaim to shake off the dust of exile. So many talked and dreamed and sighed but finally subsided back into the humid green. To act, to cut his ties with everything familiar and go, Chaim had to be as fanatical as Lenin. Eastern Europe passed before him like a rotten corpse. The scenery was so much pasteboard and tinsel. The other passengers, those not bound for the Land, were trivial, inane. Even the startling appearance of the sea was worthy of notice only because the same water laved the shores of the Land. For Chaim, for his fellow halutzim, Zion was
the sole reality. Only the Land had meaning.

  At the Romanian port of Constanta they boarded a ship and set sail southbound on waters that Roman galleys had plied two millennia earlier. Down the western edge of the Black Sea, through the straits of Bosphorus at Istanbul, across the Sea of Marmara, into the blue Aegean, around the storied islands of Turkey’s western coast, and then, once they had cleared Rhodes, a straight shot southeast to the port of Haifa. Chaim’s excitement became all but unbearable in the final hours at sea. For two thousand years his family had lived as strangers and sojourners. He had claimed for himself the honor of being the first to return.

  Chaim stood on the ship’s deck as Haifa Bay opened before him in an immense blue arc sweeping nine miles north to the ancient citadel of Acre. His first glimpse of the Holy Land was a crinkly brown smudge rising from the sea—the heights of Mount Carmel, freshly washed by the November rains. A Carmelite monastery crowned the summit; terraces of olive groves, vineyards, and carob trees ran along the flanks; palms etched their fronds against the sky. Beaches came into view as they neared the harbor. The water turned a deep royal blue. Red and white blocks of buildings—limestone walls, red-tiled roofs—rose in clusters near the shore and climbed to the base of the mountain. The ship dropped anchor and Chaim and the other passengers disembarked onto an open barge; they crossed the last stretch of water on a deck crammed with piles of cargo: until the British dredged the sandy harbor in 1933, this was the only way to get from ship to shore. Chaim finally allowed himself to exult in the warm air, the luminous sky, the smell of brine and spice and smoke, the utter unexpected strangeness pressing at every sense.