The Family

by David Laskin

  He stepped from the boat to a wharf backed by train tracks. Arabs sat on the ground next to blankets and rugs covered with produce—the Haifa vegetable market. If he wept or danced or fell to his knees and kissed the soil when he finally came ashore, he never mentioned it to his family. No Zionist arrived in Palestine with a still pulse or dry eye. Probably he danced. Chaim was always a great dancer. The joyous circle dances of the pioneers were his form of worship.

  Chaim was lucky to have disembarked at Haifa. Most settlers in those days landed at the seedy old Arab port of Jaffa, sixty miles to the south. Situated on a long, low-lying stretch of sand (since swallowed up by Tel Aviv), Jaffa was the preferred port because of its proximity to Jerusalem, but it has always been awkward to approach by sea. The shallow harbor is so beset by rocks that passengers and their luggage had be off-loaded into tipsy dinghies and rowed to shore, and as soon as they landed they were swarmed by hawkers, beggars, street vendors, shills for every kind of shady business. “This was not my idea of the new life,” future Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion recalled of his arrival at Jaffa early in the century. “It was worse than the Plonsk I had come from.”

  Disillusionment came, sooner or later, to everyone. No Zionist who stayed in Palestine escaped it. No matter how exalted the arrival, how hot the tears of joy or the gush of gratitude, the dust of disappointment eventually settled on all of them.

  Sweating copiously in their European clothes, Chaim and his comrades made their way from the port to their guesthouse. Haifa called itself a city, but with a population of twenty-five thousand it was a small city with dramatic topography and a salubrious climate, peacefully shared by Jews and Arabs. Chaim saw his first camel and his first palm tree. He saw white-robed Arab traders gathered at the cactus hedges that grew outside the city gates. He saw the tidy little German colony of tile-roofed cottages and tree-lined streets that members of the Templer sect founded in the 1860s and still maintained as an incongruous little corner of Gemütlichkeit. He saw the deep velvety shadows that the white houses cast on the unpaved roads. He packed away his European clothes. There was rail service between Damascus and Saudi Arabia, with a stop at Haifa. Chaim and his comrades made their way to the train station, an elegant Renaissance toy of a building with a dainty clock tower and banks of high windows. The young men wanted to get to the Galilee as quickly as possible.

  They discovered that “quickly” was not in the lexicon of Palestinian transport in 1924. In fact, the train they took was notorious even in Palestine for its agonizing pace—so slow, the old hands said, that you could walk faster. Chaim squinted through the dust-grimed window at the dust-grimed landscapes—the drab coastal plain, the black-soiled Jezreel Valley, the humped blue mountains that rumple this sleeve of a country from north to south. What he saw was not encouraging. The Jezreel was “still mostly stony desert, infested with malaria, typhus, and marauding Bedouin tribesmen,” wrote Arthur Koestler, who made aliyah two years after Chaim. “The hills bordering the valley were dotted with Arab mud villages, dissolving by an act of natural mimicry in the violet haze of earth and rock. Down in the plain sprawled the first Jewish pioneer settlements, a conspicuous eyesore with their white, cubic, concrete buildings.” The earth “had not seen a plough for a millennium and a half.” The air swarmed with mosquitoes, flies, and cockroaches. The rudimentary Jewish settlements—“dismal and slumlike oases in the wilderness, consisting of wooden huts, surrounded by dreary vegetable plots”—were even more depressing than the Arab mud villages. The pioneers lived in “ramshackle dwellings in which only the poorest in Europe would live, as an alternative to a discarded railway carriage.” Aradi muat—dead land—was what the Turkish rulers had called huge swaths of the country, and dead most of it remained in 1924. Wherever Chaim looked, he saw “but thorn and thistle, ruined cities, dens of wild animals, and death’s shadow.”

  The sun had probably long since set by the time the train reached Smakh (today’s Tsemach Junction) at the south end of the Sea of Galilee—Kinneret in Hebrew. But even in the dark, even in November, Chaim could sense something soft and seductive in the atmosphere here. He climbed down from the train and the warmth enveloped him like an embrace. Haifa was balmy compared with Poland, but the shore of the Sea of Galilee (not a sea at all despite its name, but a large freshwater lake) was warmer still because of its situation nearly seven hundred feet below sea level—the lowest body of freshwater in the world. Chaim ended his journey on foot, walking the mile or so from the train station across a bridge that spanned the Jordan River near the spot where Jesus was baptized, around the bottom of the lake, and finally to the walled compound of the Kinneret Colony, one of the early noncollective settlements. It was a walk to stir the soul. The bare mountains seemed to rise right from the surface of the water. The dense air held and heightened the perfumes of the earth. Land forms, stark and monumental, were barely nicked by rooftops and saplings. When the sun rose over the Golan Heights the next morning, a flood of light saturated every color. “The Kinneret was like a woman for my father,” one of Chaim’s sons said many years later. “He fell in love.”

  He was not alone. The Kinneret had an almost mystical allure for the early Jewish pioneers. An oven in the summer, isolated from the coastal settlements, hemmed in by mountains, vulnerable to Arab attacks, the region fostered the cocky independence at the heart of Zionism. Jews came here initially because the land was cheap and water plentiful; inspired by the beauty and the heat and the camaraderie, the young settlers invented new ways to live and work the land. The kibbutz, the moshav (cooperative agricultural village), the germ of a Jewish defense force, a training farm for women—all originated in the Kinneret.

  Was it I who long ago

  rose with dawn to fill the fields

  by the sweat of my brow?

  Was it I who bathed in the innocent blue

  —under a peaceful sky—

  Of my Galilee, my own Galilee?

  So wrote the Hebrew poet Ra’hel, who resided at Degania, the first kibbutz, in its early years and returned to the haunting landscape again and again in her verse. Ra’hel always spoke of her time in the Kinneret as the happiest in her life; when she died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-one, she was buried in the tiny cemetery beside the lake (the preferred resting place for Israel’s early Labour Party elite).

  By the time Chaim arrived, Jews had been farming by the lakeshore for a decade and a half—long enough to understand what they had let themselves in for, long enough to love the land regardless. Malaria was epidemic, the summers were long and torrid, the work never ending, the isolation deadening. But in the mythology of the halutzim, the Kinneret had something of the aura of the American West. Chaim, though he would suffer every hardship that the region could inflict, was smitten from the first—and for life.

  Chaim was an extremist. Had he been milder, he would have been content to work at one of the Kinneret’s well-tended lakeshore farms or join the kibbutzniks at Degania. But that was too tame for him. Instead, he ascended a thousand feet above the lake to the tiny, struggling settlement known as Kvutza Har (mount) Kinneret. A kvutza is a collective similar to a kibbutz, but smaller and modeled economically on the family—and the kvutza on the Kinneret mountainside where Chaim went in the autumn of 1924 was one of the smallest and most precarious. The original settlement, founded in 1920 by ninety halutzim from Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania, had dwindled down to twenty members before disbanding, after three starving years, by order of the Jewish Agency (the organization that oversaw Zionist settlements). Now Chaim and a small group of young bachelors, two married couples, and one baby went back up the mountain to try again. Even in November, even in their shorts and sandals, they were perspiring heavily by the time they ascended through the rocks and brown grass and reached the “village”—really just three rough cabins, each measuring thirteen by twenty-six feet, with one kitchen between them, a storeroom, and a bakery. The piddling runoff
from a spring, which turned out to be too saline to be potable, trickled through the rocks. On breaks in the slope the previous settlers had planted a rudimentary vineyard and orchard, straggling fields of wheat, barley and legumes, patches of tomatoes: all of it was suspended above the lake like a frayed hammock over the deck of a ship. Everything else was precipice. Gray scree slashed the slopes above, tufts of sunburned grass lapped at the edges of the farm fields, blue water beckoned at the bottom. In time there would be livestock—nine milk cows and their calves, a small flock of sheep, eight mules, one hundred chickens—but in those first days nothing broke the silence but the hiss of wind in the grass, the occasional spatter of autumn rain, the distant cry of a circling hawk, and the keening of jackals at night.

  Fifteen years earlier, Chaim’s cousins had gaped in dismay at the cramped shabby tenement flat on Madison Street that would be their first home in America. The arrival at Har Kinneret hit Chaim just as hard, though he was too proud to admit it. He slept on boards laid over empty gasoline cans in a room packed with snoring unwashed comrades; he choked down the salty water of the spring until his gut rebelled and his lips cracked and he was forced to haul up cans of sweet water from the lake; his hands split open and his back cramped from the toil of coaxing crops from such stony ground. But at least it was holy ground. At least, and at last, it was honest toil.

  It rained. Since Chaim had arrived at the onset of winter, his first experience of the Middle East was not its fabled scorching sun but the intermittent winter torrents that found their way in through every crack of the cabins and cut gullies into the mountainside. The newcomers, however, did not have the luxury to wait for fair weather. They intended to grow all of their own food, so Chaim and the other settlers got to work building a chicken coop and cowshed for the animals and preparing the ground for spring sowing. Chaim dared not complain. A month ago, he had been in Volozhin scoffing at the degenerate life of the Diaspora—how could he disgrace himself now by whining about blisters, aching muscles, a stomach perpetually growling with hunger? He learned to pace himself, to share the workload, to tolerate and even enjoy a diet poor in meat and rich in olives, greens, and tomatoes (which Eastern Europeans considered inedible). Weak tea in a tin cup was his sole indulgence. “We dreaded comfort,” said Ra’hel. “We yearned for sacrifice, for torture, for prisoner’s bonds, with which to sanctify and exalt the Name of Homeland.”

  While he worked, he sang. When the work was done, he danced.

  We are, we are, we are . . .

  Pioneers, Pioneers

  On burning fields

  On barren fields of waste.

  We cover the stony fields

  With golden bloom.

  He fell in love. Etl, one of two girls from Volozhin who had made aliyah with Chaim, was daring—no girl broke with her family and traveled to Palestine in 1924 unless she had guts and backbone—but she was delicate. Her hair fell in dark waves to her shoulders, her arms were elegantly rounded, her eyes dark and brimming. By day, Chaim and Etl worked side by side on the mountain, and at night they sang and danced. In the spring, when the rains stopped, they walked together at dawn through the spring grass and wildflowers. On the Sabbath they scrubbed the communal kitchen clean, ate pancakes and fish, and, dressed in their white Sabbath clothes, descended the mountain to visit other pioneers in the settlements beside the lake. When the heat arrived at the end of April, they swam. In summer, when the huts became unbearable, they slept under the stars.

  They were just shy of twenty, the same age Itel had been when she ran away from Rakov to follow William to America. Their families were far away. Everything in this ancient land was new—everyone around them was young and promiscuous—nothing was forbidden. In the heat of the Kinneret, Chaim and Etl reinvented their lives from one day to the next. The world blazed with possibility.

  But strength was essential to survive. “In those days we were a band of comrades,” wrote one of the Kinneret pioneers, “and in our devotion to the country we said that anyone who left it was like a man running away in battle.” Etl, Chaim’s beloved, was one of those who ran away. Tens of thousands did the same. Conditions in Palestine were too harsh; they couldn’t take the rigors of communal life; their bodies and spirits were shattered by the grind of daily agricultural labor. They pined for green pastures, forests full of streams and mushrooms, coffee, cobblestones. Even the most robust among them came down with malaria and could not regain their health. They returned to their shtetlach in Europe, they tried their luck in America, they committed suicide in droves (depression and suicide were “rampant” in the early collectives). They had “dreamed of a life rich in heroic deeds and poetry,” wrote one halutzah (female pioneer), “and lacked the imagination to find poetry in the task of sheep-tending among the barren hills, or heroism in the act of following the plow through the long, blazing Jordan Valley days.” “Every single person who left the country left the mark of his failure on the workers who stayed,” wrote one halutz who stayed.

  Etl’s mark of failure fell most painfully on Chaim. She left him behind in the beautiful inferno of the Kinneret, went back to Volozhin, married, bore three children—and twenty years later she and her family were killed by the Nazis. Chaim never forgot her.

  Chaim and his comrades worked their hearts out at Har Kinneret, but the settlement was doomed. Because they were chronically strapped for cash and food, the most able-bodied among them went down to the lakeshore to hire out with road-paving crews. They all tried to get by on less; they pushed themselves to the limit of their endurance. But in the end, the location defeated them. The mountainside was too remote, resources too limited, arable land too scanty. Flies tortured them by day and mosquitoes at night; malaria was epidemic. Chaim remained at Har Kinneret for two years. Then he called it quits.

  —

  Itel summoned her brothers to a meeting. It was 1925 and business was booming. Not just the bra business, but the business of America. Automobiles, radios, bootleg liquor, ready-to-wear dresses, costume jewelry, kitchen appliances, stocks and bonds—all the accessories of consumer capitalism were taking off explosively. A. Cohen & Sons boomed along with the rest. Thirteen years old in 1925, the family business had been restructured from a partnership to a corporation, with Abraham as its first president, Harry as treasurer, Sam as vice president, and Hyman as secretary. That year they finally pulled out of the Lower East Side and moved their offices and showroom uptown to the relatively swank environs of 584–586 Broadway (between Houston and Prince)—thirty thousand square feet in a stately Italianate stone palace on Manhattan’s prime commercial artery. It set them back eleven thousand dollars a year in rent, but the Cohens could afford it: they were now respectably on the map in every sense. The patriarch had put aside his religious book concession to devote himself to the company’s silverware department. Over the years, Abraham’s expertise in flatware patterns had become Talmudic: when the big manufacturers wanted to launch a new line, they solicited his opinion about its aesthetic appeal and sales potential.

  All three brothers were married now with families of their own. Sam and Celia had four children—two more sons born after the twins. Celia was not handling it well. There were days Sam returned from work to find the children screaming and hungry, the baby’s diaper unchanged. More worrisome, Celia became increasingly unstable under the strain of raising a large family. Her sudden death late in 1924, six months after the birth of her youngest son, Marvin, has never been explained. One story that circulated in the family was that she was so unhinged, or unhappy, that she went out undressed, possibly naked, on a frigid night and contracted a fatal infection. Left alone with four small children, Sam was desperate. What saved him was a match made within a year of Celia’s death with a distant relative named Gisri Gelperin (Gladys, in America), a recent immigrant from a shtetl near Rakov. Quick, funny, vivacious, dynamic, as well as a fantastic cook and born manager, Gladys took over the household and ma
de Sam a truly happy man for the first time in his life.

  Married life was more stable for the other two brothers. Harry and his wife, Sallie, had a son, and soon a daughter and another son arrived. Hyman and Anna had lost their first baby—a stillbirth—but in 1925 Anna was pregnant again. The three brothers, all in their thirties now, were becoming men of substance, like their father. It was only natural that Itel should seek their advice on an important business matter.

  Itel hated it when men, even her own brothers, towered over her. As soon as the boys showed up for the meeting, she told them to sit down and stay seated. That way they’d all be at the same level. She got right to it. Itel said she wanted their opinion—though in fact the only opinion she truly valued was Harry’s. Here was the situation. At the age of thirty-nine, she had come to a crossroad. She and Enid Bissett had been in business together for three years selling quality dresses out of the Fifty-seventh Street shop and manufacturing bras for distribution at lingerie shops and counters all over the city. Dress orders were still brisk, but the bras were flying out the door. Their operators in Manhattan couldn’t keep up with demand, so William had enlisted his sister Masha Hammer in Bayonne, New Jersey, to turn her kitchen into a mini workshop. Masha installed three sewing machines and brought in two girls to run them while she took the third herself. Within six months they had to move to a bigger house and set up more machines in the living and dining rooms. Uplift was all the rage, Itel told her brothers as the room filled with her cigarette smoke. The bra was a potential gold mine.

  What did they think? Should she quit the dress business and put everything into the Maiden Form brassiere? “Everyone comes to a fork that will decide their life,” Itel said. “If you’re afraid to go, if you stand still or stand back, then nothing happens.” This was her fork, her chance to make something happen.