by David Laskin
So, nu? What would they do in her shoes?
Her brothers responded as Itel suspected they would. Dresses would be around forever, but the bra was a fad, a bubble. Sooner or later it would go bust—and then what? Itel should stick with what she knew. Run with the bra while it lasted, but keep the dress business to fall back on. Why sink an ongoing successful concern—and for what? For underwear? Itel might be older, but they had been in business a lot longer. They could tell her a thing or two about product lines, establishing trust, building credit, expanding into new markets. You didn’t make money over the long haul by throwing out your bread and butter. Sure, those new Brazilian onyx ashtrays Hyman had insisted on buying were taking off—everybody smoked and drank these days and an ashtray balanced on the tail of a bronze dolphin made a swell gift. But did that mean they should drop the dresser sets of combs and brushes nestled in sateen-lined boxes, the alarm clocks, steak knives, waffle irons, and all the rest of the stuff they’d been wholesaling profitably for over a decade and gamble everything on ashtrays? It made no sense.
Voices got loud and heated. Tempers flared—tempers always flared when the boys had a meeting. Itel wrapped it up, thanked her brothers, and gave them that gracious smile they knew all too well. The smile that meant I’m going to do exactly as I please.
And so she did. Enid Manufacturing Company, as the business was now called, pulled the plug on dresses and put everything into bras. William, as chief designer, filed a series of patents for bras “adapted to support the bust in a natural position” without flattening and without coarse seams to irritate the tender tissue. They moved the sewing machines out of Masha’s house and into a proper industrial facility on Eighteenth Street in Bayonne. Soon they had forty operators whirring away. Joe Bissett stepped up as sales manager. Reps fanned out across the country—George Horn handled Brooklyn, Harry Miller had Manhattan, Joe Feller took the Midwest, Al Siegel covered the East Coast, a guy named Plastrich got California. The reps found out fast that their boss was none too reliable. “Joe Bissett was, in my opinion, a hot and cold sales manager,” salesman Jack Zizmor recalled of the early days. “If he liked an account, they could get anything. If he disliked an account, or if it were small, he didn’t give them very much. You had the impression that he was a guy who knew all the answers, but who didn’t. He was essentially a showman and a playboy. Many a day I would have to go to a hotel where I knew he was, find him, and tell him that he was needed back at the company. He seemed to be busy doing two jobs!” Itel knew about Joe’s second “job” and she didn’t like it. “Mrs. Rosenthal did not have a halo,” said Zizmor. “She was a normal human being and there were plenty of times that she would get good and angry.” A showdown with Joe was inevitable, though there was no question who would win. Itel was the boss and everyone knew it. William—“the most liberal, fairest minded man I have ever met in my life” in Zizmor’s estimation—was the company’s creative genius. But Itel held the reins of power. What Itel decided, William endorsed.
Years later, a callow young man, introduced to Itel for the first time, tried to break the ice with the glib opener, “I understand you’re with Maidenform.” “I am Maidenform,” was her withering reply. So it was in the beginning and ever would be.
“Soon the accounts practically opened themselves,” said the Brooklyn rep, George Horn. “The name was known. You were never turned down. You could always show your line, and the numbers showed themselves. No shop would ever open without Maiden Form.”
Family lore has it that Itel, William, and Mrs. Bissett invented the bra, but lore is wrong. In fact, bras of various types had been around for half a century when Mrs. Bissett turned her shears on a Boyish Form bandeau. By 1925, as the breast began to rise again on fashionable torsos, plenty of other American companies were patenting, manufacturing, and selling brassieres in lingerie shops and department stores. But Maiden Form had the cachet, the mystique, the name. And, Itel made very sure, the quality. A bra requires the most precise design and fit of any garment. “Two stitches more or less at the top of a dart can make all the difference between comfort and discomfort,” according to one top designer. Itel saw to it that Maiden Form bras were the best made, most comfortable, and best known on the market. The Bundist seamstress from Rakov turned out to be genius at branding. She had had no training in business; she was a short, stout, chain-smoking immigrant with an accent; temperamentally and culturally, she had more in common with Yiddish stage and screen star Molly Picon than with Henry Ford. Yet she would take her place beside Ford as a captain of industry. Only in America.
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Chaim forsook the mountain aerie of Har Kinneret but he didn’t go far. On his days off, he had gotten to know some of the settlers around the lakeshore, and one of the families at the Kinneret Colony, a walled settlement of eight farmhouses about half a mile up from the water, took him on as a hired hand. So Chaim’s love affair with the Kinneret had a second chapter, softer and more idyllic than the first.
The Kinneret Colony (Moshava Kinneret in Hebrew), founded in 1908, was not a collective like Har Kinneret but a settlement of individual farmers: each family worked alone, bought and sold by themselves, and profited (or lost) on their own. In making the move, Chaim gained a private life, cash wages, more freedom to think for himself—but he lost his standing as an equal among comrades. Up on the mountain, every voice counted; decisions were made by committee; they all had their noses in one another’s business and expected other noses in theirs. Now he had a boss who gave the orders, made the decisions, and controlled the finances. Luckily for Chaim, Yizhak Cohen was a good boss with a lovely generous wife and six beautiful boisterous sun-bronzed children (three girls and three boys, two of whom were twins). Chaim moved into the rickety shed beside the Cohens’ cramped flat-roofed house and got to work. Yizhak and Leah had been in the colony for a decade now, and by the time they took on Chaim their farm was humming along nicely, with a dairy, vegetable garden, and sixty acres of cultivated fields, most of it planted with tomatoes and cucumbers. Leah was famous for her cheeses and sour cream. She baked bread in an oven in her yard and washed the children in an outdoor shower under a fig tree. Yizhak kept current with the latest agricultural practices and had family connections to the local flour mill. It was the custom at the Moshava Kinneret to treat hired help as part of the family, with a place at mealtimes—so Chaim became a kind of older brother to the Cohen kids. On hot breezy afternoons he took them sailing on the lake. On stifling nights he slept outside on the roof of the main house. His workdays began before dawn when he and the other farmers and hired hands left the compound through a gate in the security wall, climbed the flanks of the mountain with their tools, and tried to get as much done as possible before the valley became an oven. Chaim learned to keep one eye cocked for trouble. Most of the Arabs in the nearby villages left them alone, but there was the occasional raid or random theft—hence the wall around the compound. He became adept at loading a hay wagon just right—full to the point of overflowing but precisely balanced so that it wouldn’t tip over when it hit a rut. On Shabbat, he cleaned himself in the outdoor shower, dressed in white, and gathered with the other young farmworkers. He didn’t care how hot it was or how much his body ached—he would dance all night, gulp down a glass of tea, and go out once more to the burning fields. The girls noticed how muscular and handsome he was. He wore his dark hair long and oiled back. The Cohen children were not the only ones Chaim took sailing on the lake.
He hoped the dream would last forever. What ended it—and nearly killed him—was illness.
One morning Chaim woke up on fire with fever; a few hours later, the fire went out and ice gripped him. When he tried to stand, he collapsed. When he began to burn and sweat again, he saw visions and heard voices. Then the chills returned, setting his teeth to chattering and turning his tongue to flannel. Chaim had come down with malaria—epidemic in Palestine in those years, and especially acute in the Kinne
ret because of the torrid climate and the extensive swampland adjoining the lake. Chaim’s bout began with a simple mosquito bite. Red itchy bumps tormented him for a while and then passed, or seemed to. But while he had been scratching, the parasites injected by the mosquito were silently coursing through his bloodstream, feasting on the hemoglobin in his red blood cells and leaching out toxins. By the time the fever was kindled, it was far too late for Chaim to slow the ravaging of his system. Some malaria victims die of their first bout within hours: the explosion of millions of red blood cells deprives the body of oxygen, starves the brain, and induces a fatal coma. Others, harboring the parasites in their livers for years, dwindle away into anemic ghosts of their former selves. That’s what happened to Chaim. In time the cycle became as predictable and maddening as the tides: days of fever and chills, followed by a few fever-free days that roused the hope that the sickness had run its course, then another high tide of agony. “We used to work immediately before and after the attacks of fever,” wrote one pioneer. “We worked and suffered. At ten o’clock the fever would increase suddenly; our limbs trembled, heads ached, and everything fell out of our hands. Twelve o’clock, and it is impossible to go on.” But somehow they did go on.
Chaim was almost certainly infected numerous times—and even though his body developed some immunity, a new strain always emerged to fell him again.
The Kinneret was “the enchantress-bride, who led her bridegrooms to doom,” as one early settler put it. “For a worker plagued by the vicious circle of disease there was no way out unless he chose to abandon the ‘cruel enchantress’ to recuperate in a healthier climate.” After four enchanted years, Chaim was forced to make this choice. He had become a skilled, experienced farmer and a trusted comrade. He had filled out some, despite the malaria, and at twenty-two his face had lost its chiseled delicacy. He loved the Cohen family, he loved the lake and the bare corrugated mountains and the camaraderie of young idealists working together far from their homes. But he knew that it would kill him to stay in the Kinneret.
Chaim had heard about a new colony being organized in the coastal sand dunes north of Tel Aviv. Herzliya, named after the great Zionist founding father Theodore Herzl, had particular appeal for Chaim because it relied exclusively on Jewish labor, instead of hiring out menial jobs to Arab workers. Toward the end of 1928, he gathered his few possessions, bid farewell to Yizhak and Leah and their six children, and headed west across the narrow neck of Palestine to start over.
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In Rakov, the year 1928 brought joy to the family of Shalom Tvi and Beyle: their first grandson was born on February 5. Doba, the plump, sweet, oldest daughter, had married the previous year and moved to Vilna with her husband, Shabtai Senitski. At twenty-five, Doba was old to be marrying—though Shabtai, the new husband, was over thirty, a string bean of a man with a high forehead, furrowed brow, and a beaky nose. Never mind the gawky appearance, Shabtai—everyone called him Shepsel or Shepseleh—was kind and intelligent, clean and well dressed, a good earner with a successful practice as an accountant. He came from a learned and cultured family, and he and Doba were able to afford a comfortable apartment across the street from the university’s chemistry faculty and just up the hill from Vilna’s Old City. It was an echt bourgeois neighborhood of stone-and-brick apartments and offices, built to endure. The carved lintels, tall lacquered portals, pilasters, and courtyards were quite a step up from what the Kaganovich sisters had grown up with in Rakov. Doba persuaded her husband to name the baby Shimon in honor of her grandfather. Shimon Senitski, though not a Kohain because the priestly status passed only from father to son, was nonetheless a healthy baby boy with fair hair and round wondering eyes, and his parents cherished and pampered him. Word of the new arrival spread from Vilna to Doba’s first cousin Chaim in Palestine and to Itel, Harry, Sam, Hyman, and the many other cousins in the States. Another Shimon to carry the line of the scribe into the future.
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Itel had more proximate reasons to rejoice that year: Sales of Maiden Form bras hit half a million. In fact, the bras were moving so briskly that the operators in the Bayonne factory were having a hard time keeping up with orders. Itel and William and William’s sister Masha, drawing on their long experience with needle and thread, devised a streamlined new production process. Instead of having each operator sew a complete bra from start to finish, as Itel had done with her dresses, they broke the fabrication down into separate units and assigned each unit to an individual operator: one person handled only the binding, another did the joining, another worked on the shoulder straps, another affixed the labels, and so on. It was like the Model T assembly-line approach applied to lingerie. “We took a book out of the library on production efficiency,” Masha recalled, “but I told them, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’m doing it efficiently without that book. I’m doing it better than the book.’” William hired his brother Moe to take charge of the factory. Moe turned out to be a crack general manager—tough, intimidating, eagle eyed. With Moe breathing down the operators’ necks, the Bayonne plant became a quiet and extremely productive factory floor. “In those days, everybody had his head down,” recalled Stella Kotowski, the assistant plant manager. “You didn’t talk! You just did your work, very quietly. We were so close to the boss and he was always looking right at us! We came to work at eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, with an hour for lunch, and with no breaks.” Moe was scary, but production spiked under his iron rule.
Enid Manufacturing (the company name did not become Maiden Form until 1930) relocated its headquarters to 245 Fifth Avenue, at Twenty-eighth Street, a few blocks from the site where the Empire State Building would soon rise as the world’s tallest freestanding building. Itel was convinced that the only way to grow was to advertise, and she commissioned a fledgling ad campaign of black-and-white sketches (photography was way too risqué) of slinky women lounging around in their bras and slips. “Maiden Form Loveliness” read the copy line. “The new contour—siren rather than flapper—rounded yet slender.” Clergymen chirped that it was indecent, but the company shrugged and kept moving forward. In 1928, the first Maiden Form ad appeared in Harper’s Bazaar. They had scaled the heights of elegance.
Joe Bissett’s days were numbered as sales manager. Mrs. Bissett, ailing, had pretty much withdrawn from daily operations and decisions. The company still bore her name, and she and Joe still held a one-third share, but in every other way the business belonged to Itel and William. Now that they could afford to splurge a little, the Rosenthals left Hamilton Heights for a stately brick apartment building right off Central Park West, at 18 West Seventieth Street. Lewis, now a graduate of Columbia College, was bound for Columbia Law School. Beatrice, thirteen, attended the Ethical Culture School, a few blocks from the apartment. They had a live-in Czech maid named Marie and a car (though it was usually in the shop because William, as one associate put it, “had more accidents than anybody ever had driving a car. Mrs. Rosenthal would take six aspirins before she got into the car with him”). Their neighbors were solid respectable lawyers, doctors, manufacturers, and stockbrokers—hardly an immigrant among them aside from the maids and baby nurses.
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Itel had always separated herself from the rest of the family, both geographically and emotionally, and Abraham and Sarah knew it was pointless to try to reel her back in now. The parents had better luck keeping their other children in their orbit. Abraham and Sarah made the classic hopscotch of early twentieth-century Russian Jewish immigrants—from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn and, when finances permitted, from Brooklyn to the Bronx. In 1924, the family bought both units (up- and downstairs) of a duplex house at 1819 Andrews Avenue, a street of modest brick row houses in the University Heights neighborhood (named for New York University, which had its main campus in the Bronx from 1894 to the early 1970s). Abraham and Sarah lived upstairs with Ethel and her husband Sam Epstein and their three kids (Bernard, Inda, and David). Sam and Gl
adys and their five kids (the twins Dorothy and Sidney, Lester, Marvin, and Leona, Gladys’s only child to survive infancy) lived in the downstairs unit. It was a schlep to the business on Lower Broadway, but the house suited Abraham and Sarah because it was in a nice predominantly Jewish neighborhood, it had a bit of a backyard where they could put up a sukkah during Sukkoth (Sarah had given up on vegetable gardening), and above all because it was a five-minute walk to the shul. Abraham was a founding member of the Hebrew Institute of University Heights—one of the great Orthodox synagogues of the Bronx, with more than 1,500 congregants in attendance during the high holidays. The patriarch might be president of a going wholesale concern in Manhattan, but he was a man of God before he was a businessman. Each day before work, he taught a Talmud class at the shul. On Saturday his discourses on the Mishna were packed. When the synagogue started a religious school, they named it Akiva Academy in his honor. Shimon Dov would have been proud.
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Chaim moved from the Kinneret to Herzliya to regain health and strength, but his first impression of the place sent him reeling. An unpaved rutted track delivered him to a collection of huts and barracks set in a wasteland of sand. Instead of mountains ringing a gorgeous lake, dunes speckled with brown scrub rolled out in every direction. Goats from the nearby Arab village of Ijlil al-Qibliyya browsed the low hills. Spindly citrus orchards surrounded the identical rows of workers’ houses (which had replaced the original tents), and two dozen acres of banana trees, planted the year before, flapped their tattered green banners in the sun.
Herzliya was founded in 1924 as a training center for garinim—Zionist youth preparing to relocate to collectives and cooperative farms—and a strong Labor Zionist ethic prevailed. Once he got over his shock, Chaim fit right in with the young, idealistic comrades.
