The Family

by David Laskin

  Chaim had come to Herzliya to work, not to supplant Arab workers—but it happened nonetheless. Whatever land and livelihood Jewish workers gained, Arabs lost: the equation was fixed and inescapable. Herzliya was a small, tightly organized Jewish outpost—really a tiny Jewish world unto itself—and Chaim lived and worked there without a thought about who had owned and grazed this land before him. The first wave of Zionists had relied on Arab workers because they were cheap and skilled, and because Jews were considered too intransigent and expensive to make good farmworkers. But by the time Chaim made aliyah in 1924, things had changed. Now “Hebrew land, Hebrew language, Hebrew labor” was the rallying cry. It was a point of pride for Chaim and thousands like him to join colonies and collectives where everything, even the most menial tasks, especially the most menial tasks, was done exclusively by Jews. The intent was not to squeeze out the Arabs but rather to establish their own self-sufficient independent settlements, villages, regions, and, one day, God willing, nation. “Not to dominate—not to be dominated” was the formula David Ben-Gurion endorsed. Peaceful coexistence. Side by side but separate in this sliver of a land. Why not?

  It was a beautiful dream, part and parcel of the wild blind idealism that the halutzim brought with them. But it was doomed from the start. “You want to found a state without bloodshed?” sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz demanded of Theodore Herzl. “Where have you ever seen such a thing?”

  Chaim had come to Palestine to work, not to fight. But fighting was inevitable given the ambitions of the Zionists and the deep roots of the Arabs. All it took was an irritant—an economic downturn, a sudden spike in Jewish immigration, a squabble over holy places—to bring the latent violence to the surface. There were isolated incidents from the start of Jewish settlement—thefts, harassment, destruction of Jewish property, the occasional ambush or sniper attack—but more organized and widespread anti-Zionist rioting broke out in 1920. More Jews would have been hurt had the Zionists’ rudimentary militia Haganah (“Defense” in Hebrew) not turned out to oppose the attacks. This was something else Jews had taken into their own hands in Palestine—Hebrew self-defense. Mobilized under the command of militant Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky, cofounder with Joseph Trumpeldor of the Jewish Legion during World War I, Haganah was still shadowy, decentralized, illegal, and amateurish. When even bloodier anti-Zionist rioting roiled the port city of Jaffa, in May 1921, and spread to the surrounding agricultural settlements, Haganah once again stood up to the attackers.

  The halutzim had made aliyah to farm, not to fight. But if they had to fight in order to farm, they would. Only the next time they would be better prepared.

  By the late 1920s, Haganah service had become all but mandatory for workers on the collective and cooperative farms. Chaim was ripe for recruitment. Soon after he settled in Herzliya, the local Haganah leadership approached him about enrolling in their commanders’ course. The induction ceremony was like a sacred ritual. Chaim was ushered into a darkened room lit by a single candle. The door was locked. He sat at a table with a revolver and a Bible in front of him and, with the officers looking on in silence, recited the militia’s oath: “I swear to be faithful all the days of my life to the Haganah organization, to its constitution, and to its duties as defined by the high command. I swear to dedicate all my powers and even to sacrifice my life to defense and to the war for my people and my homeland, for the freedom of Israel and for the redemption of Zion.” The oath bound Chaim to strict secrecy. If he so much as betrayed the existence of the organization or revealed to an outsider the location of an arms cache (slik in Haganah slang), he would pay with his life.

  Chaim trained for six months, from January to the start of July 1929. Five nights a week and Saturdays he and Herzliya’s sixteen other Haganah recruits learned how to load and shoot weapons, take out snipers, toss grenades, and obey orders without arguing. For target practice, they descended into an ancient Roman tunnel that served as the Herzliya slik and firing range. The boys blasted away, and no one up above heard a thing. Chaim was lucky—his group was trained by Yisrael Amir, a charismatic leader who had been active in Haganah from the start and rose rapidly through the ranks. In 1935, Amir would set up two secret factories to produce grenades and mortars for Haganah, and in 1942 he would found and head up the Haganah intelligence branch, known initially as Shai, that later morphed into Mossad and Shin Bet, Israel’s intelligence and internal security services. After independence he became the first commander of the Israeli air force.

  When Amir’s training course was over, Chaim and his comrades were rewarded with a hiking trip through the backcountry. It was July and the heat and drought of summer had scorched the land. Still, Chaim embraced the return to the mountains and valleys he had come to love in his first years in Palestine.

  It was good Chaim had gotten away when he did. A month after the hiking trip, there was another round of anti-Zionist violence—far worse than the outbreaks of 1920 and 1921. No one used the word pogrom for what started in the summer of 1929. This time it was more like the opening battle in a civil war.

  —

  That summer in New York all anybody talked about was the stock market. Or so Sam told his brothers after making the rounds of their accounts. Everywhere he went, Sam heard about how rich other people were getting off their investments. It wasn’t just the businessmen and salesmen either. The shoe-shine boy, the barber, the grocer, the guy delivering milk—all of them were trading stock tips, cashing in, moving up. Even if you didn’t have a dime, a broker would front you. You couldn’t lose. Sam worried that they were missing out on the greatest run-up in history. “We have more brains than any one of these people I meet,” he told his brothers. “Yet we just sit here and let opportunities pass us by.” Sam proposed to Harry and Hyman that they take the company’s excess cash and sock it away in the market.

  Hyman was against it. They hadn’t gotten where they were by taking foolish risks, he told Sam. They’d be better off investing in the growth of their business. The market was going up now, but it couldn’t last forever. Hyman got Harry to take his side—two against one.

  Sam kept hammering away at them. By August the city was sweltering and the market was sizzling. Headlines blazed with reports of equity shares hitting new records. “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau,” declared one prominent economist. The brothers had always pulled together—all for one and one for all. But if Harry and Hyman refused to budge, Sam would go it alone.

  —

  The fighting began on August 15, 1929, at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. There was no place on earth more sacred to Jews—or more contested by their enemies. The Romans had destroyed the temple that rose atop this massive retaining wall in 70 C.E., laid waste to Jerusalem, and cast the Jews from its ruins—but for two thousand years the pious had found a way to come back and pray beside the slabs of stone. Muslim Arabs conquered the Holy Land after the fall of Rome, and in the seventh century they crowned the platform that the Wall supported—the Temple Mount—with two splendid mosques, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Ottoman Turks supplanted the Arabs in 1517 and made Jerusalem an outpost of their vast empire. Still the Wall endured in substance and even more in the imaginations of Diaspora Jews; a trickle of the faithful always came to worship and to mourn in its shadow.

  As long as the Jews remained small in number and docile in demeanor, the rulers of Jerusalem let them daven and weep by the Wall. But the Jews who massed here on August 15, 1929, had not come to pray. Their demeanor was anything but docile. Militant young followers of Haganah commander Ze’ev Jabotinsky had organized a youth movement called Betar, and on August 15, Betar members gathered by the Wall to stage a large, noisy anti-Arab demonstration. Brandishing the blue-and-white Jewish national flag, the Jabotinskyites sang the anthem “Hatikvah” and shouted, “The Wall is ours!” That was all it took to light the fuse. Arabs demonstrated the following day and fighting flared
; there followed five days of wild rumors, random attacks, extreme tension—and killing. Seventeen Jews were dead at the hands of Arab rioters in Jerusalem by August 24. More died in Hebron, an ancient city north and west of Jerusalem, where a long-established Orthodox Jewish community had lived peacefully for decades with the majority Arab population. Earlier in the week, the Hebron Jewish community, convinced that their Arab friends would keep them safe, had turned down an offer from Haganah to protect them or assist with evacuation. It was a terrible mistake. On August 23 and 24, sixty-seven Jews died in the violence at Hebron—stoned, stabbed, shot by Arab mobs. The victims included yeshiva students, women, and children under the age of three. One observer insisted that “not a Jewish soul” would have survived in Hebron “if it had not been for some Arab families” who took pity on their Jewish neighbors and, risking their lives, hid them in their homes.

  Eighteen Jews later died in Safed, the ancient city in the Galilee where pious Volozhiners had supported a religious colony in the nineteenth century, and there were also killings in Tel Aviv. As wildly exaggerated rumors of Arab casualties flew from cities to the countryside, attacks began to flare up in the agricultural settlements as well. Here the conflict was more traumatic because the scale was so intimate—neighbors attacking neighbors in adjoining fields. At Kfar Uria, a cooperative farming village between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem where the writer A. D. Gordon had lived for a time, settlers were saved because a local village sheik took them in and gave them shelter. The Jews watched, however, as Arabs from a nearby village looted and torched their homes and farms. The settlement was completely destroyed and abandoned.

  Chaim was lucky: the fighting did not spread to Herzliya, no doubt because local Arabs and Bedouins observed Haganah recruits manning the colony’s observation posts around the clock. Drilling was stepped up, but there was no call to use the light arms and grenades hidden in the Roman tunnel.

  Haganah units in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem managed to repel some attacks, and friendly Arabs kept the Jewish death toll down. But the Jews were outraged at how little British forces did to protect them and how late they were to respond. Zionists also bitterly resented the fact that the official British reports characterized the riots as “disturbances” or “conflicts” or “loss of life,” suggesting that the attacks were mutual, when in fact Arabs struck and Jews tried to defend themselves—or perished helplessly. The casualties on both sides were heavy: 133 Jews dead and 339 wounded; 116 Arabs dead and 232 wounded. But there was this critical difference: nearly all the Jewish blood was spilled by Arabs, whereas nearly all the Arab casualties were inflicted by British security forces attempting to restore order.

  August 1929 was the end of a Zionist era and the beginning of a new and far more troubled one. What little trust and cooperation there had been between Jews and Arabs crusted over. In the aftermath of the riots, there was no reconciliation, no easing of the trauma. Self-defense now occupied a central place in the Zionist mission, as essential to survival as the conquest of labor. Haganah embarked on a rapid and intense expansion, transforming itself from a ragtag collection of cells to a regional fighting force with a steady supply of weapons imported from Europe. The training program that Chaim had completed was broadened in scope, seriousness, and membership. At Herzliya, they bulked up the slik with new weapons stashed handily in the workers’ houses.

  The violence finally ceased. A tense fragile peace returned. The dead were buried. Inquiries were held by the British authorities. Official “white papers” were handed down from London. Chaim went on working in the citrus groves. But the mood had shifted. The idea of peaceful coexistence and gradual accommodation was finished; now came the era of resistance.

  Chaim had been little more than a boy when he arrived in the Kinneret in 1924, a teenager buoyed by boundless hope and idealism. Idealism alters when it has to wear a sidearm. The tragedy of twentieth-century Palestine was that farmers like Chaim had to learn to beat their plowshares into swords.

  —

  Sam had had enough. In the middle of October, he called a stockbroker and put in an order for Consolidated Gas Company (the forerunner of Consolidated Edison). In Hyman’s recollection, Sam’s buy was thirteen shares at $135 a share—a total of $1,755 (a hefty sum when you consider that Itel’s initial $4,000 investment in Enid Frocks was just about all the money she and William had). Sam was superstitious. He never should have bought that odd lot of thirteen. On October 28—Black Monday—the stock market crashed, losing 13 percent of its value between the opening and closing bells. The next day it plunged another 12 percent. In five hours, 10 billion dollars in stock value was wiped away. Sam hadn’t even taken possession of his stock and already it was in the toilet. Harry and Hyman agreed to bail out their brother. They let Sam transfer ownership of the stock to the business so the company would absorb the loss. Though of course they would never let him live it down.

  Itel, Harry, Sam, Hyman, their parents and siblings, aunts and uncles had done well for themselves in America. They arrived all but penniless in a flood of penniless immigrants and now a couple of decades later they had houses, cars, businesses, money in the bank, children in private schools, servants, security. Not that any of it had come easily. America was the land of opportunity, but it was also a land of xenophobes, bigots, nativists, anti-Semites, and racists. The decade just coming to an end had been a banner time for mass discrimination against any group perceived as foreign or un-American. New laws enacted in 1921 and 1924 all but barred the golden door. The Ku Klux Klan came roaring back to life. Red-baiting politicians blamed Jews for the Russian Revolution and the looming Soviet threat. In Germany, the rising Nazi Party said exactly the same thing.

  Still, in 1929, there was no better place to be a Jew than the United States. Some four and a half million strong, America’s Jewish community was emerging as the world’s largest, wealthiest, and most powerful. To the Cohen family, America, not Palestine, looked like the true promised land of the twentieth century.

  And then in two calamitous days in October, the bottom fell out. In the Great Depression that followed the crash, all the world’s major economies toppled—but the countries hit hardest were the United States and Germany.

  Sam got off fairly easily. His Consolidated Gas shares tanked but at least he had family to bail him out. Business was cyclical, all the big shots kept saying. In a couple of months they’d look back and see the crash was just a dip. Things would come roaring back—just wait. Sam, for all his bluster when making a sale, was not an optimist, but he tried to believe it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE DEPRESSION

  Who would buy a bra if she couldn’t afford to eat? Itel wondered about Maiden Form’s prospects as 1929 slid into 1930 and the nation, and then the world, plunged into the worst economic depression in modern history. Sales of all the products that had buoyed the great boom of the 1920s slumped rapidly in 1930. Unemployment more than doubled its 1929 level, from 1.5 million to 4.3 million. Some 26,300 businesses went belly up that year, including 1,372 banks. Life savings evaporated; salaries for those lucky enough to hold on to their jobs declined. Itel looked on in disbelief as one big dress house after another closed its doors. Had she followed her brothers’ advice that would have been her fate. Somehow, Maiden Form not only stayed in business but sales continued to grow. Evidently a lot of women still had a few dollars to spare on beauty.

  Itel’s company survived the first year of the Depression, but her family did not. When he was sixteen years old, Lewis had contracted pneumonia. Still, bright and handsome, he seemed to have recovered and he went on to live a normal life, graduating from Columbia College and then enrolling in Columbia Law School. But his body had never rid itself of the abscess—the pus-filled cavity—that had formed in his lung. At some point an infected clot broke off from the lung and traveled through the aorta into the vessels supplying Lewis’s brain, where the clot embedded itself in the soft tissue of
the right parietal lobe and festered. By the spring of 1930, the brain abscess had become life threatening, and Itel and William rushed Lewis to Germany, which then had the most highly skilled brain surgeons in the world. In June, the German doctors performed a craniotomy—the surgical removal of a piece of the skull in order to reach and drain the abscess—but the procedure failed. The Rosenthals brought their son back to New York and on June 23 they had him admitted to the Neurological Institute of New York. The doctors did their best to keep Lewis comfortable—another operation was out of the question. The infection spread to the meninges, the membranes that sheathe the brain and the spinal cord. Lewis died in the Neurological Institute at 1:30 in the morning on Monday, August 4, 1930, six days shy of his twenty-third birthday.

  The family gathered for the service at eleven o’clock the following morning at the Riverside Memorial Chapel on West Seventy-sixth Street. Itel and William had never been observant Jews. They had not circumcised their son at birth, nor had Lewis ever learned Hebrew, attended synagogue, or celebrated his bar mitzvah. Instead of Judaism, the Rosenthals belonged to the Ethical Culture Society, a quasi-religious group that advocated morality without theology, personal fulfillment through education and philanthropy, and the interdependence of self-reform and social reform. Nonetheless, when Lewis died, Itel and William chose a Jewish funeral home for the burial—no doubt out of respect for Abraham and Sarah.

  Whatever depths of grief Itel felt over losing her only son—by all accounts a promising young man who was expected to take over the company one day—she did not share it with her siblings or parents. Itel was a fiercely private, supremely disciplined person. Devastated, she forced herself to get back to work. Only on rare occasions did her feelings show. Years later, at a family Hanukkah party, she sat grim-faced while a tactless relative rattled on, not without a twist of envy, about how lucky she was. She lived in a mansion, drove to work in a chauffeured limousine, always flew first class, had hundreds of employees to obey her every command. “So lucky!” Itel replied, bursting into tears. “I’d give up all of it to have Lewis back.”