by David Laskin
And so with her own money and her own fierce will, Sonia finally made it happen. Since the entry visa proved to be impossible to obtain, Sonia figured out a way to duck under the red tape by pretending to travel as a tourist. She and four friends bought round-trip tickets with a tour company called Totzeret HaAretz (Produce in the Land) for 500 zlotys (the Polish currency) each (a considerable sum at a time when the average Polish worker earned 125z a month). Their plan was to use the tour company to get into the Middle East and then, in effect, jump ship. Sonia went to Vilna in the first days of August 1932 to spend a few days with Doba before setting out. “Difficult mood,” Etl wrote of the departure from home. Doba’s husband, Shepseleh, had agreed to accompany Sonia to Warsaw and put her and her companions on a train bound for the Romanian port of Constanta (the same port that Chaim had sailed from). But Sonia was sulky and tense the whole time and Shepseleh’s feelings were hurt. He could not understand the foul humor. At the Warsaw train station, Sonia shrugged him off, boarded the Romanian-bound train with her friends, stowed her luggage, and tried to ignore her racing heart. Her brother-in-law’s long, pale, mournful face appeared at the window before slipping away behind her. After Warsaw petered out, the green Polish countryside swallowed them up. The girls made a point of conversing in Hebrew.
At Constanta one of the fathers was on hand to see them from the train station to the port and get them settled on a steamer bound for Lebanon. Sonia’s spirits lifted as soon as she boarded. It was August 9, high summer on the Black Sea, and the ship’s deck was full of ruddy sailors and dashing young fellows in fedoras. The girls posed for snapshots clutching armfuls of exotic fruit—bananas, grapes, lemons, something spherical that might be a melon. A first taste of the Mediterranean. When the ship docked in Beirut, the captain reminded the tour-group passengers of the standard terms: they had been required to prepay for the round-trip, but not a single groszy of the five-hundred-zloty fare would be refunded for unused return tickets. So they had a choice: go back to Poland after their visit to Palestine or lose their money. It was not the first time nor would it be the last that a Jew was bilked for the privilege of immigrating to the Promised Land. The girls disembarked on the Beirut pier and disappeared into the crowd.
Somehow they found a driver who agreed to take them down the coast to Haifa. The tourist visas sufficed to get them into the British Protectorate at Rosh HaNikra, a settlement in the extreme northwest corner of Palestine—and once they were across the border, no one bothered about their status. As soon as they were safely past the checkpoint, the driver pulled over and told the girls to get out of the car. They must have a look at the most spectacular view in the world. White chalk cliffs tumbled into the sea below; before them, the land relaxed in a wide fertile plain that paralleled the coast on one side and rose on the other side into low hazy mountains that veiled the mysterious east; to the south, where their journey led, beckoned the long blue arc of Haifa Bay. When they had stood long enough to gaze their fill and shed tears and embrace each other and murmur about the homeland, the friends returned to the taxi and continued on to Haifa. The road was appalling, the houses and people and animals outside the car windows unbelievably strange and alarming, the air blowing in intolerably hot. Finally the driver stopped in the center of Haifa and the five of them and a small mountain of their luggage tumbled out. A taxi was maybe not the most glorious way to make aliyah—but they had done it.
Sonia’s cousin Ruth, one of the girls in the group, had a relative in Haifa named Hinda, who would put them up, but Ruth had no idea where Hinda lived. She and Sonia wandered around in the heat and glare hoping to bump into her. Palm trees, whitewashed houses, strands of riotous bougainvillea, Jews in shorts and sandals, Arabs driving mule carts and camels, British soldiers hanging from their jeeps—all the clamorous life of the port revolved around them in a dizzying montage. Finally they screwed up their courage and approached a woman pushing a baby carriage; Ruth asked her in Yiddish if she happened to know her cousin Hinda—a recent arrival from Poland with six children. Haifa’s Jewish community was not so large in those days. The woman not only knew Hinda but also offered to bring them to her house. Sonia thanked God that she would not be spending her first night in the Land sleeping on a park bench. Hinda welcomed them, gave them tea, and found them a room in a seaside hotel, since there was not an inch to spare in her own house. Sonia filled a few days with sightseeing, sunbathing, and writing letters to Rakov and Vilna. She had ascended to the Land; now she had to find a way to live there.
Rakov, September 4, 1932
Dear Sonia,
Yesterday we received your letter and we were very disappointed. We did not expect such a letter from you. You traveled the world, you saw various towns and many new things. You have been in Eretz Israel a week already, and yet you still were not in the mood to write and describe anything to us. Not a hair of joy in your letter. In every one else who arrives in the Eretz, one detects a spark of joy, but in your letters one does not see any eagerness or happiness and we regret that we had let you go. I understand that you feel depressed. I saw on the page of the letter that you tried to write to me in Polish but changed your mind. Next time write to me separately. Write about everything, good or bad.
Your letter has saddened us a great deal. How did you spend the time on Shabbat? Write about your impressions. Travel to meet with your acquaintances and take care of yourself. Father is also writing.
Your sister, Etl
My dear daughter Sonia!
According to your letter, nothing interesting is happening to you, while others who have come to the Land write with awe and elation. Don’t worry. Look at everything and see where you want to settle, whether a village or a town. If it does not work, don’t worry about expenses. You can spend a month there and then come back home. We will be glad to take you back.
You have not written to us how you felt being alone and where you were on Shabbat.
Do not lose your spirit.
Your loving father
CHAPTER TWELVE
IN LOVE IN THE LAND
Nothing was as Sonia had imagined. Haifa was hot and beautiful but it was far from the agricultural settlements and the harbor was full of noise from the British dredging project. The people went about their business like people everywhere—not like blessed dwellers in the Promised Land. Where was the fire and passion that Jabotinsky had spoken of? Where were the Hebrew foot soldiers poised to claim the soil from Dan to Beersheba? Jabotinsky said you had to pay for the homeland with blood, but all she saw in Haifa were industrious citizens trying to make a living. Sonia paid for her room and left the hotel in Haifa, she said good-bye to her cousin Ruth and Hinda and the six children, she took the bus to Herzliya, where Chaim had been living and working for the past three years. She knew her family would be furious when they learned that she had separated from Ruth, but Sonia was prepared to brave their wrath. She had not come to the Eretz to live in a city. In Herzliya there were halutzim and halutzot working the land, bringing life where there had been only waste and desolation. She had to go and see this new thing for herself.
She got out of the bus at the side of the sun-bleached Haifa-to-Tel-Aviv road and walked the rest of the way through the dunes to Herzliya. The place looked to her like the ends of the earth—sandy, desolate, with no shade. The parched fields and orchards and naked housing blocks withered in the sun. Chaim was nowhere to be found. The other settlers gave her a funny look when she asked for him. Did he have a girlfriend? Was he secretly married? Sonia explained that she was his cousin, fresh off the boat from Poland, as if that weren’t obvious. They gave her a room for the night; it was stifling hot inside so she threw open the windows and collapsed into bed. “I had no idea that there were a lot of mosquitoes,” she said later. “When I woke up the next morning, I was unrecognizable, swollen from being covered with mosquito bites and with a very high fever. It was terrible!” In her delirium Sonia heard one
woman cluck to another in Yiddish, “How am I going to write a letter to her parents in Rakov to tell them their daughter just arrived and is no longer with us?”
Sonia did not die. Chaim turned up and welcomed her properly to Eretz Israel. Sonia had a letter for him—really just a few words that her father wanted her to pass along.
Greetings to my dear nephew, Chaim Binie.
I would like to ask you to write to us about Sonia and her future. We wonder if she will she be able to get along there, although she is not talented working with her hands.
Your uncle Shalom Tvi Kaganovich
Not exactly a vote of confidence from the folks back home.
Chaim had been eighteen, Sonia fourteen when they last saw each other. Now, eight years later, in the full glare of Palestine’s summer sun, they sized each other up awkwardly—cousins, fellow Zionists, but semi-strangers. Sonia felt like a child next to this brown muscular halutz. He knew how to farm, shoot a gun, fix a broken irrigation pipe, and coax a wheezy engine to life; he had friends, comrades in Haganah, and no doubt a girlfriend—maybe several. She could tell from the way he looked at her that he was surprised, but she couldn’t tell by what. That she was now almost as tall as he was? That she had become a dark graceful beauty? That her parents had allowed her to make aliyah even though she had no talent with her hands? Maybe he was wondering what he was going to do with her. As a cousin he would feel obliged to look after her, make sure she didn’t get into trouble, help her find work, keep the comrades off her. Maybe he didn’t think she would be worth the effort. Maybe Chaim, like her father, was wondering if she would be “able to get along there.”
—
Sonia had used up her own money to get to Palestine. Now that she was here in Herzliya, how was she going to support herself? Asking her family was out of the question. She would never go begging, especially after the letters they were writing. We regret that we had let you go. If it does not work, spend a month there and then come back home. She’d sooner die. But how was she going to live?
She considered enrolling in the First Agricultural School for Women that feminist-Zionist Chana Meisel had founded a few years earlier at Nahalal in the Jezreel Valley. Meisel took shtetl girls like Sonia, turned them into real halutzot, and helped them find places on collective farms. If she stayed on at Herzliya, she’d be stuck in the kitchen and the laundry. Sonia had eyes—she saw how it was: men working in the fields, women chopping onions and scrubbing shirts. Forget what they said back in Poland about equality between halutzim and halutzot. Here in the Land, when it came down to dividing the work and the glory, the halutz was the hero and the halutza was the cook, the maid, the laundress, and, once she married, Comrade So-and-so’s wife and the mother of his kids. If Sonia wanted to plow and plant and reap and harvest, the other women told her, she should go to Nahalal and take Chana Meisel’s course. Otherwise she’d better get herself a few more aprons and a pair of rubber gloves.
Sonia was torn. It bothered her how the bitter women in the kitchen slapped the plates down in front of the male farmworkers and glared at them when they fell on their food. Sonia liked to see a hungry man eat a big meal. Though she chafed to be out working the land herself, she didn’t feel demeaned by cooking or doing laundry. It was not in her nature to resent or put herself forward. She was not a complainer. She had come to the Land to work—and if they had her doing women’s work, so be it. She didn’t expect to have it easy. She didn’t want to have it easy. Sonia didn’t need to plow and sweat beside the men to feel like a pioneer. She was strong—her respect came from within.
Sonia was not always happy in Palestine, but from the moment she set foot there she felt at home. If she missed her parents and sisters, if she suffered in the climate, if she was bored by the endless loads of laundry, if she pined for the life outside the Land, she kept it to herself.
And so in the end she decided not to enroll in Chana Meisel’s First Agricultural School for Women. Besides, if she left Herzliya, she wouldn’t see much of Chaim anymore.
—
Rakov, Rosh Hashanah [September 30], 1932
Leshanah Tovah Tikateivu
To my dear daughter Mistress Sonia,
Write to us about where you live and how much it costs and about the food, too. Are you renting a room with meals or are you cooking for yourself? Will you settle in a village or a town? Write about whether you are getting used to the weather, to the life and to the food in the Eretz. Our only pleasure now is to hear good things from you, and may be the hope that one day we shall all be together.
Write to the family in America to let them know where you are.
May your wishes come true.
Your father, Shalom Tvi Kaganovich
To my dear nephew, Chaim B.
I thank you for the help and care you have extended to Sonia. We are grateful from afar. May be, some day we shall live near you and then will repay you. See to it that she settles in a village or a town, whichever she prefers.
Shalom Tvi Kaganovich
After Rosh Hashanah, a month went by with no letter from Rakov. Not even a postcard. By the third week, Sonia was starting to imagine disasters. Finally, in the first week of November, a letter from Etl arrived explaining everything.
In August, soon after Sonia left, Shepseleh had brought his four-year-old son Shimon—Shimonkeh, they always called him—to Rakov for a long visit with the family there. Since Doba was close to term in her second pregnancy and in no condition to travel, she remained in Vilna by herself. It seemed like a good arrangement for everyone: Doba would get a rest before the new baby was born, and Shimonkeh and his father would walk in the woods, breathe the clean air, dabble their feet in the lake, and go to shul with Shalom Tvi. Shepseleh filled the idle hours playing chess—he was a renowned chess master and he taught anyone who was interested how to play, even the priest from the Polish church. Shepseleh returned to Vilna before Rosh Hashanah, leaving the boy behind in Rakov for a little more spoiling by his grandparents. And spoil him they did. Every morning Shimonkeh woke up shouting, “Savtah [grandmother], give me latkes!” and even though latkes were typically served only on Hanukkah, Beyle complied. On Shabbat Beyle had to explain that there would be no latkes that day since it was forbidden to cook on the Sabbath. The next morning, Sunday, the boy told his grandmother solemnly: “Savtah, make a lot of latkes so there will be enough for tomorrow in case it will be Shabbat again.” Beyle and Shalom Tvi laughed till the tears ran. Shalom Tvi recounted the whole thing in a letter to Doba and she wept with laughter too. “What can I say,” Doba wrote Sonia from Vilna, “Shimonkeh, may he be healthy, is the greatest joy of my life.”
On Erev Yom Kippur, the boy fell seriously ill with scarlet fever and the house went into an uproar. Beyle had never forgiven herself for the death of Feigele—her youngest daughter, who had come down with scarlet fever during the war and poisoned herself by swallowing down all her medicine at once—and now she had another sick four-year-old on her hands. The same age—the same disease. Not, she prayed fervently to God, the same outcome. Beyle decreed that her grandson must be watched day and night.
On November 6, Etl sat down and described the whole ordeal in a letter to Sonia:
Shimonkeh’s condition deteriorated quickly and his temperature went up to more than 40 degrees (C) [104 degrees Fahrenheit]. We wrote to Shepseleh immediately, but he could not come because of Doba and to her we said nothing.
The ailment had affected the child’s heart, and when he worsened, we asked a doctor from Vilna to come. The doctor came here on the first day of Succot [October 15], and Shimonkeh’s condition did not please him. You cannot imagine how much we had suffered. We did not think about the Holiday, we forgot to eat and to sleep. We did not think we could make it through. There was simply a panic in the little town. Our house had turned into a quarantine. No one could come inside except for the family. For two weeks I did not ta
ke off my clothes and did not sleep at night.
The child was “already 99 percent in the world to come” but he lived, “thank God,” Etl continued. “While I am writing to you, he is sitting in bed, playing and singing his songs. He is so weak that he cannot stand on his own. He needs to be kept and watched for six more weeks and when he is well I will take him to Vilna.” Etl, who had a bit of a sour streak, could not help adding, “In the future I will not take care of a child who is not mine.”
Etl saved the good news for last. On October 28, Doba had given birth to her baby—another son whom they named Wolf, after Shepseleh’s grandfather. The family had a weakness for diminutives, and Wolf inevitably became Velveleh or Volinkeh. He was fretful but very beautiful, with black hair and a round cherubic face.
—
November 20, 1932
My dear daughter Sonia!
Let us hope that your decision will turn out well and that you will not lose your courage. In any case, if things are not as successful as you hope, you can always come back to your own room, you are certainly not superfluous here.
Even if you do not find work quickly, don’t worry about spending a few dollars—you need to gird yourself with patience—it is not so terrible. I remember that even in America, a few months passed before they were able to find work.
It is autumn here now and the weather is damp. Maybe business will start to improve. The gentiles scream about how expensive leather goods are and how they have to part with a whole cow for a single pair of boots. But what can one do?
Be healthy and with the help of God may you be happy.
Your father, Shalom Tvi Kaganovich
Doba “cried and laughed from happiness” when Etl returned her firstborn to her early in January 1933. “At first I did not recognize him he had grown up so much,” Doba wrote to Sonia. “His language and mind are like that of a mature man.” Shimonkeh quizzed his parents about the tiny howling black-haired stranger who had been acquired during his absence. You should have bought a larger size, the boy told his mother, because this one cries too much at night. “He asked me how much I had paid for the baby. I said, ‘120 gulden.’ He said it was too much, I should only have paid 30 gulden.” Winter gripped the north, and Etl wrote to complain of the endless boring nights. “No one to go see, and nothing to do. . . . The season is dead. . . . I am sick of this way of life. . . . Rakov, literally, is fading from day to day.” It was frigid but no snow fell. Twice a week friends came to play lotto, but the company barely made a dent in the frozen boredom. Bitter that she had yet to find a husband at the age of twenty-five, Etl pined for a match but “the situation” never came to a head. “It is hard to choose,” she lamented. “When you look into the depths of each one separately, it seems that they are all lost.” As winter dragged on, Etl pointedly reminded Sonia of how lucky she was to be in sunny Palestine: “I simply envy you that you enjoy life more than I do. What can one see here in Rakov? Whereas there [in Palestine] for a few coins you can go to town or to a settlement, meet with friends, meet new people and generally see what goes on in God’s world. Here, even if you want to spend a little money, there is nothing to buy.” Etl was furious to learn that the friend who was supposed to deliver some nice sausage and kishkes that they had made for Sonia had eaten them all herself. “Of course it was utter rudeness.”
