The Family

by David Laskin

  From Vilna, Doba also complained, but in a fond maternal way, of the mischief and noise that the boys raised. They had taken to calling Velveleh, the younger boy, “Bandit” because he was such a little outlaw. Still, the baby was “one of the best” and Shimonkeh, now fully recovered, was showing great talent in music. “He is the best singer in kindergarten and knows all the songs.” Shalom Tvi wrote to remind his daughter to follow the traditions and observances of her people: “We are asking you, my dear daughter, not to stray from the ways of behavior that you learned at home. Rest on holy days and on Shabbat. Keep the Pessach rituals as you have done at home. Be careful to eat kosher food, and avoid whoever transgresses in any of these things. Thus you shall be loved by God and by people, and everyone will esteem you more for it and you can be proud.”

  Each one of them repeatedly urged Sonia to tell the “whole truth” when she wrote them individually, even if she might varnish things a bit when she wrote to the others. Yet all of them carefully varnished the situation in Poland. They wrote about their daily joys and trials—children, holidays, clothing, gifts, money, gossip, weather, the foibles of their neighbors and friends—but almost nothing about what was happening outside their kitchens and bedrooms. Shepseleh mentioned that he was looking for better work or more work; Shalom Tvi vaguely let drop that “business worsens” because “the situation is bad.” Rakov was “getting even smaller” as young people left for Russia, for Palestine, for anyplace else where they might make a better living. But the letters from Vilna and Rakov were entirely silent about the growing anti-Semitism of Polish newspapers and politicians, the mounting calls for Jews to get out of Poland, the attacks on Jewish culture, Jewish institutions, even on the use of Yiddish. It was impossible to travel without seeing the slogans “Poland for the Poles” and “Ours to Ours” plastered on buildings and walls, but no one spoke of this in a letter to Sonia. “Remember that it’s not good to save on food,” Etl wrote on January 31, 1933. “Keep your health. We do not play lotto any more. People are confused and they do not get together.” Not a word about the fact that Adolf Hitler had been appointed Reich chancellor the previous day in Berlin. “People say that Feytzeh [one of the girls Sonia had traveled to Palestine with] has a fiancé and will marry soon,” Etl ends the letter. “Tell me if it is true.”

  Rakov was emptying steadily of Jews, and the Polish authorities were glad to be rid of them. In fact, it was becoming state policy: Jews were not Poles and never could be; they had brought down the economy through their stranglehold on Polish business; they should self-deport voluntarily. Neither Shalom Tvi nor Shepseleh spoke of these matters in their letters to Sonia, but they both felt the sting. Shepseleh dropped wistful hints about moving to the Land one day. He could learn Hebrew and a little English and set up as an accountant or small businessman. What did Sonia think? “We are waiting for Etl’s lottery ticket to win at least a few thousand dollars,” Shalom Tvi wrote to his daughter on February 2, “and then we shall all get out and come to you. Write to us and tell us how much land for cultivation costs. It may suit us to buy a parcel somewhere over there and then we could all live together.”

  Six months earlier they had bitterly opposed her decision to make aliyah. Now they were dreaming—idly dreaming—of joining her.

  Spring came to Herzliya and Sonia breathed the perfume of orange blossoms for the first time. She had made up her mind to stay on in the settlement and was now working in the citrus groves. Her days were pruning, irrigating, weeding, spraying; her nights were singing with the other young people or collapsing in exhaustion. She had gotten a room of her own—a spotless cubicle decorated with linens embroidered by Etl and a red tablecloth that her mother had lovingly packed and shipped to her. She was happy and glowing with health. Sonia fit in well at Herzliya, even though the flagrant irreverence of the halutzim offended her. The guys around her were godless, anti-kosher, horny, tough, and entitled—she was forever fighting them off. Luckily, she had Chaim to look out for her. “It seems that of all our young women, you have succeeded the most,” Etl wrote her on March 20, “and all is thanks to Chaim.”

  In fact, Sonia and Chaim had fallen in love. It must have started at a dance. Handsome Chaim danced her off her feet, then tried to dance between her legs. Sonia was four years younger and a decade less experienced, but she was old enough to know that Chaim was the one. She liked his brusque brazen manner and his way of overwhelming her with his need. She liked how competent and cocky he was. She liked how his brown chest showed at his open shirt and how he grinned at her when he’d had a few beers. Sonia was not a drinker. Her idea of a good time was a walk through the orchards and a big meal prepared by her. She was conservative by nature, maybe a little frightened of too much freedom. Having broken with everything familiar, she now craved stability. She never really strayed from the Judaism she was raised with. Chaim was not religious but that didn’t matter. He was part of her past; it felt right they should make a future together. Talk of Chaim’s old girlfriend stopped. If anyone thought it was strange for first cousins to have a romance, they kept it to themselves. The family was overjoyed, if a bit mystified, at how quickly they had reached an agreement. “I believe that this is your free will and that you are not forcing yourself,” Etl, ever skeptical, wrote soon after Purim (March 12 that year). “Chaim is one of us, we know where he comes from, we’ve heard so much about him and everybody praises him. With someone like that you can peacefully build your life. We on our side will help you build your house, which, with time, will also be ours.”

  The house Etl wrote of was not just a fantasy. After nine years in Palestine working on land that belonged to others, Chaim had found a place of his own. In a sense this was another family endeavor—only the family involved were not blood relatives but comrades, fellow halutzim. Four years earlier, a group of twenty-one Labor Zionists (nineteen bachelors and one married couple) had been allocated land by the Jewish National Fund for a new cooperative farming village—a moshav—up the coast from Herzliya. They named the settlement Kfar (village) Vitkin, after early Zionist visionary Josef Vitkin who had preached “the conquest of labor through the conquest of the soil.” Kfar Vitkin was the perfect next step for Chaim. One of the founders was a comrade from the Volozhin HeHalutz, and friends from the Kinneret and Herzliya were relocating there.

  The moshav’s balance of the communal and the individual also appealed to Chaim. On a kibbutz, he would have surrendered all autonomy to the group: he would work on rotating shifts assigned by committee, eat his meals in a group dining hall, have his kids raised communally. On an individual farm, he’d be totally on his own—no backup, no safety net, no protection against raids, no hedge against market fluctuations. But a moshav like Kfar Vitkin combined the best of both worlds. Chaim would have his own plot of land (identical in size and quality to those of the other moshavniks); he’d live in his own house, grow his own crops, bring up his children under his own roof. The personal was private at Kfar Vitkin, but the economic was communal. Whatever was needed to run the farms—fertilizer, feed, seed, water—the moshavniks purchased collectively; what they produced, they sold collectively. When someone got sick, members pitched in to help out the family. When a new baby was born, women covered for each other. When the founding generation died, the land would pass undivided to one member of the next generation. New moshavniks were accepted when a parcel fell empty—but under no circumstances could land be transferred to an Arab. The arrangement suited Chaim ideally. The question was whether it would suit Sonia.

  Sonia had come to Palestine not as a Labor Zionist halutzah but as a Jabotinskyite bent on rapid, armed expansion of Jewish territory in Palestine. Chaim and Sonia may have been first cousins, but politically they belonged to different “families.” This was no small matter in interwar Palestine, where ideology and affection were so tightly intertwined that they fused into a single thread binding every aspect of life. Sonia obeyed her father’s injunction to obser
ve the Sabbath and keep to “the ways of behavior that you learned at home”; it bothered her even to be in the presence of nonkosher food. Chaim never went to synagogue if he could avoid it, ate what he pleased, and celebrated not with fasting and prayer but with carousing all night with friends and girlfriends. Sonia had had little experience with men. Etl warned her sister pointedly to hold fast to her modesty, “because there are plenty of evil guys [over there]. Stay away from unfit elements. Don’t ‘fly’ too much because it is not too late for your wedding.” The family in Rakov clearly had no idea of all the flying Chaim had done. When Etl got an inkling of how irreligious and “licentious” most of the halutzim were, she suffered a “crisis of faith regarding Eretz Israel.” “They live there almost like in Russia,” she wrote Sonia in disgust, “but are covered with the national mask.” In other words, beneath the appearance of working for the Jewish homeland, the socialist Zionists were no better than Bolsheviks in their promiscuity and atheism. Etl may not have realized that she was describing Chaim to a T, but Sonia did.

  Was it a love match? Sonia had left home in anger, having quarreled with Etl and defied her parents. She had not quite burned her bridges, but she was far too proud ever to return to Rakov with her tail between her legs. The life in Palestine, much as she loved the Land, was not what she had expected. How long would she have been able to fend off the “evil guys” if Chaim hadn’t been there?

  Sonia was a dreamer, but she was also a survivor. “She was very beautiful,” her daughter Leah said many years later when asked whether her parents’ marriage was a happy one. “And she and Chaim fell in love. There was not time to be happy—they worked so hard, they lived in such bad conditions. Our mother was very strong.”

  Sonia and Chaim came to an agreement in the spring of 1933. Chaim had already bought in at Kfar Vitkin and there was much talk about the house he would build there—our house. “But,” as Shalom Tvi wrote to Sonia at the end of April, “the obvious problem is the money.”

  —

  September 21, 1933

  Rosh Hashanah Eve, Rakov

  My dear daughter!

  It is hard to believe that we have not seen you for over a year. We need to believe that everything will settle, that we all will be healthy and will hear good things from you all. Doba and the children are in our house now and it makes us happier. Volinkeh, the little one, is a good boy, very active, and Shimonkeh is already a young man.

  Be healthy. From your mother Beyle.

  Dear Aunt Sonia,

  I wish you Shanah Tova, be healthy and eat many cakes and sweets.

  Shimonkeh

  —

  In 1933, Yom Kippur fell on the last day of September, a Saturday, and Abraham as usual had spent the day in shul with his son Sam and his son-in-law Sam Epstein, Ethel’s husband. The men didn’t talk business on their way to shul—the sons knew better than to raise the subject on the holiest day of the year—but they all thanked God silently that business was a little better. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had taken office in March and everybody said the new president was going to turn the country around. Abraham heard what everybody said but privately he had his doubts. The scourge would end when Hashem, not man, decreed.

  A few days after Yom Kippur a letter from Rakov arrived for Abraham—a letter from Shalom Tvi. Though the brothers had not seen each other for twenty-four years, a letter was always a big deal—something to study line by line and pass from hand to hand and talk about until they had savored and digested every precious morsel. This letter was particularly juicy. It seemed that the niece and nephew who had moved to the Land were going to be married. Cousins marrying cousins—it was not forbidden in the law, and Shalom Tvi had given his blessing. Now he wanted his brother’s blessing as well, the blessing of the patriarch. Chaim already had a plot of land to cultivate—the boy had become skilled at farming and had chosen his land carefully. But before he could bring his bride there, he needed to build a house, and to build a house required money. Shalom Tvi had asked Sonia and Chaim to write a letter requesting Abraham’s assistance, but in case the young people were too shy, Shalom Tvi was taking the task on himself. Could a brother help this niece and nephew in the Land? It would be a mitzvah if he sent two hundred dollars so Chaim and Sonia could build their house at Kfar Vitkin.

  Abraham took up his pen and wrote back to his brother right away. Tell the children to write me everything about their land, their house, when they intend to plant. Do not worry, I will send them the money. He found his checkbook and wrote out a check for two hundred dollars—worth more than three thousand dollars today—and sent it to Chaim in Palestine.

  —

  October 3, 1933

  My dear daughter Sonia! Leshannah Tova Tikateivu.

  We have received your letter and we are glad that you are content. With God’s help may you live in the Land all your life, glad and content.

  Now I will write about us. Business is still getting worse and we have also lost dollars from Etl’s dowry. Even when we receive a few dollars from America, they have lost a third of their value by the time they get here. I wrote to America and requested a large check, but it seems to me that they will not send it. They need to leave some money in the bank for themselves. The head is splitting with thoughts of what to do.

  As for Shepseleh, his business is not successful. There is nothing for him and Doba to do in Vilna. He is searching for ways to go to Eretz Israel.

  I have a question for you. Each settlement must have shop keepers, right? Since you are building a new settlement, maybe we could come and start a store there. Think about all of this and weigh it carefully. We are counting the days until we can be together.

  Be healthy. I wish you a happy new year.

  From me, your father Shalom Tvi Kaganovich

  On December 7, 1933, eight years to the day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Sonia and Chaim stood side by side under the chuppah (bridal canopy) while their ketubah (Jewish nuptial document) was read aloud. The vows were exchanged, the glass was smashed underfoot, the wine was drunk, the feast consumed, and the guests split into circles to dance the pulse-quickening Zionist folk dances of love and hope and solidarity. The first cousins were now husband and wife.

  Shalom Tvi had urged his new son-in-law to build a house with an extra room so he and Beyle and Etl could stay with them if they came to Palestine, but Chaim did not have the means to take this advice. Even with the two hundred American dollars sent by his uncle Abraham in New York, he had only enough money for a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom, all made of cinder block covered with stucco. But there was space to expand—someday. Chaim situated the house at the top of the property, near the road, with a porch at the back overlooking the chicken coop, the toolshed, a couple of acres of fields, and beyond that, a blue slice of the sea. The plot of land he had been assigned by the moshav committee—a long narrow parcel that dropped off gradually from front to back—was near the village center and across the street from the site of the future synagogue. In fifteen minutes he and Sonia could walk over the dunes and be on the beach. From the still unpaved street their neighborhood looked almost like a working-class suburban subdivision—houses and shacks set close together, each with its bit of front garden—but every house had a farm field behind it and there were larger tracts set aside around the margins for orchards and citrus groves. Chaim and Sonia planted two olive trees on either side of their front yard, a symbol of peace and a pledge to the future. All the moshavniks did the same. One day the olive boughs would knit together in a continuous band of silvery green, living proof that the land was truly and forever theirs.

  Chaim and Sonia had missed out on the precarious first three years, when the moshav barely clung to life, but their neighbors told stories. Back in the autumn of 1929, when the first settlers had led a convoy of borrowed horses, carts, and plows onto the fields, Bedouin Arab sharecroppers from the surroundi
ng lands of Wadi al-Hawarith rushed out waving sticks and shouting at them to leave. All work came to a halt. The settlers went out the next day and tried a different section, but the same thing happened. “We went back to Hadera in a somber mood to await further instructions,” one of the men wrote in his diary. “We were there mainly to reinforce the fact that the land had been bought by Jews and was Jewish land.”