by David Laskin
The violence at first sickened Palestine’s Jews and then goaded them to unify and take furious action—a familiar pattern. Haganah emerged from the shadows and began to launch retaliatory raids, with the tacit complicity of the British. Working together, Jewish and British forces organized highly effective “Special Night Squads” that emulated Arab guerrilla tactics and occasionally crossed the borders to strike at guerrilla bases in neighboring states. A new spirit of resolve and faith in their mission spread through Jewish Palestine—a feeling, as one young Jewish writer put it, that “their roots had gone deeper and that a time of organic growth had come.” Part of it was numbers—a critical mass of Jewish immigrants had begun to tip the scale. Part of it was desperation. With violence abroad in the Land, Jews developed a new technique of rapid-fire homesteading reminiscent of the American West: in the course of a single day, a convoy of young settlers would rumble into a remote piece of arable land, erect a prefabricated watchtower and a block of houses, string up barbed wire, and post guards. By nightfall a new Jewish dot had appeared on the map of Palestine: another bit of contested soil that Jews vowed never to abandon or surrender. Zionists had their eye on the prize of Jewish nationhood. The more land they effectively controlled, the wider the boundaries of the future Jewish state.
In the dozen years Chaim had been in Palestine, the character of Zionist pioneering had altered almost beyond recognition. The joyous nights of song and dance in the hills of Galilee had given way to the barbed wire of the instantaneous “stockade and tower” settlements.
“We are fated to live in a state of constant battle with the Arabs and there is no escape from sacrifice of life. If we wish to continue our work in this country, against the wishes of the Arabs, we must take such sacrifices into account.” It sounds like Jabotinsky, but in fact these are the words of Arthur Ruppin, the peace-loving Zionist leader who had devoted his early career to the planting of collective farms like the Degania Kibbutz and the Kinneret Colony where Chaim had worked. After the Arab uprising of 1936, even Ruppin was resigned to bloodshed without end.
—
As the violence escalated in 1937 and 1938, the British first sent reinforcements—and then bureaucrats to study and reflect on the situation. British soldiers finally retook Jerusalem’s Old City in the summer of 1938, but the bureaucrats came and went without finding even a remotely tenable political solution. The Peel Report, issued in the summer of 1937, dangled the possibility of partitioning the region into Jewish and Arab states, but only at the price of a serious curtailment of Jewish land purchases and the scaling back of Jewish immigration to twelve thousand a year. Even that meager offer did not remain on the table for long. In the face of stiffening Arab opposition, subsequent British commissions radically pared back the land area of the proposed Jewish state and insisted on yoking Jewish and Arab political entities together in a clearly unworkable economic union. The deteriorating world situation worked against Zionist interests and the Arabs knew it. As Hitler grew more threatening, the British vacillated, appeased, and caved. In the event of war, it was clear that Britain would sacrifice the Jews rather than run the risk of alienating the Arabs and losing their oil. But even without war, the British no longer seemed inclined to invest much political capital in the idea of a Jewish state.
—
On March 12, 1938, at the height of the Arab uprising, the Nazis overran Austria and took the crisis in Europe to another level. In the grand imperial boulevards of Vienna, Jews were spat at, robbed, beaten, and taunted with shouts of “Jude verrecke”—death to the Jews. Two days later, rapturous crowds filled the Austrian capital to welcome Hitler back to the land of his birth. In the days that followed, Jewish houses were ransacked; Jewish shops and businesses were shut down or appropriated by Aryan employees; Jewish government workers, teachers, lawyers, actors, and musicians lost their jobs. The Gestapo moved in to arrest Jewish journalists, political leaders, and intellectuals. Mass deportations to Dachau began.
Hitler had spent five years gradually and systematically stripping Germany’s Jews of their civil and human rights; those who were not in prison camps in the spring of 1938 lived in miserable poverty. Austria’s Jews were broken in a matter of weeks.
Aliyah Bet was stepped up, but the number of immigrants that Sonia and Chaim and their comrades were able to smuggle in was minuscule in comparison to those left behind and barred.
—
In August 1938, while Hitler was maneuvering to seize the industrialized western fringe of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland, Sonia somehow found the money and cleared the red tape to book passage back to Poland for herself and three-and-a-half-year-old Leah. Sonia could not explain the source of her impulse, but suddenly she was desperate to return to Europe to see her family.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
RETURN TO RAKOV
It was Itel’s idea to switch Maiden Form over to piecework—compensation based on the number of pieces produced rather than the number of hours clocked—and like most of her ideas it paid off handsomely. Sales picked up again after the brief stumble in 1932—“we really took off during the Depression years and kept growing and growing,” said one of the early salesmen. If the company was going to capitalize on the uptick, it had to find a way to keep pace with demand. The new piecework pay scale did the trick. Machine operators who had been earning fourteen dollars a week were initially reluctant to make the switch—Itel spent six months charming union bosses—but the grumbling stopped when they realized how much more money they were pulling down by working more efficiently. “The sky’s the limit,” Moe told the workers on the factory floor. “Make as much as possible and do a good job.” Production tripled and company profits soared. Itel and William became very wealthy indeed during the 1930s.
Monetizing industrial engineering came naturally to Itel—she was born to be a tycoon—but William had the soul of an artist. For him, satin and lace and cotton mesh were just another medium, though a particularly profitable one. He had always loved making beautiful things with his hands. When he went to the beach in the summer, he pushed wet sand into reliefs of voluptuous naked women. At home he had a studio where he sculpted the torsos of laborers in clay and crafted molds for bronze busts.
Like many an artist, William in middle age felt the urge to return to his roots. He was fifty-six years old in 1937—three decades had passed since he had last seen the town of his birth, the scenes of his youthful romance with Itel, the cemetery where his ancestors were buried. Unlike most artists, William in middle age had the means to satisfy his curiosity. The same year piecework revolutionized production at Maiden Form, he crossed the Atlantic alone and journeyed back to Rakov.
This is what he wrote after the visit:
In 1937, I visited my hometown and found it to be quite different from what I had left: A border town, under the Polish authorities, separated from Minsk and the large estates which surrounded it. I found it in utter poverty, expecting charity from relatives in America. I stayed there for some time and observed the poverty of the people, how some of them were, literally, down to their last piece of bread. But it must be said, that in spite of this dark picture, the social-cultural life was as effervescent as ever: the bank, the community institutions, the Hebrew school, and the Youth Movements—they were all full of bustle, energy, and many activities. All of these made one hopeful, and were the basis for the belief that somehow the town would overcome the material crisis.
William did not write about his family, but he must have passed many hours sipping tea and schnapps with assorted Kaganoviches, Botwiniks, and Rosenthals. For all his fame and fortune, William was never one to put on airs or lord it over anyone. Shalom Tvi and Beyle received him gladly and graciously (they were connected on both sides—Itel was Shalom Tvi’s niece and William’s mother was related to Beyle). Before he left, William met with Rakov’s rabbi, Israel Helprin, and agreed to make a substantial donation toward the construction
of a large new religious school. He might belong to the Ethical Culture Society in America, but back in Rakov he didn’t forget he was a Jew. He distributed some American dollars to each of the family members. They all parted on good terms. Shalom Tvi hoped that one day he and William would meet again in New York.
—
Sonia returned to Rakov the year after William’s visit. She had been away only for six years, but she was just as stunned as William by the changes. Maybe more so. The poverty she was prepared for—the town had been suffering before she left and she knew from her father’s letters that business was weak and the economy depressed. But it was the atmosphere of naked contempt that she found new and intolerably oppressive. When had it become a crime to be Jewish in Poland? In Kfar Vitkin, Sonia lived freely as a Jew among Jews. If a neighbor’s cow strayed into her vegetable patch, she could yell about it without being called a dirty Yid. When she and Chaim went to Haifa or Tel Aviv they could sit in a café or barter in a shop without being muttered at behind their backs. But after six years in Jewish Palestine, Sonia found it difficult to breathe in Poland. She opened a newspaper and saw Jews branded as the “internal enemy.” “The Jewish influence on morals is fatal,” Poland’s Roman Catholic primate Cardinal August Hlond wrote in a widely published pastoral letter. “One does well to prefer one’s own kind in commercial dealings and to avoid Jewish stores and Jewish stalls in the markets.”
The Polish government held the same views and endorsed a boycott of Jewish businesses. Market day in Rakov brought threats and attacks. Anti-Semitic placards were everywhere. Gentile shop owners now displayed signs guaranteeing their “Aryan” purity while the stalls of Jewish merchants were vandalized or wrecked. In Warsaw, gentile gymnasium students circulated a pamphlet advocating violent attacks on Jews and Communists: “Remember if you have a Jew or a Communist in a lonely spot, hit him with an iron bar in the teeth. Do not be afraid and do not feel sorry for him.” At the universities Jews were being forced to sit apart on “ghetto benches.” Members of the fascist anti-Semitic ONR Party (the “Polish Hitlerites”) had taken to proclaiming “Jewless days” at Polish universities—and soon “Jewless weeks.” Jewish students were routinely attacked by ONR thugs and several were murdered.
This was the Poland Sonia returned to in August 1938. Why had her family failed to mention any of this in their letters?
It quickly became obvious that the subject was off-limits. Compared with what was going on in Germany and Austria, they were lucky, so best not to talk about it. To draw attention to trouble was to court it. The safe path was to ignore what couldn’t be changed. She had come home to enjoy herself, so why ruin it? It was high summer. The fields around Rakov were golden; Beyle’s garden was bursting with cucumbers and beets; the little wooden houses—so much more cheerful and cozy than the cinder-block hovels of the Jewish settlements in Palestine—looked like toys painted by children. Sonia should relax, have a holiday, let her mother and sister spoil her. Everyone wanted to know about life in the Land, squeeze her muscular arms, admire her brown complexion. Everyone wanted to hear Leahleh speak Hebrew—such a prodigy! Only three years old and already she spoke better Hebrew than Rabbi Helprin! After a couple of days of prattling on command for rapt strangers, Leah burst into tears and clammed up altogether. Did they think she was a performing poodle?
They put politics aside and wrapped themselves in the big tattered quilt of family affairs and town gossip. For years Etl had worried that she was doomed to drag out her days as a “traveling maiden,” but she had finally found a match and gotten married. The husband was a teacher at the Polish school named Khost Goldstein, a trim natty young man with wavy fair hair and a shy shifty smile. Sonia had read all about the courtship and marriage in the family letters, but they repeated the whole story nonetheless—how Khost used to come to the house with other young folks to play cards and one thing led to another until Etl, nearly thirty years old, became a bride. On a schoolteacher’s salary Khost would never be rich—to economize they lived with Shalom Tvi and Beyle—but at least he had a steady source of income, unlike poor Shepseleh in Vilna, who was still trying his hand at this and that and not making a living at any of it. So now all three Kaganovich sisters were married, and all three were mothers. Etl and Khost’s daughter, Miriam—Mireleh—was two years old that summer, the spitting image of Shirley Temple, with soft brown curls and a tiny rosebud of a mouth. Etl, another wizard with needle and thread, whipped up adorable matching frocks for herself and the child—though in truth with her angular, small-breasted figure she looked less like Mireleh’s mother than her maiden aunt. No matter. Being a wife and mother had softened some of Etl’s sharp edges. She was still hypersensitive and judgmental, but she had quit feeling sorry for herself and envying Sonia. Although the fight that had stained Sonia’s departure to Palestine was not forgotten, the two sisters put the past behind them. It helped that their daughters took to each other. The two little girls slept in the same room and every night they went to bed crooning Hebrew songs. Nachas—pride in the happiness and success of one’s offspring—flowed thick and fast. Shalom Tvi and Beyle went around misty eyed with joy.
A big family wedding was celebrated during Sonia’s stay in Rakov—no one recalls who married whom—and relatives from far and wide gathered to eat and pray and gossip and toast the newlyweds. Tsipora Alperovich, one of the little cousins from Vilna on Beyle’s side, had come without a proper dress to wear, and Etl stitched together something lovely for her in a single day. Tsipora was ten years old at the time but she never forgot it. Beyle, meanwhile, made sure there were enough tasty dishes to feed all the poor of the shtetl.
“It was a tremendous effort to get back to Poland,” Sonia told her children long afterward, “but it was very important to me to visit.” Given the difficulties and cost of travel, a short stay made no sense. Three months was barely enough time to fit in all she wanted to do. Her pace was rapid, even hectic. She must see everyone, go everywhere, show Leahleh off to every last aunt and uncle and cousin. From Rakov she went to Volozhin to visit with Chaim’s branch of the family—his mother and stepfather, his sister Chana, his older brother Yishayahu. Yishayahu, the sibling Chaim was closest to, was much loved and admired in the old yeshiva town. Though he earned a living running an imported fruit shop with Chana’s husband Meir Finger, Yishayahu’s heart and soul belonged to Zionism. He was one of the founding teachers of Volozhin’s Tarbut (Hebrew language) school, and his forceful, levelheaded manner was an inspiration to all who studied with him. Yishayahu was the one adult who didn’t make a fuss over Leahleh’s Hebrew. He assured Sonia that it was only a matter of time before he made aliyah with his wife, Henia, and their daughter, another Leah. Meanwhile, he and every other relative in Volozhin had packages for Sonia to schlep back to the Land.
By coincidence, an aunt and uncle from America—Beyle’s brother Hayim Yehoshua Botwinik and his wife, Esther—were visiting Rakov at the same time as Sonia, and the family threw a big party to celebrate the coming together of the three branches. After the food and drink had been cleared away, they all posed for a photo: two dozen grinning young people dressed to the nines and standing in rows behind their proud round parents, aunts, and uncles. Shalom Tvi, with his bald head uncovered, looks distinguished in a stylish dark suit; Sonia, beautiful in a plain black dress with her hair parted in the middle and pulled back fashionably, smiles with her mouth but her eyes are tense and strained; Etl, in a tailored brown suit jacket, has her head cocked as if trying to catch the punch line of a joke. The joke must have been good because all the young glossy-haired men and rouged, lipsticked women in the back are laughing openly.
Uncle Hayim Yehoshua made good money in America with his New Haven machine tool business, and he left everyone in the Rakov family with a check for twenty-five dollars.
Sonia and Leahleh spent their final weeks in Vilna with Doba and Shepseleh and their sons. Sonia knew Vilna well—she had attended the Tarbu
t school there as a teenager and had stayed in the city for a few days in 1932 right before departing for Palestine (in a black mood). Even though Leah was too young to notice or appreciate much, Sonia wanted to show her daughter the sights. How could she be in Poland and miss Vilna? There was no city in Europe prouder of its Jewish heritage and culture than the “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” as local Jews never tired of calling their home. Three Yiddish theaters, six Jewish dailies, twenty Jewish schools, 105 synagogues including the Great Synagogue, where the revered Gaon of Vilna had discoursed on the Talmud at the age of six. Vilna was also the birthplace of the Bund and home of YIVO—the Yiddish Scientific Institute, which in a mere thirteen years had become the essential archive of Jewish history. Nowhere in Europe did Jews live with more beauty and history. The old town was cobbled, pastel, graced by a noble university, splashed with courtyard gardens. Vilna had something of the elegance and refinement of prerevolutionary St. Petersburg, though on a more comfortable human scale. But unlike in St. Petersburg, Vilna’s Jews accounted for a substantial percentage of the population—more than a third at the time of Sonia’s visit.
Doba and Shepseleh lived well amid all this splendor and loveliness, though they rarely dipped a toe in the great river of culture. A few years earlier they had moved from their flat across from the chemistry faculty to a more stately apartment on Pivno Street, a wide thoroughfare of three-story apartment buildings with grillwork balconies and high skinny windows vaguely reminiscent of Paris. Though far from grand, the new flat was airy, plush, and richly furnished—a berth in the solid middle of the middle class. Doba had a maid who kept everything clean and orderly—you’d never know two little boys had the run of the place. The flat was just a block from the city’s holiest Christian shrine—the Gate of Dawn, an arched portal into the Old City that housed the wonder-working icon of the Ostra Brama, the Black Madonna, in a chapel above the gate. The narrow street beneath the shrine was choked all day long with beggars and kneeling worshippers. Whenever a Jewish man approached, the gentiles demanded that he uncover his head, which of course Jewish law forbade. Orthodox Jews went out of their way to avoid it; Jewish children secretly spat on the paving stones beneath the arch and ran. Shepseleh and Doba could afford to roll their eyes about such primitive superstitions. The lives they led were thoroughly modern and secular. Though they kept kosher and attended Taharat Hakodesh, the ornate Moorish-style Orthodox choral synagogue a few blocks from their apartment, it was more out of duty than piety. Shepseleh wouldn’t dream of going out without a fresh shave and nice tie. Doba and Shepseleh kept up the Jewish traditions because their parents expected it, but their true religion was the happiness of their children.
