The Family

by David Laskin

  The 1939 World’s Fair was going full blast that summer in Flushing Meadows. No one came to New York and missed it. Shalom Tvi sat in one of their cars, got driven out to the former ash pit in central Queens, paid his seventy-five cents admission, and spent a summer day being dazzled by “the world of tomorrow.” Television! Color photography! Nylon! Fluorescent lights! Air-conditioning! Automatic dishwashers! All of these wonders were up and running at the fair. Soon lucky consumers would be able to install them in their living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens. Shalom Tvi rode the world’s longest escalator up into the Perisphere—the eighteen-story high globe that occupied the center of the fairgrounds alongside the seven hundred-foot-tall Trylon needle—and took his place on the revolving observation platform. Though he didn’t understand a word of the piped-in English sound track, one of the relatives explained that they were looking down on “Democracity,” a model of the coming American utopia with a high-rise commercial-cultural core ringed by residential Pleasantvilles, light-industrial Millvilles, and an outer greenbelt of tidy parks and productive farmland—all of it looped through by superhighways. He walked past the endless line inching toward the entrance of General Motors’ fabled Futurama—a narrated ride in a comfy cushioned chair through a maniacally detailed diorama of the America of 1960: Bubble-shaped cars! Sprawling suburbs! Superhighways with nary a traffic jam! But Shalom Tvi declined to join the queue. The futuristic razzle-dazzle concocted by the wizards of Broadway, Madison Avenue, city hall, and corporate industrial-design departments would have been lost on the alien from Rakov. Nor was he interested in the time capsule that would preserve Camel cigarettes, a Kewpie doll, a Mickey Mouse watch, and the words of Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann until the year 6939. He bypassed Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the speech synthesizer installed by Bell Labs. What grabbed Shalom Tvi at the fair was not art or science or the magic of modern appliances or the promise of the sunny streamlined world to come. It was the reflection of the politics of the day. He wrote Sonia that he had spent three hours examining the Jewish Palestine pavilion, “the smallest one” in the fair, with a copper relief sculpture of “The Scholar, the Laborer, and the Toiler of the Soil” on its façade. He was also bowled over by the Russian pavilion—“They wanted to show the world that they are ‘hopping and dancing’ and they have done it extraordinarily well. They have brought everything from Russia and erected a glorious pavilion, and they say that afterward they will send it back to Russia and turn it into a museum. There are other pavilions from other countries, but the cursed Germans did not get a spot here.”

  There was more “hopping and dancing” going on at the Aquacade synchronized swim spectacular and the girlie show bizarrely staged inside a replica of an eighteenth-century Manchurian Lama Temple, but Shalom Tvi skipped those too. He did not, however, miss the seventy neon signs flashing Maiden Form ads at strategic points by the fairground entrances. If ever Shalom Tvi harbored doubts about how well the family was making out in America, here was graphic proof in tubes of colored light. The last time he had seen Itel she was a frizzy-haired teenager decrying the tsar in the Rakov market and inflicting no end of tsouris on her parents. Now his brother told him that she and William drove to work in a chauffeured limousine and lived in a swanky apartment on Central Park West; William was not only rich but also generous, a donor to Jewish causes—Rakov’s beautiful new religious school, just completed that month, had been largely financed by him. Evidently the wealth of the American family was like an iceberg with the bulk of it invisibly submerged. His brother Abraham lived modestly in the upper floor of a house he shared with his son and daughter and their families, but their business had been thriving for twenty-seven years now; they all had cars; their wives had mink coats and diamond rings; in the winter they vacationed in Florida.

  There was no doubt in Shalom Tvi’s mind that the American relatives had the means to help his family get out of Poland. The question was, could he motivate them to use it? And would he? Shalom Tvi was a quiet, reserved man—it wasn’t in his nature to ask, even from his brothers and sister.

  He may have come to the States as a scout, but his mission seems to have drifted after a couple of weeks. Or perhaps he realized the mission was futile. He had only just managed to secure a three-month visa for himself—he had no reason to believe that his wife or daughters would do any better. Like it or not, he had to return to Poland by October 13, so he decided to relax and enjoy himself and make the most of his time in America. He went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“I walked and looked for a few hours but saw only a small part”) and the circus (“not like the circus in Vilna and certainly not like Tel Aviv”). He slept on a folding bed in the living room of Abraham’s flat—every morning he put the bed away and stowed his clothes neatly behind the sofa. On Saturday he went to shul with his brother. He put up with Sarah’s cooking and politely ate everything they put in front of him except corn on the cob, which he indignantly refused as fit only for animals. He accepted every invitation to eat downstairs with his nephew Sam’s family, since Gladys was a wonderful cook and served all the dishes he was accustomed to at home.

  Everyone was sweet, helpful, generous, accommodating—but the truth was that after the first few weeks, America left him cold. The brassy New York of 1939 made his head spin. Everything moved so fast; everyone was in a hurry; everywhere he looked there was something for sale. All anyone ever talked about was how the economy was finally bouncing back. A. Cohen & Sons was in the process of making yet another move uptown—this time to 27 West Twenty-third Street, half a block from the Flatiron Building, and the nephews schlepped him down there so he could admire the forty-eight thousand square feet of office space being fitted out in the latest contemporary showroom style by a rising young architect. Except for his brother, the family here felt like strangers. They talked about business incessantly—every meal, every drive, every walk to shul. A. Cohen was expanding, Maiden Form already had sales in the millions and its products were on the shelves of 95 percent of the nation’s department stores: this is what mattered to the American family. Not the boycott of Jewish businesses in Poland. Not Sonia and Chaim’s struggle to eke out a living at Kfar Vitkin. Not the sporadic violence that continued in Palestine. These expensively dressed middle-aged executives were his flesh and blood; the nephews had been bar mitzvahed in the Rakov shul; the nieces had worked in their mother’s store and run dresses and coats through their sewing machines just like his daughter Etl. They all used to sit together at holidays and sing the same songs and pound the table and raise a glass to the patriarch, Shimon Dov. They used to tell the same jokes and laugh and cry together in Yiddish. But America had turned their heads. They had forgotten what life was like in Rakov. For a Jew there was no hope of assimilating in Poland—the goyim made it impossible. But in America it was all but impossible not to assimilate. To live here you had to give up your past, your customs, your traditions, your identity. His brother and sister-in-law kept to the old ways, but the nieces and nephews were Americanized—and the children of the nieces and nephews were fully American. What did it mean that they were family when they spoke different languages, bore different names, lived such different lives?

  “I went to the World’s Fair and I saw everything,” Shalom Tvi wrote to Sonia and Chaim. “I saw everything but you, my dear children. You, I could not find there. To tell the truth, I already miss home. But I feel that I’m obligated to spend the time here.”

  —

  In the last week of August, Shalom Tvi went to the shipping company in Manhattan to inquire about his return passage. He was booked on a ship due to sail back to Poland on October 1, but the clerk told him that if war broke out before that he must apply to the Immigration and Naturalization Service for an extension of his visa. “I am confused,” Shalom Tvi wrote Sonia. “I don’t know what God may bring or whether he plans to sweeten our lives with any pleasure.”

  Just befo
re the start of September he traveled up to Stamford, Connecticut, to stay with his youngest brother, Herman, for a few days before continuing on to Hayim Yehoshua’s place in New Haven. On the last day of August, he sat down to write to Sonia and Chaim from New Haven about how worried he was about the danger of war. “First, because we have separated from each other in such uncertain times and second, who knows what will happen to Shepseleh and Khost.”

  Shalom Tvi was right to be worried. By the time he went to bed that night, German tanks and troops were crossing the border into Poland and hundreds of Luftwaffe planes were dropping bombs on Poland’s major cities. Hayim Yehoshua kept a radio in his living room, and on the morning of September 1, the whole family stood and stared at the floor while the crackling voice of the announcer shrilled at them. The Wehrmacht is on the move, Poland is in flames, but the Polish army has been mobilized and resistance is expected to be stiff.

  —

  To my dear and beloved wife Beyle and to my dear children Etl, Khost and Mireleh:

  Be healthy and may God shield you from all calamities.

  I am writing to you with a broken heart from the disaster that has happened to the world and especially to us. I am left severed from you and I cannot even send letters. I will try to send this through Eretz Israel, and maybe it will arrive.

  I don’t know what will happen to you. Will all of you be in Vilna or stay in Rakov? I hope that you will live together, my dear and beloved ones. I had hoped that we could see each other soon, but now only God knows when this will happen.

  May all of you be together and healthy and may Khost and Shepseleh not be taken from you. I am going around crushed by a weight of anxiety. Everyone here sits by the radio all day long.

  May this letter reach you. This is my only comfort. Everyone here prays to God that He will defeat the dog Hitler.

  From me, your husband and father, Shalom Tvi

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SECOND WORLD WAR

  Doba was still a young woman—only thirty-seven years old—in 1939, but she was emotional and high-strung and a bit of a hypochondriac. Motherhood, her greatest joy, was also the source of endless upset, which no doubt contributed to her attacks of nerves and ill health. If Shimonkeh or Velveleh so much as skinned a knee, Doba flew into a passion; when Shimonkeh nearly died of scarlet fever the summer Sonia made aliyah, no one could breathe a word to pregnant Doba, lest she become unhinged. With so much angst fluttering her heart, Doba was forever craving rest and relaxation. When her in-laws offered her and Shepseleh and the boys use of a cottage that they had rented in the spa town of Druskininkai that summer, Doba jumped at it. Druskininkai’s mineral baths were renowned; the country air would do all of them good; there was a hammock stretched between two trees where they could take turns snoozing on warm afternoons. Doba decided that she would spend the entire summer there and, after some cajoling, she prevailed on her mother to join her. After all, Shalom Tvi was in America and the leather business had been sold, so for the first time in her life Beyle was free to leave Rakov and do what she wanted. What better occasion for a nice long stay in the country?

  Beyle joined Doba’s family at the spa right after Shalom Tvi’s departure at the start of July and stuck it out at Druskininkai for as long as she could stand it. She took the waters; she tried to sleep in the hammock; she sat in the shade; she watched Shimonkeh, now eleven years old, ride his bike and Velveleh, seven, sit with his father and move wooden pieces around the chessboard. She wrote letters to her husband and bustled around the kitchen. She went to shul on Saturday with Doba. But five weeks in, Beyle decided that she had had enough. After more than forty years of hard work, idleness did not come easily. She wanted to be home. It was arranged that Beyle would depart and that Etl, Khost, and Mireleh would take her place in the Druskininkai cottage for a few weeks’ vacation. By August 21, Beyle was back in Rakov writing to Sonia and Chaim about how healthy she felt after taking the waters and how glad she was that Etl’s family had a chance to relax at the spa before Khost started another busy year teaching school.

  It was only because Khost was away in Druskininkai that he avoided being called up by the Polish army when the Germans attacked on the morning of September 1.

  With the outbreak of war, there was no question that they must leave Druskininkai immediately—but where should they go? The two couples sized up the situation anxiously. Clearly, Etl and Khost would return to Rakov—Mother could not be left alone and Khost had a job there. But what about Doba, Shepseleh, and the boys? Wouldn’t it be better for them to come to Rakov too so the family could all be together? They didn’t have long to debate it—they must get out before the roads became impassable and the rail lines were bombed. In the event, they decided that their two families should separate, reasoning that if they were in different places they would have a better chance of keeping some line of communication open with Sonia in Palestine and Father in America.

  The little rail station outside of Druskininkai was pandemonium, but somehow the two couples shoved their children and luggage onto separate trains and somehow the trains got through to Vilna and to Olechnowicze, the station closest to Rakov. Thank God, they thought, that Rakov and Vilna were in the east of Poland, far from the Nazi invaders. (Rakov and Vilna had been incorporated into the newly formed Polish state in the 1920s, so when the war broke out, the members of both families were Polish citizens.) Thank God that on September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Thank God that Poland had an army, an air force, tanks, modern weapons, the will to fight. Doba wept with joy when they opened the door to their flat near the Dawn Gate and saw that all was exactly as they had left it in June.

  Then came the first German bombing raids. Sirens wailing in the street—screams and shouts in the hallway—the pounding of shoes on the stairs as the neighbors fled to the cellar. Doba and Shepseleh leapt out of bed, woke the boys, and fled downstairs with the others. They cowered in the dark and strained their ears for the thud of explosions. They huddled together trembling until the all-clear sounded. When they returned to their flat, their hearts were racing, sleep impossible. In the morning, Doba and Shepseleh dragged themselves out of bed hollow-eyed and desperate for news.

  It came thick and fast in those September days and none of it was good. Britain and France were technically at war with Germany but they did nothing to help Poland. The Polish retreat from the western border had turned into a rout. The Wehrmacht seemed to be everywhere and unstoppable. The Luftwaffe dominated the skies. By September 14, Poland’s air force had been effectively disabled. Sixty German divisions were converging on Warsaw, and German planes, unchallenged, were bombing every major city in the country. In the general mobilization, Khost was called up for service with the Polish army. (Shepseleh, though subject to the draft as a citizen of Poland, was spared.) Etl had no idea where her husband was being sent or when he would return. The news that arrived on September 17 baffled all of them: the Russians were now attacking Poland from the east. Evidently, the Nazis and the Soviets were allies in this new war—it made no sense, but that’s how it was. Only later did it emerge that Hitler and Stalin, by the terms of a secret nonaggression pact worked out by their foreign ministers, Ribbentrop and Molotov, at the end of August, had agreed to carve up Poland between them. Hitler took the west, including Warsaw, Lodz, Cracow, and Lublin; Stalin got the east, with Lithuania thrown in as a “Soviet zone of interest.” In this new division of Poland, Rakov was Russian once again; and Vilna, which had flown God knows how many flags in the past twenty years, became Russian again too, at least for the time being.

  As quickly as it started, the war seemed to be over. The bombing stopped in Vilna. Blackout curtains were removed; street lamps were lit again at night. Shimonkeh and Velveleh slept all night in their own beds. Polish troops started to trickle back, many passing through Vilna on their way home. “I cried when we saw soldiers returning and Khost was not among them,” Doba
wrote her father. She and Shepseleh feared the worst, but God was merciful.

  November 28, 1939

  Dear Father,

  I have much to tell you, but it is hard to do in a single letter. I have written to you before that Khost had been drafted to the Army. Now I can tell you that he has come back—first to Vilna and from here he returned to Rakov. You cannot imagine how happy we were when we saw him.

  He was lucky. He was with us at Druskininkai and therefore reported for duty a bit later. That changed the whole situation. Shepseleh worried that if “the big ones” [i.e., the Russians] had not come, his fate would have been the same. The fact that we can joke about it is a good sign. So you don’t have to worry about our men, or the rest of us. We were very glad to see the “big ones” because we had been weary of staying days and nights with the children in the basement.

  The real problem now is that there is not enough money. Zloties [the Polish currency] are worth nothing. Shepleseh does not have work. The office has shrunk. Only a few workers were left and it is hard to find work. The big firms are no more. Everything has changed suddenly.

  Who could imagine that such a situation could ever happen? Briefly, dear father, we are left with no means of livelihood. What I have written is only a drop in the sea. What you read in the papers is nothing in comparison to what has happened here in only three weeks.