by David Laskin
I envy the Americans their peaceful life. They cannot fathom what is happening here and in the rest of the world.
Love, Doba
—
The situation in Vilna remained volatile. The Soviets had seized the city on September 19, two days after they invaded Poland, but they agreed to turn it over to Lithuania at the end of October on the condition that 20,000 Red Army troops be permitted to remain in Soviet bases on Lithuanian soil. In the final days of the Soviet occupation, civic life collapsed. The Forward reported that “Vilna is congested with refugees and its population suffers hunger and privation; economic life has come to a halt and many Jews wander the streets begging for a piece of bread.” The Soviet pullout triggered a three-day pogrom. Vilna’s Polish and Lithuanian population beat Jews in the street, wounding 200 and killing 1; scores of Jewish shops were vandalized; a policeman was killed. A typhus epidemic broke out and hospitals overflowed (Lithuanians claimed that disgruntled Poles had triggered the epidemic by cutting the city’s water supply, while Poles insisted that Volksdeutsche—German nationals residing in Vilna—had connected sewer pipes to the municipal water supply). Meanwhile, 14,000 Jewish refugees from Poland’s German-occupied sector streamed in—among them “the spiritual elite of Polish Jewry” including 2,000 halutzim, 2,440 rabbinical students, 171 rabbis, and assorted Bundists, teachers, journalists, and scientists whom the Nazis had expelled. The refugees survived on charity distributed by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (“the Joint”), but Vilna’s non-refugee Jewish residents were on their own. “The food supply is being rapidly depleted,” wrote one resident. “One must brace oneself to acquire a little butter and some eggs. The queue for these items is enormous. . . . It is pointless to join the queue at 6 A.M., for by that time thousands wait at the door.” White-collar workers who had been accustomed to conducting business in Polish, Russian, and Yiddish were laid off in droves because they could not speak Lithuanian, the new official language. Shepseleh, now forty-two years old, joined the ghosts who haunted the streets looking for work.
My dear Father-in-law Shalom Tvi,
The big problem is that it is hard these days to find work. I traveled to Kovno [the Yiddish name for Kaunas, Lithuania’s second-largest city and the temporary capital during the interwar period] to see if I could find something. I spent money for the trip but found nothing. All the big companies have lost everything, and there is no one to turn to. Of course, the idleness causes the money to dwindle away and the cost of living has gone up. We still have food and do not suffer, but when I think of the future, I feel like my brain is exploding. To stay sane and healthy, it is better to not think too much. Who knew that the situation would deteriorate so fast?
You know, father, that I am not one to make life difficult, so if I allow myself to write to you like this, it shows that I am totally broken. Though truthfully, others have bigger problems. There are people who were well-to-do in the past who have no roofs over their heads. There are those who have lost a relative. So we should be satisfied with our lot and not complain.
Father, please write to us in detail about yourself, about Reb Avram Akiva and his family and about Hayim Yehoshua and his family. If you have not yet received our letter, I am reminding you that the money you sent has arrived and we thank you and uncle from the bottom of our hearts. Write to us what is happening with the visa. We can no longer take care of it from here. Maybe you can handle it.
Your son-in-law Shepseleh
For the family, there was one ray of light that dark season: on November 28, Sonia gave birth to a son. They named him Arie, for Chaim’s late father, though they called him Areleh as a baby and Arik when he was older. As he grew, no one could understand where the child had come by his looks—bronze, athletic, chiseled, a lanky golden boy in a short dark family. It was as if some warrior gene, after skipping many generations, had surfaced under the fierce Mediterranean sun.
“Mazal Tov, Mazal Tov, with God’s will may the tender born son bring luck, blessing and peace to the world,” Shalom Tvi wrote his daughter and son-in-law from New York. “May you raise him easily and may he merit a long life.” Shalom Tvi sent Sonia not only blessings and prayers but a steady stream of packages—hand-me-down clothing from the rich American relatives (“here one wears clothes a few times and then they discover a new fashion, discard the garment and buy something new”), money, even the occasional brooch or necklace. Sonia’s insistence that she had no need for jewelry puzzled her father. “Is it forbidden to wear jewelry there?” he demanded. “Surely women in the big cities wear jewelry even in Palestine.” Jewelry was the last thing on Sonia’s mind in those days. She had a toddler, not yet five, and a newborn but no refrigerator; their cow ate voraciously but provided only a trickle of milk; she worried about Arab attacks every night when Chaim drove the truck and was late getting home. We’ll come when it’s quiet, her mother and sisters used to reply when Sonia urged them to join her in Kfar Vitkin—quiet was their euphemism for peaceful, free of violence—but it was never quiet in the Land. Now Europe wasn’t quiet either. For as long as this war lasted, Sonia knew there was no hope of getting her mother or sisters out of Poland and into Palestine. She was on her own with two small children, a stingy cow, a tiny house baking in the sun, meat and cheese spoiling in the heat, an antiquated ringer washer, hostile Arabs over the next dune, and the cowardly British government that valued oil more than human life.
So no, Sonia was not thinking about jewelry when Areleh was born in the dwindling days of 1939.
Many years later, when she had children of her own, Leah asked her mother why she had spaced her children at such long intervals. Nearly five years separated Leah and Arik, another five and a half years passed before a third child was born, and yet another five years before the last one—four children in all spread out over sixteen years. “We waited because we were poor and there was so much work to do,” Sonia told her daughter.
—
“We met some wise people who are aware that we are sitting on the mouth of a volcano,” Doba wrote her father as winter closed in on Vilna. “Anyone with means has already escaped from here. Dear father, we must do something so that we can all come to you [in New York]—Mother, Etl, Khost, Mireleh. We are not interested in going to Eretz Israel, as you suggested. It is not quiet there. We simply don’t have the strength to go through a third war.”
Doba saw what was going on in Vilna—the refugees lining up for bread at the Joint; prominent lawyers, wealthy businessmen, distinguished congregants from Warsaw in rags, subsisting on handouts; men like her husband broken and despairing. Escape to New York now seemed like the only hope. “We have a joke about the refugee situation,” she wrote. “Everyone is laughing and saying that it pays to become a refugee, because at least someone takes care of them.” Doba was high-strung and hyperbolic—but she wasn’t foolish. She knew what was burning inside the volcano. She had a friend named Marisha whose husband had been taken by the German army at the start of the war and had not been heard from since. Four months without a letter—who knew whether he was still alive? Doba heard the rumors that the refugees brought with them—about the seizure and burning of Jewish homes and businesses in Warsaw and Lodz; about the sudden disappearance of able-bodied Jewish men. The Germans moved in and the next day the men were gone: rounded up, imprisoned, deported, God knows what. Doba wouldn’t talk about it, but she knew how close it was.
Winter came and the weather turned savagely cold. For days on end Doba refused to set foot outside the apartment. The boys quit going to school on the coldest days and stayed in bed under their feather quilts—it was cheaper than paying for extra coal. Velveleh was still jumpy from the German bombing raids. If a door slammed or a book fell he startled and trembled. Shimonkeh, a year away from celebrating his bar mitzvah, was growing tall and serious. What kind of future could she give them? Doba watched the luckier neighbors pack up and leave, and she envie
d them. Someone had sent for them. Someone had paid their way. Someone had arranged their papers. Why not her family?
Doba was tenderhearted. It was not in her nature to heap scorn, to recriminate or lash out. But as the first winter of the war dragged on, she began to seethe. It made her crazy to see others heedlessly enjoying what she and her children lacked. No one she knew enjoyed more than the American relatives. They became the focus of her fury. She blamed them for being rich while she and her family were poor, for being comfortable while they were suffering, for not doing more to help them.
Every week, Doba wrote to her sister in Palestine and her father in New York. Every week, her letters grew more bitter:
January 17, 1940
Dear Father,
It is good that you are not here. If you were home you would have suffered.
Who could have imagined that so horrible a war had begun? You were able to see Warsaw [before leaving for America], but now Warsaw is all in ruins. Tens of thousands were killed and woe to the few Jews who remained. What we didn’t see in the previous war we are going though in this war.
January [date missing], 1940
Dear Sonia,
The truth is that father’s stay in the USA is a big deal for us. He sees to it that the family sends money and help to us. But we are such egotists that it does not satisfy us.
I do not understand to what extent the family [in the United States] wants to bring us to them. If they wanted us, they would begin to arrange the papers because it takes a long time, but when one does not work on it nothing will happen. Why doesn’t Rosenthal make an effort? Everyone who has even a distant relative in America does all they can to get them out of here. But we have a wealthy family, and they prefer to send money instead of inviting us. Write me what you think about this.
You know that my heart is bitter. I am angry with the family and cannot understand why they have not sent all of us an invitation to come to them.
January 25, 1940
Dear Father,
I wish at least that William Rosenthal would be interested in us and help us survive in these hard times. A person needs hope. We received some money for food, but that is all the money we have. The Joint helps the refugees in Vilna but we have a family who can help us. Rakov is already barred and we can’t get any money from them. God forbid that we should be refugees. Doesn’t the family over there want us? Why do they remain indifferent in these hard times? They are waiting and this is a great mistake.
February 12, 1940
Dear Sonia,
Father said that a family like ours needs $50 to $60 a week [to live in America]. It will be hard to make a living [in New York] because Shepseleh does not know the language. We are still young and we can learn the language if we have to. Of course, it will be hard at first, but it will be very good for us. But they don’t care so it will never happen. In my opinion, if it were not for father, we would never have received even this money.
February 19, 1940
Dear Sonia,
Father allowed me to understand that they will never invite us. Too much of a burden for them. I don’t want to ask. It is enough that father needs to ask them for money to help us. It is very cold and the children spend the whole winter in bed. Thus we pass the days, while in America when it gets too cold for them they go to Florida.
March 15, 1940
Dear Sonia,
As the holiday [Passover] nears I see how our family is torn. There are moments when my heart goes to pieces from pain for them [the family in Rakov]. Mother writes in every letter that she wants father to stay there [in New York] and bring her there. Father writes me now that they will not let him stay in the U.S. permanently. When he went to HIAS [Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society] they did not accept his application. Sonika, father should be happy to be there and not in Rakov, because in Rakov the situation is not good.
March 26, 1940
Dear Sonia,
Hayim Yehoshua [Beyle’s brother] has written from Florida—just one letter during this entire time. He writes that we need not worry. They are taking good care of father. He devotes not a single word to our situation, does not ask if we need anything, and God forbid, he does not mention anything at all about whether we could come to America. He writes calmly, as if nothing has ever happened in the world. Nothing has happened to him, because it is quiet over there and they think only about having a good time. I am angry that none of the family we have there is the least bit interested in inviting us to come to them. We know that moving to a new country one does not lick honey, but we think about our children. It would be good to take them out of here once and for all, so they at least could live peacefully during the years of their childhood and youth.
People are leaving here and going to America and to Palestine. Thousands are fleeing from here—refugees and people from Vilna. They get their travel permits by cable—everything is settled very quickly. Naturally we ask why our family, who are people of means, cannot receive us and the family from Rakov? This question has cost me my health.
In fact, nothing was settled quickly nor did many succeed in leaving. Once the war started, international travel became difficult to arrange. Vilna’s travel agents arbitrarily stopped booking tickets for anyone older than eighteen or younger than fifty. Berths on transatlantic ships were scarce due to wartime demand. Even if Doba and Shepseleh had somehow been able to book passage out, it would not have been easy to get in. The U.S. government had not altered its immigration policy after the outbreak of war, but the State Department began enforcing the law more stringently and snarling its red tape more impenetrably. State Department officials justified the squeeze by claiming they were trying to keep out potential spies and saboteurs. But this was a smoke screen for entrenched isolationism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism. Public opinion was solidly on their side. The majority of Americans had no desire to open the doors to the likes of Doba and Shepseleh. Even after Hitler invaded Poland, the country remained overwhelmingly opposed to easing immigration restrictions. A bill introduced by New York’s senator Robert Wagner to admit twenty thousand German refugee children died in committee in 1939 due to opposition from the powerful anti-immigration bloc and President Roosevelt’s failure to get behind it. The truth is that from September 1939 forward, Vilna’s Jewish residents and refugees had little hope of securing sanctuary in the United States or anywhere else in the world. The ranks of those who succeeded were tiny: according to one report, as of April 1940, a total of 137 Vilna Jews had immigrated to all countries excluding Palestine; of these, 41 were admitted to the United States. The Joint managed to get some into Shanghai or Siberia. South America was a haven for a handful. But very few went from Vilna to America.
Doba blamed the American relatives for refusing to “invite” them (i.e., file the necessary sponsorship affidavits) and there is no evidence that the relatives tried. But even had they done so, it’s unlikely they would have succeeded.
—
“I walk around confused and ponder how everyone could have been envious of me for going to America,” Shalom Tvi wrote to Sonia after the war started. “Maybe in America I could have done something for my children—but then suddenly came such calamity. I have been separated from everyone and only God knows for how long.” The weeks dragged on, he renewed his tourist visa for another three months, letters from Doba and Etl and Beyle trickled in, but otherwise nothing changed. There were no more trips to the museum or the World’s Fair. The sycamores and maples shed their leaves; the sky over the Bronx turned leaden gray. With nothing to do but ask for handouts and worry about his wife and children, Shalom Tvi became despondent. He came to depend more and more on his brother for support and guidance. Abraham found him a job at A. Cohen & Sons packing jewelry into boxes in the shipping room. It was menial, repetitive work but Shalom Tvi was happy to get it—anything to help pass the time. “I go to work a little at my brother’s store and earn a little be
cause I don’t want to stay idle,” he wrote Sonia. “When one does nothing the mood is much worse.”
Shalom Tvi and Abraham had been close in Rakov thirty years earlier. In New York the brothers became close once more. Shalom Tvi was not as strictly observant as his older brother, but they were cut from the same traditional cloth and it was a solace for both of them to be together in old age. Shalom Tvi fell in with his brother’s weekday routine: first thing in the morning they went to shul to pray, then they returned home for a bowl of cereal and two hard-boiled eggs, then Abraham had a short rest on the sofa, and then at ten o’clock they left together for work. The brothers rode home together in the evening chatting in Yiddish in the back of Sam’s car. Shalom Tvi shared a single bathroom with the other family members—eight of them under one roof including Ethel and her husband, Sam Epstein, and their three children, ages twenty-one, eighteen, and twelve.
The Americans called Shalom Tvi the Uncle, and behind his back they joked fondly about his “greenness.” On his first Saturday in America, the Uncle had taken out a piece of paper with an address in Texas written on it and asked one of the nephews to walk there with him. He was incredulous when they told him it was impossible. When a new baby daughter was born, the Uncle made a little sachet with salt inside, tied it with a red ribbon, and tucked it under the cushion of her carriage. Once the Uncle wandered into the living room when one of his pretty young nieces was in the arms of her fiancé engaged in what used to be called heavy petting. “Oh, I see you’re playing cards,” he murmured in Yiddish and left them to it. The younger relatives thought of the Uncle as a benign phantom from the Old World—polite, tidy, quiet, unassuming, wrapped in a cloud of sadness and incomprehensible Yiddish.
What Shalom Tvi thought of the Americans he never said, not even in letters to his wife and daughters. The only one he singled out for special mention was his oldest brother. In America, no one seemed to have much respect for anything or anyone, but all of them respected Abraham. Not only the family, not only the members of the Hebrew Institute of University Heights, not only his fellow Jews. Christian clerics sought him out for his wisdom about the Talmud. The Chevrah Mishnayos—Mishna study class—he founded at the shul was always full of eager students young and old. Though Abraham lived modestly, he was clearly a man of substance—substance grounded in security and law, not like in Poland where every decade a war or pogrom blew all you owned into the whirlwind. A truly religious person, Abraham was tolerant of the beliefs of others and bent to the customs of his adopted country. He let his grandchildren hang a stocking on Christmas Eve and secretly filled it with candy. When one of the granddaughters landed a job that required her to work half a day on Saturdays, Sarah hit the ceiling but Abraham said, “She is an American girl—she’s lucky to have a job—let her work.” Abraham was the patriarch and his word was law, but he laid down the law gently and with humility. “I had two heroes growing up,” said one of his grandsons. “Grandpa and FDR.” Though he had long since given up the work of the scribe, Abraham still loved to make things with his hands; his grandchildren remember him sitting outside in the summer whittling them toys and whistles with their names carved in Hebrew letters. “Mr. Cohen’s patriarchal appearance distinguished him from all the people in the congregation,” wrote one of the members of his shul. “He was the leader of the older generation and lived the way of life which brought respect and admiration even from people unaccustomed to it and unwilling to subscribe to it.”
