by David Laskin
Shalom Tvi would have been lost in America without his brother. His niece Itel was rich but intimidating. Even her generosity was imperious—at Hanukkah Itel always made a point of giving twice as much gelt (money) to the nieces and nephews as the other aunts and uncles. William was more approachable, but he was so busy with Maiden Form that they rarely saw him. His nephew Sam downstairs was happy to chat and joke in Yiddish, yet most of the time Sam was too consumed by fighting with his brothers over the business to pay his uncle much attention. Shalom Tvi dropped hints about his family. He complained about how much money he had lost as a result of the devaluation of the Polish zloty. The Americans listened, shook their heads, and told him to keep his spirits up. No one talked about the fate of Poland. The name Hitler was a curse that they refused to utter. Abraham sent money; the others were kind but vague.
The visa extension that Shalom Tvi had been granted after the outbreak of war was due to expire on April 13, 1940. As the date approached he sized up his situation. “They will either give me a few more months, or I will have to go back to Rakov,” he wrote Sonia on April 1. “In the meantime I don’t have another place to go. May there be peace! I need papers to go anywhere, and if I don’t have them I will have to go back to Rakov—this is surely not good.” His latest idea—bringing Beyle to America and then traveling with her to Palestine after the war—was dashed when he went to the HIAS office to inquire about the paperwork. The one hope now, Shalom Tvi wrote his youngest daughter, was that “God would bring quiet to the world and we could all come to you together.”
—
England and France were technically at war with Germany, but Europe had been eerily quiet since the carving up of Poland the previous September. The six-month lull—which came to be known as the phony war—was punctured on April 9, 1940, when the Nazis launched an air and sea attack against Norway and Denmark. Britain and France sent troops to Norway on April 18, but the Allies bungled the defense, and by the end of the month the Germans had pushed them back sufficiently to consolidate a three-hundred-mile line connecting Oslo and Trondheim. Denmark surrendered at once. The swastika now flew over Norway, Denmark, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and half of Poland.
The Cohen family wasn’t paying much attention to the world situation that spring. They had troubles of their own to worry about—business trouble. After weeks of fruitless negotiations over a new contract, Local 65, the CIO-affiliated chapter of the United Wholesale and Warehouse Employees Union, went out on strike against A. Cohen & Sons. Abraham had always considered the warehouse workers at A. Cohen & Sons his friends, practically his family. He took it as a personal betrayal when picketers shouted at him in the street and jostled him as he tried to get inside the new West Twenty-third Street office. Hyman, who had played a reluctant part in the failed negotiations, became irate. It was bad enough that the union guys yelled at his father, but this was the sloppiest picket line he’d ever seen. Hyman had drilled with the First Division in France! He wasn’t going to stand by and watch while these Bolshevik deadbeats slouched around at the entrance to his office. Hyman grabbed a placard from one of the strikers, rested it on his shoulder like a rifle, and, with back straight and chest thrust out, marched a few steps back and forth on the sidewalk—just to show them how it was done. “If you’re going to picket—picket!” he shouted. Everybody laughed and it broke the tension. But it was a bitter day for Abraham.
The workers picketed for three days, after which the mediation board intervened and brought the two parties together. “The strike upset Father,” Hyman wrote later. “He just could not believe that people, friends whom he helped in time of need, would picket against him. Actually they were picketing against the Company. He was badly hurt psychologically and never the same after the strike.”
—
For Orthodox Jews, the weekend starts at sundown on Friday and ends at sundown on Saturday. Sundays are a workday like any other—which explains why Abraham was at the office when he collapsed on Sunday, April 28. One of the sons heard the old man fall and rushed in to find him conscious but weak. The brothers conferred and quickly decided that their father would be better off at home than in the hospital. They got him into Sam’s car and tried to make him comfortable. Sam, a terrible driver under the best of circumstances, somehow managed to keep the car on the road between Manhattan and the Bronx. When they reached the house, they moved Abraham into a chair and the men carried him up the stairs and got him into bed. Dr. Fred Glucksman, who lived a few doors down on Andrews Avenue, was summoned to do an exam. The doctor broke the news to the family that Abraham had suffered a heart attack. Hyman believed that the warehouse workers’ strike was responsible, but that seems unlikely. Abraham was in his late seventies; the family had a history of high blood pressure and hardening of the arteries; the strike had been settled for some time when he collapsed.
The heart attack had been fairly mild and Dr. Glucksman said that the patient should be okay in a few days if they kept him in bed and made sure he was quiet. But on May 6, a Monday, he took a turn for the worse. By the time Dr. Glucksman arrived at this bedside, Abraham was in a coma. He had suffered a serious stroke. “Pray that he does not recover,” the doctor told the family. “If he does he will be a helpless invalid.”
—
At dawn on May 10, the Germans terminated the phony war once and for all with a coordinated surprise attack on Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands—a swift deathblow that was being called a blitzkrieg—lightning war. At eight o’clock that night, Abraham died at his home in the Bronx. Since it was a Friday and after sundown, Shabbat had begun and the body could not be moved. A man from the synagogue came to sit by the bedside of the deceased and pray through the night. The family arranged a funeral service for 1 P.M. on Sunday at the Riverside Memorial Chapel, the same chapel that had handled the funeral of Itel and William’s son, Lewis, a decade earlier, but the leaders of the shul wanted to do something more. They asked to have the pine coffin of the patriarch placed in the sanctuary of the synagogue he had helped to found fifteen years earlier—an honor bestowed only on rabbis and esteemed religious scholars.
University Avenue is a major six-lane thoroughfare slicing north/south through the Bronx, parallel to the East River, but on the day of the funeral the police closed the avenue to traffic on the block of the Hebrew Institute. The synagogue staff set up loudspeakers outside so the crowd that overflowed into the street could hear the prayers. The ancient poetry of the mourner’s kaddish drifted into the soft air of spring.
Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba
May His great name be exalted and sanctified
Yit’barakh v’yish’tabach v’yit’pa’ar v’yit’romam v’yit’nasei
v’yit’hadar v’yit’aleh v’yit’halal sh’mei d’kud’sha
Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled, mighty, upraised, and lauded be the Name of the Holy One
B’rikh hu.
Blessed is He.
Abraham’s grandfather had been alive at the time of Chaim the Volozhiner, the beloved student of the Gaon of Vilna. His father, Shimon Dov, had died while the last war raged. Now every hour brought word of fresh disasters from Europe.
Two thousand people turned out that day to pay their respects. It was the end of an era not only for the family but also for Jewish New York. The old guard was passing on and there was no one to take its place. The patriarch had died; there would be no patriarch after him.
—
While they were sitting shiva, Shalom Tvi approached his nephew Harry. As the oldest son of the oldest son, Harry was now by rights the head of the family. Shalom Tvi took him aside and told him quietly that, because his brother was dead, he must return to Poland. He had found a ship that was due to embark shortly and he was going to buy a ticket. Why should Ethel and Sam Epstein continue to put him up? It was one thing to live with a brother—but a niece and her husband had no obliga
tion.
Ever gracious, Harry sat with the Uncle until he talked him out of it. Ethel and Sam would never throw him out no matter what happened. Europe was burning; the Atlantic was swarming with German submarines; how could he even think of sailing back? Here in the States he had a job and a place to live with people who loved him. He must remain until the war was over and he could be reunited with his own family.
Finally, Shalom Tvi bowed his head and agreed to do as Harry said.
According to family lore, the ship on which he had been planning to sail back to Poland was torpedoed and sunk.
—
Brussels fell to the Germans on May 17, a week after Abraham’s death. By May 21, German soldiers were on the shores of the channel gazing across toward England. At Dunkirk, what Winston Churchill called the “whole root and core and brain of the British Army” was cut off by the Wehrmacht and had to be evacuated between May 26 and June 3. The Germans entered Paris a week later. The enfeebled French government sued for peace and a French-German armistice was signed on June 22. The Battle of Britain began soon after.
“The big ones make plans which are impossible for our heads to grasp,” Shalom Tvi wrote to Sonia. “God knows how this will end.”
—
July 15, 1940
Dear Sonia,
Soon it will be Rosh Hashanah, but this year the world has turned on its face. A year ago, when I arrived here, my heart was glad. Today there is mourning. Etteh [Beyle’s sister] passed away. Here, my beloved brother Avram Akiva passed away. In New Haven there is also mourning. Hayim Yehoshua, our beloved brother-in-law, has died. Mourning at everybody’s. The air is full of mourning—the pain and the sadness are great.
From your father who kisses all of you,
Shalom Tvi Kaganovich
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
UNDER THE BIG ONES
Etl, as the middle sister, five years younger than Doba, three years older than Sonia, had spent her life in the shadows. Doba was the acknowledged family beauty and her marriage had brought her all the pleasures and diversions of Vilna. Sonia, the family rebel, was a pioneer in the Land, the mother of sabras! Etl was the sister who had never left home. Pinched, irritable, sharp-tongued, she had married late after a score of failed matches; she was pushing thirty by the time her first child was born; she was thin and sickly and prone to digestive trouble. While Doba browsed the fashionable shops of Vilna and Sonia made the desert bloom, Etl toiled away through the years in Rakov at the family leather business, kept house for her elderly mother, nursed sick nephews, bent over a sewing machine in the failing light of dusk, and harbored grudges against spoiled relatives.
But Etl came into her own during the war. Although Khost had been pressed into the Polish army soon after the German invasion, his service was brief and relatively painless. Other fellows from Rakov had disappeared without a trace—killed, captured by the Germans, imprisoned in Soviet labor camps, never to be heard from again. But Khost had come home unscathed after a few weeks and resumed his teaching post in the Rakov school. When the Red Army marched into Rakov at the end of September 1939, the local Communists welcomed them as liberators, and all others held their breath to see what would happen. Teachers like Khost soon exhaled. Factories, banks, and large estates were nationalized or confiscated; in the market, shops and stalls were quickly depleted of their merchandise and then closed down as government-controlled shops took over; anyone branded a capitalist, industrialist, or speculator was arrested and sent to Siberia. But the schools remained open; Jewish teachers were welcomed, even promoted; Jewish students who showed promise had a chance of winning a place in a Soviet university, with no ghetto bench.
Young Jews and the Jewish “working intelligentsia” were “really happy,” wrote one contemporary, “as if awakened to a new life. New and unheard-of opportunities for work were opened up before them.” The Russians were no angels and they wasted no time in outlawing Rakov’s Jewish institutions—the Zionist youth groups, the Bund, the Jewish community council (kehilla), even the mikveh (ritual bath). The faithful trembled when word came that the revered Volozhin yeshiva had been converted into a cheap restaurant where gentiles gathered to wash down greasy pork with shots of vodka (supposedly the ghosts of yeshiva boys could be heard singing and praying within the walls at night). This was a tragedy. But at least pious Jews could still go to shul to pray and hope, even if, under the Big Ones, their prayers “had lost their Jewish essence and flavor.” As long as a Jew wasn’t too rich, too loud, too critical of Stalin, too religious, too inquisitive, too flashy, too stubborn, or too fastidious to grease the palms of Soviet officials, he could live and be well under the new regime. Khost qualified on all counts. Every month he brought home a good paycheck, and whatever Beyle needed for the household expenses, he gave. The Rakov family had enough left over to send money to Doba and Shepseleh. Despite the devaluation of the zloty and the disastrous sale of the family leather business in Rakov, they were fine. More than fine. They still had their garden of summer vegetables. They could still get milk and eggs and every now and then a chicken. No one went hungry. They listened to the stories of the refugees who had fled the Germans and felt blessed. “For most people, life appeared normal and safe,” a shtetl Jew said of the Soviet period. “Nobody thought about war.”
Etl felt blessed with her daughter too. Nearly four years old, Mireleh had turned from a pink-cheeked, ringleted cherub into a funny, chatty, lanky little girl. Her grandmother swooned whenever the child opened her mouth. “My only comfort is Mireleh,” Beyle wrote to Shalom Tvi. “She will be a wonder girl, with her brains and the excellent way she speaks. I love how she sings and dances. She is tall and beautiful and it is a pleasure to talk to her.” Etl risked the evil eye by singing her own child’s praises. She wrote Sonia proudly that Mireleh was now old enough to wear trousers and run around all day on her long legs. Mireleh still remembered her cousin Leahleh in Palestine, or said she did, even though nearly two years had passed since Sonia’s visit. Like Doba, Etl spoke of moving to the Land one day, but for her it was a vague, rosy dream born of longing, not desperation. Never shy about complaining, Etl evidently had nothing to complain about in the spring of 1940. Her family had the proper flour to make matzo for Passover. Thanks to Khost, they had cash to pay for food in the market, and thanks to Shalom Tvi they had a few leather hides left over from the sale of the business to barter for vegetables and chickens with the peasants. It pained Etl that her parents were separated by the war and that another visit from Sonia was out of the question, but otherwise life was good—better in some ways than before the war, because now she and her husband were the family anchor. “We need nothing,” she wrote in every letter to her father and Sonia.
Whatever marital trouble there had been between Etl and Khost was long past. They were thinking about having another child.
—
At the start of June, Shalom Tvi went to talk to a man in New York about the logistics of traveling from the United States to Palestine. The man evidently had an official role with a Jewish immigration agency. After the meeting, Shalom Tvi went back to the Bronx apartment and wrote in great exhilaration to Sonia. All he needed was proof that he had a thousand pounds (Palestinian pounds, which had a slightly different value from British pounds) to be issued an immigration certificate as a “capitalist,” thus bypassing the 1939 white paper quota. “It is so easy after all,” he wrote. “I don’t understand why I had been afraid before. I felt great happiness in my heart, that it will be easy to come to you.” The only blot on his joy was that the family in Rakov and Vilna could not come too—“the times do not allow this. The situation is bad with mother and it will be difficult to bring them [to Palestine] from there. They say that they do not let people leave.”
He mentioned the certificate and the thousand pounds in a subsequent letter, but with less excitement and more uncertainty, and then he lost his nerve. “You ask me in your own name a
nd in the names of mother and Doba why I am not arranging a certificate to come to you,” he wrote Sonia later in June. “The reason is that we cannot anticipate what will happen there, so I have decided that I should not move anywhere until there is peace in the world, until God has mercy on us and on all of Israel.” Apparently, the New York relatives had talked him out of it: the crossing would be too perilous, they said, the situation in Palestine was uncertain, better to play it safe and stay put in a nation at peace. Shalom Tvi remained in the Bronx, mourning his brother and packing boxes at his brother’s business. Sonia toiled on the farm at Kfar Vitkin with Chaim and their two children. Doba tore her hair out in Vilna. Shepseleh found a bit of merchandise to trade (or sell on the black market), while gratefully accepting gifts of twenty-five, fifty, sometimes one hundred dollars from the family. Etl and Khost looked forward to the end of the school year and the long lingering days of summer.
