The Family

by David Laskin

  For Sonia and Chaim, 1949 was memorable as the year when Shimon, then four, was kicked in the head by a horse. The injuries to his face and nose were serious enough to keep him in the hospital for six months. When word reached the family in the States, they put together a huge box of toys and art supplies. “We were very poor in those days,” recalls Shimon. “Everyone at Kfar Vitkin was struggling. When that box arrived, we were the only kids in Kfar Vitkin with toys. All the kids of the moshav came to see the miracle of the toys! I was King Creole.”

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  Maiden Form launched its famous Dream Campaign that same year. Itel had always been aggressive and adventurous about advertising, but even she hesitated before signing off on this new and risqué series of print ads crafted by Mary Fillius at the Weintraub ad agency. The ads depicted beautiful young women doing fun, zany, strenuous, absurd, or ordinary things out in public places while clad from the waist up in nothing but their Maidenform (as the company now styled itself) bras. The kickoff ad featured a glamorous beauty in biceps-length black gloves, a chic black hat, billowing white satiny skirt, lace-up sandals, and, slung between her willowy bare midriff and her delicate bare shoulders, a very pointy satin Allo-Ette bra. She leans on a table of gewgaws in some elegant boutique and gazes at herself rapturously in a hand mirror. The copy line reads simply: “I dreamed I went shopping in my Maidenform bra.” Subsequent Maidenform dreamers included a female Tarzan (“I dreamed I had a swinging time . . .”), gunslinger (“I dreamed I was WANTED . . .”), firefighter (“I dreamed I went to blazes . . .”), political candidate (“I dreamed I won the election . . .”), and housepainter (“I dreamed I painted the town red . . .”).

  It was one of the most celebrated, successful, and (briefly) scandalous ad campaigns in marketing history. The likes of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon were brought in to do the photography. The tagline was so catchy that Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong referenced it in their song “Dardanella” (“She looks so dreamy in her Maidenform bra”). Prudes tutted that the ads were obscene, but American women—amused, flattered, defiant, newly assertive, flush with cash, and hip to the Freudian suggestiveness—voted with their pocketbooks. Fortune reported in 1950 that Maidenform sales now stood at 14 million dollars a year, accounting for a tenth of all bras sold in the United States.

  Itel and William could afford to be generous. In December 1949, they brought over a relative named Zelig Kost, who had been living at the Foehrenwald displaced-persons camp near Munich since the end of the war. Foehrenwald, one of the largest and longest-lasting DP camps in Europe, housed between three and five thousand Jewish survivors from 1945 to 1957. Zelig Kost, a relative on Sarah’s side, had a particularly moving story. A strapping, good-looking man—“movie-star handsome,” according to females in the family—Zelig had run a dairy shop in Ivenets (a shtetl near Rakov) before the war. He was married and the father of a daughter named Esther. When the Nazis seized eastern Poland in 1941, Zelig’s family was imprisoned in the Nowogrod ghetto but he managed to escape. He went to look for some kind of hiding place for the family, but when he returned, he discovered that in his absence the ghetto had been liquidated, his wife and baby daughter shot and burned. Zelig fled into the woods and joined a group of partisans. For the duration of the war, he took part in sabotage attacks on Nazi convoys and rail shipments. Zelig and his comrades stayed alive by making raids on local villages: they demanded food at gunpoint; peasants who refused were shot.

  Zelig went to Rakov after it was liberated in the summer of 1944. He left this account of what remained:

  The edge of Vilna Street stayed intact. There I found Hillel Eidelman [who had written to Sonia describing Rakov’s destruction] with a few other wretched, miserable fellows who had reached the shtetl ahead of me. Their appearance, and the sight of the destruction, filled my heart with depressing sadness. A few minutes passed, and none of us uttered a word. We just sat on the ground mourning silently and let our tears flow uninterrupted.

  We walked together to the market square. Here was the town’s center and its commercial hub. Generations upon generations had made their livelihood here. We stood in the middle of the market square. For a second we forgot everything and wondered why was it dead silent here? For a short moment we imagined that the stores and the shops would be opened soon, that the Gentiles would jam the place with their wagons and then it would be filled with the hustle-bustle of a market place. . . . And as much as the years in the forests had hardened us we could not hold back our tears.

  We reached the “Shul-Hoif” and were jolted. Here stood the synagogues—the “Old” and the “New.” Their walls absorbed the prayers of generations of Jews and their pleas to God in Heaven. Within their walls Jews poured their tears during Fast Days and during the Days of Awe. . . . Now—a mountain of ashes. We were standing among the ruins of this sacred place where there was no sign of all those who filled it with their prayers and with their studies of God’s Torah. This was the site of the slaughter! Its air still carried the horrifying screams and moaning of those who had been led to their death. Here was the valley of manslaughter. Here was the last act of the bloody tragedy of the Jews of Rakov. Some charred bones could still be seen over here, and over there—the remains of a child’s shoe, which, for some reason, was not consumed by the fire and which did not rot during the two years that had passed since that day. We stood silently, remembering the souls of our saintly dear ones. I turned and faced East, and said “Kaddish” in memory of my sister and her family, who died here with the rest of the martyrs of our town.

  Homeless and despairing, Zelig made his way to Foehrenwald. There he met and married a fellow partisan named Shoshanna Buckerman, a dressmaker from the Belarusian shtetl of Horod’k.

  In December 1949, Zelig and Shoshanna set sail for New York on board the General Stuart. On the ship’s manifest, they listed their destination in the United States as Quanacut Drive, Bayville, New York—Itel and William’s Long Island mansion. Itel got them both hired at Maidenform and the couple moved to Bayonne, New Jersey, and had a daughter named Estelle.

  “They were not happy people,” Estelle said recently. “Dad was a bright and caring man, but he did not have much left after the war. He suffered from depression all his life and had numerous electric shock treatments. He worked as a mechanic on the sewing machines at Maidenform—it was just a job, not what he wanted to do with his life. There were many days when he could not get out of bed. The culture of my household was very secretive. My mother did not talk at all about the war—she was very jealous of dad’s first wife and child whom he loved a great deal. He was a broken man.”

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  Captain Leonard E. Cohn returned from the war with a Bronze Star Medal awarded for “meritorious achievement” in North Africa. Len and all of his American cousins in uniform survived the war unharmed. They had fought and won the good war; they had brought down Hitler; their comrades had liberated the death camps—but none of them thought or talked much about the connection between their military service and the fate of their cousins in Vilna, Rakov, and Volozhin. “I never knew they were killed,” said Sol Rubenstein, Leah Golda’s son and Doba and Etl’s first cousin, who was stationed in the Aleutian Islands with the navy. “We had no idea.”

  In the memoir he self-published in the 1960s, Hyman includes one paragraph about Shalom Tvi and one sentence about the death of his family: “His family perished when the town Synagogue, in which they were herded was sealed, and set afire.” The use of the passive voice is telling. We never talked about. We never knew. It never came up. No one mentioned it. Every American cousin said more or less the same thing when asked about the fate of their relatives. “I never knew we had relatives who died in concentration camps,” one cousin remarked—but of the seventeen family members who perished in the Shoah, only two likely died in a gas chamber. The others were shot over pits, lined up and machine-gunned, murdered by gentile neighbors, burned alive, work
ed almost to death, and then shot and incinerated. “Auschwitz,” writes Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killings, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning of the past still to come.”

  But the two surviving branches of the family grew closer. Thanks to the many modern appliances that the American family had given Shalom Tvi to take to Kfar Vitkin, Sonia and Chaim were doing better. Benny, their fourth child, was born in February 1951. Leah turned sixteen that year; Areleh—now called Arik—was eleven. Shimon, who was six, shared a room with his grandfather. “He was always very good with his hands,” Shimon recalls of Shalom Tvi. “Always fixing things. He didn’t talk much and he didn’t eat much. He loved to go to the beach—he carried a black umbrella when he walked there. He was always trying to find ways to help Sonia around the house.” Shalom Tvi prayed daily at the synagogue across the street from their house. Sonia was also devout. “It was her way of honoring her father and her dead mother and the relatives killed in the Holocaust,” says Shimon.

  In 1952, Itel and William bought a Ferguson twenty-eight-horsepower kerosene-fueled tractor and had it sent to Kfar Vitkin. Shimon recalls proudly, “It was something very special. We had the second tractor in the moshav—everyone else was still using horses.” Chaim built a shed to house it next to the poultry incubator. Itel and William also contributed generously to a clinic, named in honor of William, in the Israeli city of Ashkelon.

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  A. Cohen & Sons prospered during the postwar years, though not as spectacularly as Maidenform. As promised, all war veterans were able to resume their jobs. Though the three brothers were still nominally in charge of the business—Harry as chairman of the board, Sam as vice president, Hyman as president and CEO—their sons and sons-in-law were shouldering more responsibility. Harry’s older son, Melvin, appointed secretary in 1949, was being groomed to take over after his father retired. The company added new product lines—Corning Ware, Rado watches—and opened offices in Atlanta and Los Angeles. The younger generation got married, moved to the suburbs, filled their big comfortable homes with children, squabbled and griped about each other as their fathers had done.

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  In 1958, William died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-six in the Bayville mansion. Itel sold the house and moved into a small, elegant apartment on lower Fifth Avenue, near Washington Square Park. Harry died the following year, at the age of seventy, after a series of heart attacks. At the next A. Cohen & Sons board of directors meeting, the slate of officers was reshuffled: Hyman took over as chairman and Harry’s son Melvin became president. Sam’s youngest son, Marvin, was named vice president and Sam’s son-in-law Meyer Laskin (married to Sam’s younger daughter, Leona) secretary.

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  In 1959, Chaim suffered a serious stroke at Kfar Vitkin. Chaim had always embodied the spirit of the halutz. He was a singer and a dancer; he loved to hike through the mountains and valleys of Israel; every vacation, he piled the children of Kfar Vitkin into his delivery truck and drove them to remote corners of the country for camping trips. Nothing made him happier than hanging out with friends, drinking, and smoking Eden brand cigarettes into the night. Every year he returned to his beloved Kinneret to take the waters at the Tiberias hot springs. He had friends in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, and he took pleasure in sharing the bounty of Kfar Vitkin with them. “Chaim was a professional class salad-maker,” wrote his youngest son Benny, “and every Shabbat morning he would prepare a super finely diced green salad. His favorite songs were ‘Ein Gedi’ and ‘Evening Has Come.’ Many times he danced all night until his shirt was in shreds.”

  The singing and dancing stopped after the stroke. Chaim was only fifty-three but he was a “broken man” in Benny’s words. It rankled Chaim that Shalom Tvi—his father-in-law and uncle—was still spry and active in his eighties while he was partially paralyzed in what should have been the prime of his life. The children remember tension between their father and grandfather. Sonia was caught in the middle. She and Chaim and Shalom Tvi lived together in a small house with four children. It was impossible for Sonia to honor her father without angering her husband. With Chaim disabled, more of the farmwork fell to the others. Shalom Tvi’s contributions only made Chaim more bitter. All of them suffered. Chaim eventually found a small apartment in Jerusalem and spent much of his time away from the family.

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  In the spring of 1963, Itel and Hyman and Hyman’s wife, Anna, came to visit the family at Kfar Vitkin. The farm was actually the last stop on their Israeli trip. First they got the grand tour of the young nation’s major sights and institutions, with special guides befitting a visitor of Itel’s stature and generosity. In Jerusalem they had an audience with Zalman Shazar, Israel’s third president, a native of Belarus who had made aliyah the same year as Sonia.

  Shimon, eighteen at the time of the visit, remembers that Sonia told Chaim to put on his “fancy pants” to receive his famous cousin from New York, but Chaim refused. “I’ll go as usual,” he told his wife. The cousins sat together on the covered verandah at the back of the house overlooking the tractor shed and the chicken house and an azure strip of the Mediterranean. They spoke Yiddish. Hyman was stunned to see Shalom Tvi, now ninety-one years old, feeding the chickens. “He was happy to be in Israel,” Hyman wrote of his uncle, “but not too pleased with the life. The illness of his son-in-law who had suffered a stroke made life rather unpleasant. He saw his daughter working very hard, taking care of the farm.”

  Shalom Tvi died at Kfar Vitkin on September 18, 1964, a month shy of his ninety-second birthday. Chaim died the following year, at the age of fifty-nine. Chaim had always dreamed of being buried at the tiny beautiful cemetery by the Sea of Galilee where he had lived and worked as a youth. The poet Ra’hel is buried there along with many early Labor Zionist leaders. But it was not to be. The officers in charge of the cemetery denied the family’s request. Chaim is buried instead in the Kfar Vitkin cemetery in a rustling grove of ficus, grevillea, and casuarina trees on a hill overlooking the moshav.

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  Itel turned eighty in January of 1966, but she refused to retire. She always said she didn’t have time to stop working. “First, I can’t afford it,” she once told an interviewer. “Second, I like it here. And the second reason is the truth.” She still spent about half her time on the road. “Quality we give them,” she told the Time magazine reporter who profiled her in 1960. “Delivery we give them. I add personality.” Her company was now taking in upward of 35 million dollars a year.

  Itel was on a business trip in Milwaukee in 1966 when she suffered a stroke that left her seriously impaired. She was conscious and mobile afterward, but much of her mind was gone and she rarely left her chair. Relatives recall seeing her sit for hours on end stroking a small dog in her lap—the only thing that brought her comfort. She died in New York on March 29, 1973, at the age of eighty-seven.

  The Maidenform dynasty Itel founded endured for only three generations. The company declared bankruptcy in 1997, and the trademark and management of the business passed from the family. People lost their pensions. There was—and is—bad blood.

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  “With God’s will may the new born bring luck, blessing and peace to the world,” Shalom Tvi had written to Sonia when she gave birth to her first son, Arie, in November 1939. “May you raise him easily and may he merit a long life.” None of these wishes came to pass.

  Arie—Areleh—Arik—had always been a golden boy—taller, more athletic, more handsome than anyone else in the family. Sonia fretted to her father that the boy was rough and rambunctious, but Shalom Tvi countered that rowdiness was a sign of intelligence and spirit. This grandson, he assured Sonia, was destined to be another Bar Kochba—the hero of a Jewish uprising against the Romans. As a youth Arik played basketball and broke girls’ hearts. He had a square ja
w, tousled brown hair, his mother’s brown eyes, a fine mind, and an intense work ethic. Arik won a place at the Technion in Haifa, Israel’s MIT, and did well in his studies. He married and fathered two daughters, all the while serving as an officer in the tank corps of the Israeli Defense Forces.

  When a coalition of Arab states mounted a surprise attack on Israeli positions in the Sinai and the Golan Heights on October 6, 1973—the Yom Kippur War—Arik, now a major, was hastily called up in the general mobilization. His tank corps unit was deployed to the Golan. On October 12, a Syrian missile scored a direct hit on the tank Arik was operating and he was instantly killed. His death came a month before his thirty-fourth birthday. Arik is buried in the Kfar Vitkin cemetery in a section set aside for those who have fallen in Israel’s many wars.

  Benny said that after Arik’s death his mother shut herself in the house at Kfar Vitkin to be “alone with the tragedy.” War had already killed her mother, her sisters, her brothers-in-law, all of her nieces and nephews. Now, like her cousin Itel, she had lost her oldest son as well. “Arik’s death cut flesh wounds that never healed,” said Benny.

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  In the 1960s, Sam and Gladys began making yearly trips to Israel. Sam had always been the most observant of the Cohen brothers, and in Israel he felt a deep sense of connection to his roots, his faith, his heritage, and most of all his family. Sam and Gladys and Sonia, though virtually strangers, forged an immediate bond when they gathered in Israel. Their shared affinities ran deep. After Sam retired, the Israel trips grew to several months in duration.

  Sam was ailing when he and Gladys departed for Israel in February of 1974, but he decided to go ahead with the trip. Gary Cohen, a grandson who was at the airport to see them off, remembers Sam saying he was going to Israel to die. “He didn’t say it in a sad way, more a factual way.”