by Elisa New
THREE
From the River Bug to Riga
Unbearable. This one word, unbearable, curls up toward me, sad, miasmic, from the black square of microfiche in the YIVO archive. It is an entry in a forgotten reference book, Jews of Britain. Every few months I journey to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City to look at this entry again. Sliding a thin plastic sheet into the square reader, I find a checkerboard of images that mark page 39, where I locate the section devoted to my great-great-uncle, Bernhard Baron.
If I wanted to, I could probably see this square of microfiche with its one telling word, unbearable, closer to my home. Doubtless the microfilm collection at Harvard University includes this 1941 book whose proud title, Jews of Britain, and whose author remain ignorant of what was then befalling Jews on the European continent. But I go again to YIVO, for only there can I breathe the oxygen of those documents in which my great-grandfather and Bernhard Baron’s idea of civilization sleeps.
There, amid the largest collection of writings by and about the Jews of eastern and central Europe, are documents still vibrant with the optimism of Europe ’s Jews that enlightenment would eventually prevail over Russian darkness. There too I draw close to the wild despair, the cyclic defeat, the pessimism, of those equally as hungry for civilization but barred again and again from achieving it.
At YIVO I can read Jacob’s older brother Max Levy’s own copious notes, in careful triplicate, purple carbons attached. These secretarial minutes of the Jewish representative of the town of Raseinai from 1919 to 1929 still sleep at YIVO in pebbled black file boxes. Here too I can look at the yellowing photos of Shavli’s lakeside promenade, both before and after it was repaved with gravestones from the Jewish cemetery. The ephemera from the file box labeled “Riga” give glimpses into civilization at its proudest. Running my fingers down the typed pages, I note the elegance of the fonts, the play of the decorative in the proud nouveau printer’s ornament, the unmistakable style and pride of that urbane city to which it seems every Jew seeking enlightenment made his way, including my great-grandfather’s brother Paul, and including too Bernhard Baron’s sister Sarah, whom Paul met there.
It is not surprising that a long-ago note in my Aunt Jean’s hand, headed “From the desk of Jeannetta Jaffe,” asserts that Bernard Baron was born in “Riga, Latvia.” Riga was where anyone Jewish in the year 1850 would have preferred to have been born rather than where Bernhard actually was. Riga—a Hansa, or German city—was the place where a man could shed a crude, disenfranchised, cringing, or downtrodden mien in favor of a prouder one, a place where a boy from Belorussia by way of Rostov-on-Don might acquire the handsome German name Bernhard, the name itself signaling liberation from a place his father found “unbearable.”
The microfiche clicks in, and seconds later the white print on black negative resolves: “As Bernhard Baron’s father found life unbearable in his native town of Brest-Litovsk, he journeyed to Rostov-on-Don. But finding things no better there, the family journeyed to America.”
History leaves little mystery of why a Jew raising a family in the town of Brest-Litovsk during the reign of Nicholas I would have found the place thoroughly miserable. Today the town is remembered, if at all, for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which redivided Europe after World War I. The Poles were given back a much shrunken and nibbled Poland and, for the umpteenth time, Russia and Germany were reassigned their spoils.
But from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, Brest-Litovsk was a proud Jewish capital, a jewel in the crown of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and a thriving center of commerce and culture. It was from Brest-Litovsk that pronouncements bearing on all Lithuanian Jews went out; its synagogue among the grandest in the commonwealth; its rabbis the most esteemed. Renaissance Brest was a seedbed for the intellectual culture that makes Lithuanian Jews so proud, even arrogant, about the superiority of the “Litvak.” Brest’s thriving intellectual culture was supported by real wealth. From Brest-Litovsk, Jews conducted trade with centers as far away as Venice. They conveyed furs and timber, leather and wax, filling a crucial role as stewards, managers, and transporters of resources from the east; the commerce made them mobile citizens of a multiethnic world and also brought them into contact with ideas. Like their brothers to the north, they moved goods; the river lanes to the Baltic and Black Seas connected them to the Vistula and Danzig, a port of the mighty Hansa, as well as to Turkey. Commercial trade became an avenue of culture—of books and luxuries, of ambition.
This Lithuanian golden age was interrupted suddenly, sickeningly, in 1648, when the Cossacks and Tartars, led by Joseph Chmielnicki, charged up along the Dnieper on horseback. Taking out their long-nursed resentment of Polish ducal control, the Cossacks vented their fury on the Jewish ducal managers, burning, raping, murdering. With their torn and baggy clothes, their belts hung with flasks of powerful spirits, fresh killed game, and sharp scimitars, they emblazoned themselves onto Jewish memory.
By the time the Cossacks arrived in Brest-Litovsk, the city’s more prosperous Jews had fled to Danzig, where they would remain for the next fifty years. An epoch of optimism had ended, and those who returned would have much to endure. Catherine the Great expanded the Russian empire, and then the czars turned the border town of Brest into a modern front. After Napoleon’s invasion, and with national feeling stirring in Poland, Nicholas I determined that Brest (“Litovsk” was shaved off to mark Lithuania’s defeat) would become a Russian garrison. About 1830, Nicholas claimed the strips of land adjacent to the Bug River as the site of Russia’s easternmost fortress. The whole town was to be torn down and moved three kilometers to make room for the fortified walls. Buildings of value to Nicholas and the holdings of select citizens were moved, but many monuments of the town’s proud Polish and Lithuanian past, including houses of both rich and poor, were razed or carried off as building material.
With the fort completed in the 1840s and the anti-Semitic Czar Nicholas in charge, the Jews of Brest entered their darkest period until World War I. Jews kept body and soul together by trading secondhand goods on market day, which is to say goods “confiscated” from river rafts by underpaid customs officials and then sold to Jews for pittances. This pathetic trading occurred only once a week. Or the Jews moved timber. When the weather held it was a better livelihood than hawking black market booty from the rafts, but the weather seldom held. It was dangerous work, dislodging timber from the yellow mud. Workmen were trapped there, grown men and children too, as the riverbed shifted and logs burst out of the sucking mud as if shot from a cannon. Particularly able or clever Jews, swept up in an ironic push to “industrialize” the Jewish people, might pursue a craft of some sort. Brest had a factory for leather and another for the one product which, no matter how depressed, nearly every hamlet needed—tobacco. But conditions in those workplaces were grim.
All this was miserable enough—the familiar tale of shtetl life—but “unbearable”? The word suggests something more. True, conditions in nineteenth-century Brest were considered so terrible that the rabbi—in a town renowned for piety—permitted the eating of dried peas and beans on Passover. Also, the decades-long construction of a brick fortress five kilometers long would have turned this town into a sort of Egypt, for who would have made and hauled the bricks, dug the canals, risked (and lost) life and limb on the ramparts built to protect the cream of Nicholas’s army? Who but the Jews? All of this could have made life unbearable for a Jewish family. But there was, I think, something else. It was finding the name “Beron” on the “Registration” rolls of the town of Brest-Litovsk that planted the question, for to be on the Registration rolls at all might augur the “unbearable.”
Thus, while I gloried in locating Uncle Baron’s actual family in Brest-Litovsk, I knew that the Registration rolls of the Russian empire were the equivalent of wanted posters. Jews were registered so that they could be hunted down for conscription. These rolls were instrumental to a policy of rounding up boys—5 to 18—to
serve as “cantonists,” or cadets in the Russian army. Nicholas’s bellicosity required a constant flow of draftees. To be drafted in the Russian army as a cantonist was a life sentence. Only after finishing a term of eight to ten years as cadets would these boys begin serving twenty-five-year terms as regular soldiers.
No Jew was completely safe from the threat of conscription, not even those merchants technically exempt. My cousin Moshe recounted with no little delight the derring-do of his own grandfather, Avraham Shimshon, in evading the khapers—the catchers. “Our sire kept three steps ahead of these khapers,” Moshe told me. I can still see the smile lines around Moshe ’s blue eyes deepening as he conjured for me the sight of Avraham Shimshon’s stout-wheeled cart maneuvering through roadblocks and musket smoke. “As a boy in the 1840s, our sire, Avraham Shimshon,” Moshe declared, “had been too fast for them, and as a man, too valuable.” In his stout cart he traveled long distances, filling contracts for army supply. And he used some of the profits to offset the lesser morality of other Jews, bribing officials to overlook one or another scrawny neighbor.
Not so lucky, apparently, poor Beron of Brest. With the fort only three kilometers away, Brest-Litovsk’s Jewish children were perhaps the most vulnerable in the empire. One day a little boy built mud castles in the yard. The next, he was slung over a horse, booty of the czar’s kidnappers, bound for military reeducation. More unbearable still, Jews were part of the process.
Hard put to provide the czar the number of soldiers he demanded for his Crimean adventure and desperate to protect the many, the rabbinic council of Brest-Litovsk in 1851 appointed its own khapers to prey upon the few. Recruited from the ranks of the Jewish dregs, these khapers “caught their brethren of any age and any status and handed them to conscription centers.”
Various sources date the Baron family’s departure for their new home in Rostov-on-Don, at the Crimean front, to around 1853. They were not alone. Families betrayed by their own co-religionists sometimes hoped that by trailing the troops down bloodied roads they might find the small cadet who had been taken from them. Many families like the Barons left native towns behind to become an accessory to Europe ’s first modern war. The czar learned that no matter how many men and boys were poured into a battle, no matter how cheaply human lives were held, Russian glory was outmatched by modern armaments. The dead seen on the roads or piled by doorways, the soldiers on litters moaning their last, had wounds such as Russians—armed with the firelocks used against Napoleon—had never seen.
Was there among these boy soldiers a younger Beron, lost brother of so many lost brothers?
If so: unbearable.
This narrative of Uncle Baron’s early years is one I have cobbled together out of scenes from Tolstoy’s Crimean works, biographies of Belorussians such as Chaim Weitzmann and Menachem Begin, place-names from the atlas I keep on my desk, its pages cracking open to the entries “Baltics and Belorus” and “Poland, Danzig, and Lithuania.”
In the 1870s and 1880s Brest once again emerged as a busy capital of trade. My own journey to Brest, which included a long walk along the brick fortifications and the streets of the Jewish quarter, afforded me glimpses of that civilization (as hope, as memory, as legend, as realized fact) that led Bernhard Baron to become so outspoken a champion of “enlightenment.”
And yet all my patient siftings, guesses, and outright confabulations do not, in the end, get me as close to Bernhard Baron as my great-grandfather Jacob Levy’s elaborate cane gets me to his brothers and his world, his “civilization.”
The cane conducts me to a world with great confidence in civilization. Fashioned in one country, purchased in another, its inscription written in the tongue of a third, the cane proclaims a Jewish way of life—liberal and enlightened, attuned to competencies and chances not available to provincial persons. The cane, accessory of a person out and about, hints at hotels and long travel routes, ambitious itineraries, and reliance on a servant sector. Its sleek, traveled look, the prints it bears of persons and places long since lost to family lore, point to a life elevated above subsistence, to a life lifting itself into modernity.
Hanging three high, finial to ferrule, clamped in little springs up the vaulted walls, canes were displayed by the score. Before Yael and I ever met Vitalija, Kaunas Goberniya’s colorful archivist, we spent an hour in the cane chamber of the Kaunas Ethnographic Museum. The museum’s roomful of canes showed us the choices, the chances, that Jacob Levy, unlike his future kinsman Baron, had been raised to enjoy. The cane room in Kaunas tells the story of the progress of industrial civilization in the Baltics through walking sticks.
Standing in barrels, splayed open like wild bouquets, the early folk canes are more like cudgels. True, their grips may be carved to resemble small-eyed swine or hares, beaked birds, bears, or—with a bit more craft—carved to imitate a noose of hempen rope, or the pebbled teardrop of ripe wheat, or beet and turnip tops, homely onions. But the craft bestowed on these whimsical heads ends at the ferrule. The stocks of these rustic canes, though stripped and scraped to form rough dowels, show knotholes and the natural curvature of tree boughs.
One step up, then, arranged on shelves along the walls like wine bottles, are the canes of the rising classes. With decorative crooks and handles, these are not shillelaghs. Mahogany or ebony, not oak, their grain invisible beneath a coat of stain, these canes boast metal ferrules between head and stock. Among those lying on the shelves are some boasting a bit of gimmickry, like a little door that opens to reveal a tightly whorled map, or a set of pens, or a ring for keys. There are canes with a stock carved like a pistol, or that have a working trigger that releases a flag. Such canes, by their style or ingenuity, declared their bearer a person of parts. Produced for a volume trade, those canes were bought by town dwellers—merchants of the second guild, professionals, midsize manufacturers, students with well-heeled fathers.
And finally, last along the walls and displayed like trophies, are the rarer specimens of a cane maker’s art. The finest ones, German made, disdain cheap gimmickry in favor of luxe materials—malacca, ebony, or rosewood; silver, gold, ivory. By such exquisite artifacts as these life was imbued with ceremony. Bestowed on dignitaries, travelers from afar; ordered for birthdays, special days of triumph, anniversary galas—these presentation canes honored both giver and receiver, stamped the estimability of both.
And it was this quite subtle kind of message, I began to see, looking from the canes in barrels to these on shelves and then to those along the walls, that was written on the cane Max Levy gave to his youngest brother, Jacob Levy, on the occasion of Jacob’s return visit to the homeland in 1928. Observing all the conventions, the cane reminded its recipient just whom he had to thank. The names of the four Levy brothers and their associated towns were arranged on the cane in age order, but the giver’s initials were in a different metal.
Place-names were given in their local spellings, but the cane ’s inscription, in German, supervened like a transposition of local manners into the most ideal terms. Nothing about the cane signaled anything but the utmost respect.
Vitalija the archivist confirms such surmises and more. An hour after we viewed the museum canes, Vitalija pushes the enlarged photograph of our cane back across the table to Yael.
Yes, Vitalija says, beaming, this was just the kind of thing that relative of yours, that Maksas Levy, would have gone to trouble to order. Not only to show his brother, visiting after so long, the proper welcome but also—and here she cast a knowing glance at us—to show the kind of man he was.
Not ordinary, not without status. Vitalija pronounced the word sta-Toos. The cane might well have been ordered in Siluva, a village near Rasainei, a provincial place. But it was made in Riga, by a proper German cane maker whose prestigious imprint “Loewensohn” went on every one of his handcrafted canes. A distinguished man, this Maksas!—Vitalija nods in approval—clever, and making the most of his chances. For instance!
And with this Vitalija flips
open the file, not thin, in which she has gathered extant documents of the family of one Max Levy, Advocat, of Raseinai, born 1860, son of Avraham Shimson Levy, of Shavli, born 1839, died 1873.
Under Yael’s curious eye, Vitalija now traces her fingers, line by line, across a solid block of Cyrillic script. Translating as she goes, she leans toward us to signal her excitement at sharing this precious paper with us. He was just a bit older than you are, Yael, Vitalija says, when he prepared a document on his mother’s behalf in 1873.
What Vitalija had to show us was a petition written on behalf of one Sarah Levy by one Meyer Levy, age 14. Addressed to the Esteemed Officials in the fortunate service of His Most Excellent Czar, Alexander Nikolaevich, with a stamp affixed to indicate seventy kopeks duty paid. Written in a flowing Russian hand, Meyer Levy’s document inquires the following: Will the authorities kindly send his mother a paper confirming that the family house on Malutremnaya (Smallprison) Street indeed belongs free and clear to Sora Rivkah, widow of the late Avraham Shimshon. And Vitalija shows us, attached to this same document but in a different hand, the reply that came six months later from the officials of His Most Excellent Czar.
“Owing to its location just outside the town boundary, said house and its wooden annex on Smallprison Street are entirely the property of the wife and heirs of Avraham Shimson, no fees or city taxes due. The Jews are free to live or work in it as they please.” By settling outside Shavli’s plat and thus off the city rolls, Vitalija explains, the family of Avraham Shimshon lives in a place not worth the czar’s attention.
“And look at this!” Vitalija exclaims as she pulls another typewritten sheet out of the file, pointing to an entry recording taxes paid by one Marcus Levy (Jewish taxpayer 144 and presumably Avraham Shimshon’s father): his 1846 “candle tax,” one of many devices that Czar Alexander’s father had deployed to force assimilation of his Jewish subjects. Though the dwellers on Smallprison Street managed not to pay it, these nineteenth-century candle taxes supported the Jewish schools young Max attended. It was this very program of compulsory Russification that Max’s mother, Sora, had to thank for her son’s accomplished Russian letter to the czar. At the same time, what a very wicked, what a very Russian device it was, Vitalija now explained. For how did the czar fund the Jews’ Russification? By taxing Sabbath candles, the very candles the rabbi’s wife sold out of her kitchen, making the rebbitzin not only the czar’s tax collector but also his own deputized agent of Russification.
