Jacob's Cane_A Jewish Family's Journey From the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore; A M

by Elisa New

  Jews like your relatives—Vitalija explained—beat the czar at his own game, extracting the benefits and avoiding (with houses off the city plats) the penalties.

  Max Levy’s correspondence with the czar. From the collection of the Kaunas County Archives. Reprinted with permission.

  Now once again Vitalija flips the file open, extracting a document. Two years later (flip, and a rustle of paper), Max is now sixteen years old and (excitedly, Vitalija shows me a page, its script Gothic, its language clearly German) is living in Riga. This page is from the Riga business digest. Below one Adolph Levy, his business, Getreidehandel, she points out the name Max Levy, Getreidehandel—the grain trade. She slips the page back into the file, taps her nails on the manila cover. Her hand on the sheaf of pages is momentarily still. Then, not without a flourish, in one rapid motion she pulls out and fans open a sheaf of photocopied packets.

  Neatly stapled here and here and here, Vitalija points out with satisfaction, are entries representing the activities—civic, philanthropic, professional—of the now grown, now prospering Maksas Levy, with privileges to practice law along the whole length of Kaunas Guberniya, in Kurland, and at the ports of Memel and Riga. Meyer, Maksas, later Max Levy, now settled in the agricultural town Raseinai, has come into his own.

  Distinguished jurist, Maksas Levy; county representative, Maksas Levy; library committee; fire prevention delegate; liberal delegate to the Sejm. A man to cast a long shadow, to set a high standard, was this Max Levy.

  Back at home with my young children, Yael the eldest with two younger sisters, the passage of years began to show me what effect an older brother like Max Levy could have had on his younger siblings and eventually on his children. Vitalija’s take on Max seemed obviously right and ever more shrewd.

  A few years later, when I returned to Shavli and Raseinai without Yael, I met a man in Raseinai who actually remembered Max Levy. Mister Lawyer Levy, Victoris Andrekaitis called him, emphasizing the honorific Mister. He used his hands to draw down two imaginary tufts of beard and then settled an imaginary hat on his head. Victoris bade me imagine Independence Day sometime in the 1920s. Raseinai’s one broad avenue lined with citizens, half Jewish, half gentile. Down the middle of the street who comes marching? Mister Lawyer Levy. And just after pronouncing that exaggerated Mister, Victoris Andrekaitis pantomimed something else. Balling one hand into a fist and lifting his knees, he thrust an imaginary cane under his arm and strode his driveway’s length. Max Levy.

  Even without an older brother who was something of a prodigy and something of a martinet, Jacob would have had, in Max, a high standard to meet. A picture began to form for me of my great-grandfather’s early life as the youngest of four brothers. It could not have been easy for Jacob to make his mark.

  Born to the first generation of Jews afforded real opportunities, Jacob had little excuse for not succeeding, if not brilliantly then at least by making the most of opportunities the new times offered. Enlightenment! Emancipation! Shavli, a stronghold of both, was home to cultured but also practical men, keen to kindle ambition and drive as much as cultivation. The Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment, with active chapters in Shavli and Raseinai, discouraged the purely intellectual in favor of credentialed competencies; the society’s mission was to “assist the young in devoting themselves to the pursuit of science and knowledge.” Formerly, a Jew of northern Lithuania would have been a scholar, an agricultural middleman, or a craftsman serving a local market. Now the scholar was to become a jurist; the grain trader, an agronomist; the locksmith or saddle maker, an engineer or manufacturer. Fathers pressed sons, and brothers pressed younger brothers, to go beyond occupations and to claim professions. Civilization would follow auto-emancipation.

  Simply growing up on Smallprison Street gave Jacob a front row seat on the modernizing world, as well as plenty of stimulation. For instance, the north-south railroad connecting the Baltic port of Libau with the wheat fields of Ukraine was finished in 1872. (Jacob was then five.) Two years later, the north-south line connecting Riga further north to Koenigsburg in East Prussia was also completed. The rails of both lines crossed at Shavli. Then the Petersburg to Warsaw line was built, with stops in Vilnius and Kaunas, via Brest, and Shavli was its major central Lithuanian station.

  Young Jacob could thus watch from his own backyard as a new industrial world was born, could glimpse all the apparatus and paraphernalia of modernity being unloaded from the trains. Out with the cauldrons and the rusty forges. Out with the workshops that went up in smoke when stray sparks licked wooden walls. In with steam-powered jennies, pulverizers, tension rods. On sunny days, the carters and draymen unloaded the new steam boilers and wheeled them on dollies into the brick-walled factories.

  Delicate controls on the new machinery moderated temperatures and produced novel varieties of everything. When heated to a precise temperature, ordinary beet sugar could be turned into bright lozenges flavored with lemon, sassafras, and peppermint; into fondant colored creamy pink and violet. At lower heat, the chocolates that Shavli was mad for were produced in the factory owned by a Jew, Kagan.

  Local flax and creased linen still had a place in any bride ’s trousseau. But now cotton from England and America came in via Germany, and the bride might smooth out marriage bed sheets of a finer, silkier feel. The workshops were full of spinning bobbins, the thread drawn out thinner and thinner until, satiny and shining like glass, it gleamed on a spool. The new mercerizing process made the fiber stronger and improved its ability to take the aniline dye. Other processes could turn hanks of oily wool or wiry horsehair to gleaming, supple dry goods, fit to smooth onto a divan or turn into gentlemen’s trousers. The old weavers, tanners, and blacksmiths did not have the skills or materials to fashion such modern goods. The new products needed experts who understood how a roller kept even tension, how a mangle turned stiff things supple, how dyeing was more than pigment. Chemists, engineers, inventors, machinists—persons with knowledge of cold versus hot water baths, caustic agents, air pressure, revolutions per minute—commanded high wages and respect. Each new product or process created new realms of possibility and a demand for skilled persons to make them work. In short, the more innovation, the more opportunity, the more of what everyone now called “progress.”

  Of course, the opposite was also true. With the older products, the more established their traditions and methods, the more resistant their craftsman might be to mechanization. In Shavli it was just the same as across the industrializing world, for even as machines saved labor they inspired terror in the laborer. And one product in particular seemed to exemplify all the injustices workers had to struggle against to earn their bread.

  Was there ever a product in the history of the world so hungry to burn human labor for the sake of human pleasure? Rapidly consumed, yet desire for it nigh unquenchable, this was a product for which demand, ever rising, only pressed down prices, ever falling. The more refined and sophisticated its mystique, the more wretched were those who produced it. The many exacting steps that went into its cultivation spread slavery across the Western Hemisphere. The abuse of its workers would be a spur to progressivism worldwide. But in Shavli (as in Brest and Rostov, as in Raleigh and Shanghai, as in New York and Aachen) its mid-nineteenth-century victim was still hunched over a workbench, rolling rolling rolling, his daily quota ever rising as the pay for every unit rolled fell. The product was, as the young Bernhard Baron, now in Rostov-on-Don, knew from the pain in his hands and wrists, along his bent spine, and in his throat—tobacco.

  I wonder if any of Jacob’s brothers would have been around in 1880, when tradition dictated that Jacob Levy, on turning thirteen, would be called to the Torah as a bar mitzvah. Had Jacob’s aging mother, Avraham Shimshon’s widow Sora, managed to get her youngest, her most rebellious son, the dark, slight, intense, and restlessly intelligent Jacob, to stand before the gray heads in synagogue? Would this Gymnasium student—already, I’d guess, prone to passionate declarations, to st
anding on principle—be willing to go through the ritual?

  If the tales told of my great-grandfather’s extraordinary library—a collection including not only Engels and Lasalle but the King James Bible and Don Quixote—tell me anything, they say that this recipient of an enlightened education may well have objected. On the other hand, I know that Jacob’s education had not omitted ancient Hebrew, along with Russian, German, Lithuanian, Latvian, Yiddish, and, later, accented but flawlessly grammatical English. Many years after his death, his daughters, Jean, Myrtle, and Fanny, recalled that in Baltimore and then in Philadelphia, he led a Passover Seder, reading the Hebrew from the Haggadah at top speed and then discoursing on the book’s political aspects—the Jewish people ’s flight from oppression. Thus I think that he would, despite the Enlightenment curriculum he and his brothers followed, have gone through his day in synagogue, perhaps not fretting that his brothers were not around to hear him read or join him for an aliyah on the bimah.

  Max would have been unlikely to attend. In 1880 he was completing his law degree at Tartu, or as the Germans called it, Dorpat, in Estonia, where many Jews attended the university. Tourist brochures of the period commend Tartu’s “remoteness from noise” and its “picturesque situation,” but I doubt Max would have much noticed this. With its Lutheran charter and a governing board of Baltic German barons, it was the university’s reputation for turning out modern doctors, lawyers, and scientists that drew its high percentage of Jewish students. They soldiered on at Tartu, despite the mean, small homes that boarded them, the beet and fish diets, and isolation. A Russian university whose language of instruction was German—one of the czar’s many accommodations to the tax-paying, port-managing Baltic Germans—Tartu was a magnet for multilingual Jews. Willing to study Russian law in German, or German law in Russian, they endured privations as long as accreditation followed.

  Probably also absent when Jacob was called to the Torah as a bar mitzvah was his brother Isaac, who at sixteen had been sent to Freiburg in Germany, sent by the richest, greatest, and eventually most famous industrialist in Shavli—Chaim Frankel.

  Sharing Jacob’s interests if not his temperament and a few years older, Isaac was a gentle, kindly boy, one gifted with a wrench and curious about machines. The boys had grown up together near Lake Talksah, within earshot of rail yards and close by the rising brick pile of Frankel’s magnificent leatherworks. The southeastern edge of town would have been full of interest to growing boys. Near the train yards they could put a coin on the rails and see it flattened to a satiny disk when the train roared by. They could play at the edge of the lake, building dams of wood and brick discarded as the Frankel factory was constructed near the shore. And in the late afternoons, as darkness crept out from the trees, the spooky sound of a train whistle allowed a boy to recall battles of long ago: the Teutonic knights fallen in these same marshes, “cut down like women.” They would have read the phrase out of the Livonian Chronicles in school. Then by morning all was hammer and clamor again.

  What interested both boys most was the scale and ambition of the leatherworks. Whether funded by Napoleon’s retreating soldiers’ louis d ’ors or German investors, this was no ordinary backyard tannery with a slaughterhouse and manufacturer cheek by jowl—men in bloody aprons skinning pigs and calves hanging from hooks—but a real manufacturing plant. After first bringing in experts from Germany, Frankel soon realized the advantages of training his own, of sending local boys abroad to learn how to stabilize dyestuffs, to moderate steam, to learn factory layout, fire protection, first aid. Some he sent close by, to Kaunas or Riga Polytechnic. But the most promising were dispatched west. When he chose Isaac from among Shavli’s boys, it would have shown all the family that, despite Avraham Shimshon’s death, the boys would make their way.

  I think that the only brother living close enough in 1880 to see Jacob stand up and read the Torah would have been the second eldest, the sweet, idealistic, dreamy, awkward, waggish brother who, born Pinchas or Perel, at a certain point became known as Paul. By 1880 Paul was in Riga, the metropolis, which was now within a day’s train travel from Shavli.

  It would have taken a lot to get Paul to go there. Shortly after Max took himself to Riga to study Getreidehandel, grain trading, he would have begun urging Paul to follow him to the city. To get out of Shavli. To not let grass grow under his feet!

  Problem was, though, Paul loved grass. He was a country boy through and through, who grew more sentimentally rustic as he aged. Many years later, from Glyndon, Maryland, where he owned the town’s largest individually held plat and was its only Jew, Paul wrote to my aunts, “When the boys are finished school, send them out to me. Mother Earth will do them good.” Those who showed up at his farm he’d take to the coop to feed the chickens, to the barn to squeeze the teats of cows. He named the cows so lovingly, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and my aunts remembered how they’d sometimes find him murmuring to these friends, his skinny neck near their flanks.

  Yes, young Paul would have been loath to leave the plains of Shavli for Riga, to bid farewell to the milk cows, pastures, and breezes with their scents of hay and cucumber. Eventually, though, he must have gone, for the name Riga on Jacob’s cane says so. He’d have been persuaded that a lover of Mother Earth had best learn to care for her properly—to gain intimate knowledge of feed and fodder, the proper potash levels, electrification. Plant hybridization, livestock breeding, machine maintenance—these were the essentials of the practical curriculum embraced by modern Jews of the soil. In the 1870s this newer agriculture was called agronomy. Paul’s teachers at the Riga Polytechnic, all recruits from Germany, had social ideas to impart as well. Collectivization was sweeping across Europe. What agronomy student did not do his stint on a model farm?

  An old photograph—gray, grainy, fished out of a suitcase of Paul’s personal effects—suggests that the experience changed him for good.

  The photograph shows three rows of boys and girls in a forest clearing. The boys wear overalls or peasant blouses, with knotted kerchiefs on their foreheads. The girls, a half dozen out of a group of thirty, wear their headscarves tied up more fetchingly, the knots pulled over their ears like flowers, and on their legs what must be bloomers. An outing of the Jewish Agricultural League? A summer week in the Rumbula forest spent cutting wood?

  When I hold the magnifying glass up to the grayish photo I see the young Paul Levy in a back row. Between two older teenage boys, he is the skinny one; the flanges of the family ears protrude from under his cap. Now I scan the rows of girls once, and then again, but do not see her. Though I strain to find the dark browed girl with a statuesque figure and full, kissable lips, she is not there.

  I want to find this girl because she, Sarah Baron, had a romance with skinny Paul in the city where he came of age, making her the only romantic heroine in my family history. Sarah was, I’m guessing, the tie that first bound the Levys to the Barons, the reason why it is the name of a city, not a county or rural outpost, associated on the cane with dreamy Paul. Putting the inscription on the cane, Max would have known that it was really the girl, and not where he met her, that mattered to Paul. Nevertheless, Max put a Baltic city’s name on the cane. The city was Riga.

  In 1799 Peter the Great, having routed the Swedes, pronounced Russia’s reign in Riga to be as perfect and permanent as the goblet he then dropped from the tower going up in his name. Yet the Riga to which Paul arrived sometime late in the 1870s was a thoroughly German city.

  Established as a beachhead by Teutonic Knights and the bishop of Bremen, Riga was the Hansa’s eastern jewel, its key role in Baltic trade making it the Russian city with the best claim to being, in the German sense, “free.” In the 1870s the ambitious Alexander II was not disposed to leave Russia’s most important gateway in the hands of backward Russians. In exchange for the brisk trade Baltic Germans could maintain with Bremen, Hamburg, Danzig, and Lübeck, he let the city’s culture, language, and architecture remain German.

  All th
e side streets in Riga today are built in a naive style recalling the Latvian folk past, but the clustered domiciles also bear resemblance to villages along the western Baltic coast in Germany and Sweden. In summer, these cities of the Baltic rim turn their faces to the yellow northern sun that warms the bricks of the city squares and ripens the shadows on the stucco. Winter scours this northern sun to a dull throb; the walls of the cities roughen with gray frost. But in Riga, as in Lübeck and Sassnitz, tucked under the steely cobbles are cozy Bierstuben.

  In the major squares and along the avenues, handsome high-fronted residences in the style of Bremen and Lübeck rise above the cobbles, not far from the docklands that used to swarm with agents and factors, inspectors and moneychangers, for Riga’s wealth came from the polyglot, raucous flow of trade between nations. By the nineteenth century Jews had finally, fully arrived in Riga.

  Until Peter the Great ’s triumph in the eighteenth century, Jews in Riga had suffered the same restrictions on residence and mobility as their cousins in the Latvian countryside and farther south in Lithuania, and would see these rules tighten under Catherine the Great. In the years before Peter, Jewish raftsmen, conveying logs or grain from the interior, sailed the Dvina to Riga. But they were forbidden to sleep overnight inside the city limits and lodged three to a room at a Juden Herberge: a Jews’ shelter. Many a Jewish raftsman preferred to make his bed on the Dvina, falling asleep with the breeze in his face, than in an odorous dormitory with a stigma of his unwelcomeness blazoned on the door.