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

  As time went by, however, the Baltic barons and their Russian trading partners began, little by little, to accommodate their Jews. At the port of Libau, southern Jews became so indispensable that “temporary” arrangements with more permanence were devised to accommodate the Jewish brokers, conveyancers, shippers, translators, and warehousers who maintained the grain, timber, leather, and other trades. Technically excluded from residence in Libau proper, Jews nevertheless made up Libau’s tax base.

  Thus the duke of Kurland arrived at a clever method to palliate the sting of their presence; he issued expulsion orders attached to a hefty schedule of fines: “Jews continue to be present in the country contrary to the Law. Steps shall therefore be taken to assure that all Jews leave within six weeks from this day, and if any Jew shall be found within the borders of the Duchy after that date, he shall be imprisoned and be released only upon payment of one thaler for each day.”

  One thaler was not, for a Jewish businessman, an impossible sum to pay. But one thaler per day for every Jew in the city was a tidy sum for a duke to collect. Thus Kurland ’s expulsion order, perennially un-enforced, allowed the region to absorb useful Jews in number and, as with the czar’s candle taxes, tax them for their own exploitation.

  In Riga, when the proprietors of the Juden Herbergen sought more regular arrangements for the temporary billeting of Jews, they asked the city to compel Jewish boatmen, technically forbidden to stay in the city, to do just that. In time, Riga’s prosperity so depended on Jews that the restrictions cramping Jews throughout the Pale, the vast area of restricted residence, were lifted for the Jews of Riga.

  A Jewish resident of Riga by the 1850s could believe himself living in a German city. Osip Mandelstam described the world of his grandparents living in old Riga as ineluctably German. Isaiah Berlin’s father, a native of Riga, embraced German culture as his own. Morris Hillquit, Riga-born chairman of the Socialist Party of America, recounts that “the language of [Riga’s] courts and administrative offices, its theatres and schools, the language of its business and social intercourse,” was German. Coming of age in the 1870s in Riga, Hillquit considered himself “bilingual and cosmopolitan, without any marked national traits.”

  No wonder, then, that from all the provincial districts of Latvia and Lithuania, from as far away as Vilnius and beyond, young Jews flocked to Riga to escape the Pale of Settlement and to become something higher than Jewish, Russian, or even German—civilized. The ribbon of road crossing the Lithuanian border to Riga was the road for people with places to go. Jews of means beat dirt tracks to macadam, bought slips in Riga harbor, hired Riga agents, and set up pieds-à-terre near Riga’s baroque hotel.

  By the 1920s, when Jacob Levy returned to Riga from America and had his photo taken there, Jews lived in handsome residential blocks, designed by Jewish architecture students returned from Germany. In the late nineteenth century the city had begun to explode with architectural invention.

  The buildings lining Riga’s new Jewish neighborhoods had soaring facades with stem-like window apertures. Tendrils of iron curled around bay windows lined with silk organza, and from the balconies, in rows, young girls looked down, just as they looked down from their perches in Munich, Berlin, and Vienna. The German-educated children of timber wholesalers and glove manufacturers built curving staircases, gilded facades, doors and gates for the new German-style synagogues, hotels, and theaters in the style of art moderne and art nouveau.

  From the provinces, from as far away as Byelorussia and Poland and from the nearer cities of Lithuania, modern children might be sent to live together while they attended the Polytechnic or began careers in law or medicine or engineering. In dockside offices some children apprenticed themselves to uncles, who, by steady application, had made themselves known as reliable in all the relevant ports. There was a romantic logic to it as well. While billeting the likely boy in an upstairs room for the course of three years at the Polytechnic, one would not be shocked if the young man, in the course of learning a profession, also fell in love.

  Modern-day Riga. Photograph by Fred Levine.

  Riga was then, as it still is, a young person’s city, where girls from the provinces gathered the hair off their necks, frizzing it at the temples, and put on high lace collars. Strolling the square on the golden cobbles before the Cathedral of Peter and Paul, the girls swung para-sols as young men quickened their pace to join them. Free from mocking younger brothers and clucking, fussy mothers, the young men let hair grow on their upper lips, bought walking sticks, began to smoke.

  Nothing like this had ever happened to Jewish boys and girls penned inside the Pale of Settlement. But this happened frequently in that grand and established city on Russia’s western coast, the Free Hanseatic City of Riga.

  Which is why an image of Jacob’s first meeting with a Baron—Bernhard Baron’s sister, Sarah Baron—eventually formed in my mind along with a scene that goes something like this. The image and the scene provide a tender rationale for why the initials on the cane—PSL—have a little plaque under them reading “Riga.” Although he was born in Siauliai, Lithuania, as his brothers were, it was in Riga that Paul came of age in all important ways. In Riga he changed from a moony country boy into an agronomist and in Riga he grew to love Sarah.

  I like to envision the day when Jacob, visiting the city for the first time, bounds out after Paul from Uncle Adolph’s flat near the docks. Who is more boyish looking—the younger brother, Jacob, with his intent and searching eye, only thirteen—or the older Paul, loping, almost running, along the golden cobbles for a glimpse of his beloved Sarah?

  With his bar mitzvah behind him, Jacob has been permitted to board the train with his brother Paul and stay with him in the city. The train had sped across the green plains, its engine huffing rhythmically as they clicked across the border. From the second class compartment, now raucous with laughter, Paul and Jacob had burst out onto a street in Riga. What new sights the city offered! The depot itself was majestic, the skyline lit. In the morning, the city was somewhat less impressive yet more conducive to a lift in the heart, with its colored facades drinking in the sunlight and an impossibly blue sky bracing the spire of Peter and Paul.

  “There she is,” calls Paul over his shoulder to his brother. He hides nothing of his joy at seeing the girl, whose beauty I study many years later in a tintype I find at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. Sarah’s high lace collar and tight sleeves tell me that she and Paul must have met and fallen in love sometime between the late 1870s and early 1880s. Sarah’s sleeves and the frizzle of hair at her temples date the first blooming of love with Paul to just before he set sail for America, and thus the first rendezvous of Levys and Barons took place in this prepossessing city.

  Did Sarah know then that even when her bosomy softness turned to solid fat, even when her richly colored skin sallowed, Paul would love her as he did the morning he ran after her in Riga? Perhaps she did, for on that day I believe she had already delayed departing for America for more than a year, putting off the brother now urging her to join him in Baltimore. This brother Bernhard ’s epoch of penniless struggle in the New World was now definitely past. “Baron and Company,” he had written to her, was now a strong and expanding establishment, with a training school for boys, a wide and popular inventory of cigars, cheroots, and hand-rolled cigarettes, and prospects of future mechanization. Baltimore, unlike New York, was a city she need not feel lost in, for its German streets and German names would remind her of Riga. Still, I think it was not until her brother Bernhard wrote to say why not bring along her beau—he would pay the passage for them both and help the young man make something of himself—that Sarah agreed to leave Riga for Baltimore.

  I know with some certainty that Uncle Baron was not “from” Riga anymore than my Uncle Paul was, but came originally from the muddy slough of Brest-Litovsk and later from Rostov-on-Don. I do not even think it was Riga where he deposited his sisters, Deborah and Sarah, before he left for America, but rathe
r, Jewish Zagare, Lithuania. It was a poorer place, and Deborah, along with her sister and her Zagare-born husband, might have moved to the city with others. Zagare ’s connection to Shavli, as well as to Riga, would draw me and eventually bring me to stand in the woods where Shavli’s Jews lay with Zagare ’s. But this was later, and another story.

  On the question of why and how Paul and then Jacob came to Baltimore, I believe that sometime in the late 1870s or early 1880s, Sarah met my great-grandfather Jacob’s brother Paul in Riga and fell in love. By then her brother Bernhard had passed through his difficult early years in America and had begun to build something—a vision as well as a machine—in Baltimore, and he brought Sarah and Paul to join him there. Then he brought Jacob. And then, a few years later, he brought his other sister Deborah, whose eldest daughter, Amelia, eventually became Jacob’s wife and the mother of my three great-aunts, my great-uncles Eddie, Bob, Paul, and Theo, and my grandfather Emil.

  For as long as she lived, however, nothing stopped my Aunt Fanny from insisting her father was from both Austria and Riga, handling the discrepancy thus: “My father came,” she insisted, “from Riga—in Austria.”

  So distracted was I by the fact that my aunt sounded the i in Riga like the i in “fig” that, except for thinking that it sounded somehow wrong, I didn’t pay much attention to the way she ’d moved Riga out of the Russian sphere of influence into the German, with as little regard for geography as if Bangor could, on someone ’s say-so, turn up suddenly on Lake Michigan, as Chicago. When I knew better, I just assumed, not without some smugness, that sweet dear Aunt Fanny was rather muddleheaded. Latvia? Austria? Six of one, half a dozen of the other. But geographic boundaries, after all, existed.

  These things kept countries mired where they were planted.

  Except, as I was to learn, as the cane later taught me to understand, when they didn’t.

  FOUR

  The Free Hanseatic City of Balt-ee-mewer

  Why had my great-grandfather used the occasion of his naturalization in Baltimore in 1893 to claim Austria, rather than Shavli, Lithuania, as his place of origin? And what was the reason for my aunts’ insistence on places of family origin vaguely, if not actually, German?

  Weren’t Riga and even Siauliai sufficiently proud and prosperous not to have tempted my great-grandfather to lie about them? When I visited there they seemed presentable enough, and Jacob had gone to no trouble to cover evidence. The passport tracing his return from Europe in 1928 was stamped England, Germany, Latvia, and Lithuania, without even a stop in Austria. And of course the metalwork plates on the stock of Jacob’s cane specified, in addition to Riga in Latvia, only Lithuanian towns, Raseinai and Siauliai, which no one looking at a map would ever find in Austria.

  Was it shame, then, at not hailing from western Europe but from the Pale of Settlement, that cordon sanitaire established by Nicholas I of Russia to solve the Jewish “problem”? After returning from meeting my cousin Moshe, this is what I thought had to be the case: My great-grandfather made the not atypical Jewish decision to claim a German pedigree rather than the more common eastern European one. But this guess was wrong.

  For when I found and then used Jacob’s cane to guide me around the streets of his adopted American city, Baltimore, I came to see that while Jacob’s claim to have come from Austria may have been a fabrication, it was an imaginative and a telling, rather than a trivial or shamefaced, fabrication. Moreover, little in his subsequent experience in Baltimore would contradict that fiction because his Baltimore almost fancied itself as Vienna, an outpost of Germanness, though one less parochial and more enlightened than Germany itself.

  The gesture of using a line on his naturalization papers to declare himself quit of the emperor of Austria told a truth about Jacob perhaps more telling than mere birthplace. The scorn he expressed for Austria and its ruler stood for his general scorn for every king, pharaoh, or potentate, and indeed for every imperium the world over. Jacob’s renunciation of the emperor was a sign of his universal, liberal spirit.

  Baltimore. A city rivaling Vienna? A place of cultivation, cosmopolitan grace, and European grandeur? It was hard to credit. Certainly the Baltimore I’d seen, or thought I knew because my relatives lived there, was no Hapsburg capitol.

  The Baltimore I visited as a young girl was a dingy, smelly, sketchy-seeming place. My family lived outside Washington, D.C., in Maryland, and we drove though Baltimore regularly on our way to Philadelphia to visit my three aunts. Rusty, drab, its residential streets lined with liquor stores and Polish seafood joints, the Baltimore I glimpsed from the car was down at the heels. A pervasive burning smell—diesel fuel overlaid with cheap, sweet pleasures (hot dogs, crab shells, cigarette smoke) drifted out to the highway. From the backseat my brother and I clowned that the letters on the derelict-looking railcars, B & O, stood for body odor. When my father told us they stood for Baltimore and Ohio, the once proud railway that took thousands of newly arrived immigrants west, Ohio suffered by association.

  My brother and I were amused by the way people from Baltimore, or at least our relatives, spoke, exaggerating long vowels and accentuating consonants in an accent that struck me as odd but certainly not “European.”

  My Aunt Fanny’s way of turning any silent, half silent, or even short vowel sound into a long one (as in “don’t you look just bee-oootee-ful”) and at the same time, of changing random consonants (voicing the final s of “gas” to make it “gazz”) was an extreme example, but all of my relatives had similar ways of emphasizing and improvising sounds. My uncles, who called themselves man-ahfack-chrs, would lament the end of man-ahfack-chring, remembering the heyday of all the may-jer man-ahfack-chrs. My aunts traced Balt-ee-mewer’s decline to when the fine dee-partment stores started to close down. Once it was no longer possible to spend a Sat-ur-dee in town—too dangerous, too dingy, and even the best downtown hotel, the Lord Balt-ee-mewer, had closed its tea rooms—the city’s best days were over.

  End of an eee-ra in Balt-ee-mewer.

  As I said, it was hard for me, hearing these sounds as a child, to understand them as intentionally cultivated. But this is what they were, for my aunts and uncles had been raised in Baltimore, where slurred letters signified low class. Their exaggerated ee-nunciations were their generation’s retaining wall against the argot of the South and also a bulwark against a host of merely American, that is to say, gentile, habits of speech and manners.

  These could all, in some way, be represented by the local pronunciation of the city’s name—Ball’mer. Ball’mer was a place where the gentiles took bottles right from the icebox and placed them on the dining table. Balt-ee-mewer Jews knew to put their condiments in proper condiment trays, bestowed on brides.

  Ball’mer was a place where girls sat on stoops in sloppy bobby socks, men visited taprooms and went to work without proper coats and ties. But not my relatives in Balt-ee-mewer, where nice people, Jewish people, knew how to live properly.

  So it was represented to me by my three elderly aunts—who lived in Philadelphia, where they moved to be near the second branch of their father’s company, Levy’s International Shrinking Company. Each in her one-bedroom apartment sanctum, my aunts cultivated this weltanschauung—old, exacting, fine—without ever mentioning, or acknowledging, the more casual American ethos it stood against. This was a weltanschauung not unkind but strict, one that took for granted prompt arrivals, clean babies, monogrammed guest towels.

  Fundamentally urbane, their weltanschauung also took for granted the superiority of a Saturday “in town” over any of the laxer amusements of home. It exacted workmanship in haberdashery and upholstery. It believed family life was properly regulated by a cycle of clubs and card games, dinners and coming-out parties, engagement luncheons and other charming fêtes. The rhythms and ceremonies of the life cycle were maintained by orders of stationery—announcements, invitations, thank-you notes.

  This weltanschauung assumed the superiority of a taxi over a car-pool, a trunk
over a carry-on, and regarded as only suitable such functionaries as the driver, the porter, the caterer, and the waiter in the club car.

  “I can tell you,” I remember my aunt ’s voice rising with emphasis, “trains were certainly different in those days—none of these plastic cups and ‘self-service.’” From Aunt Fanny’s tone, I was to understand that for a Jewish lady of Balt-ee-mewer, service was not something of which a self was strictly capable.

  Given all this, it was ignorant on my part and tactless, I now realize, to ask Aunt Fanny if she remembered any Yiddish.

  “Yiddish?” She laughed nervously.

  I persisted: “Your father began, didn’t he, in East Baltimore, an immigrant. He must have spoken some Yiddish, didn’t he?”

  I could see she found the question in bad taste. I ought to have known Jacob Levy was as likely to speak Yiddish to his children as they were to mistake fork on the left for knife on the right. The language of the household was English, although her father’s background would have permitted him to converse in German, Russian, whatever they spoke in Riga, Austria, and maybe Yiddish as well.

  Aunt Fanny was trying to answer my inquiries, but I was not to take advantage. Which left the whole matter entirely confusing and mysterious—until Jacob’s cane led me from his Baltic origins to his own little Austria in Baltimore. As my aunt implied, Jacob, arriving in Baltimore in the mid-1880s, made a claim true to the spirit of both his place of origin and of destination. The Baltic regions of his origin had been, for centuries, little Germanies once removed.