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

  “We chose someone to read to us,” explained Samuel Gompers, “who was a particularly good reader, and in payment the rest of us gave him sufficient of our cigars that he was not the loser.” A quiet task, requiring dexterous hands but leaving the intellect unoccupied, cigar rolling afforded long hours for conversation and brought a man of thoughtful bent into contact with like-minded others. Cigar factories up and down the Atlantic coast were sites of lively seminars in social thought. Debating in both German and English, habitués of these cigar salons viewed their workshops as satellites of London and Vienna, outposts of internationalist thought.

  David Hirsch’s shop, for instance, where Gompers worked, was, as contemporary accounts suggest, less a cigar factory that happened to employ men of intellectual bent than a sort of reading room for socialists. There the German intellectual tradition blew strong day and night, émigrés keeping themselves and families in groceries at the bench but keeping their minds—and hopes—alive with Marx, Lasalle, Bernstein, and Owen. German speakers like Adolph Strasser and English speakers like Samuel Gompers exchanged labor theories and language tutorials. The 1870s were, as Sorge, the American head of the International Workingman’s Organization, called them, “the period of highest accomplishment . . . when real true wage earners and craftsman of all possible trades . . . competed with each other in learning economics.” It was generally agreed that the cigar rollers set the tone and held the center, their eloquence preparing the ground for the next generation’s leap into progressive reform.

  They might work with their hands, they theorized, but this did not make their work brutal or unintelligent. Between “manu-facture” and mere “manual labor” was the skilled worker, whose dexterous (rather than automatic) motions, his diligent (rather than coerced) industry, whose mindful (not absent-minded) agency conferred human value on mere matter.

  In the New York Public Library, scrolling year by year through the microfilm of the city directory, I find Uncle Baron’s first actual address in America.

  Living on Broome Street in 1873, he is not yet Bernhard but Bernhardt. He lives a few streets south of his famous bench mate, still Gomperz, Samuel, occupation also listed as “seegarmaker.” I surmise that as I find no trace of him in New York before this date, he probably lived for a few years in the basest poverty, flush days allowing him a flop in one of the dormitory “hotels” in which single men, for three or four cents, could buy the use of a canvas hammock.

  Later pictures of Uncle Baron tell me what he would have looked like in 1873, age twenty-three, rolling cigars on his bench and listening to the philosophers of the 144th union spin out their debates, perhaps even adding a thought of his own. From the pictures of the mustached older man, vest buttoned over his squarish torso, I summon up a solid youngster on the edge of manhood. Not tall but robust looking, with a strong nose, narrow nostrils, brownish hair, and dark brows, he tilts his head as he listens to the dialogue, drinks in the rhetoric.

  What is to be done? (This is what they ask each other.)

  What is to be done to ameliorate the suffering, the ignorance, the poor health, and the hunger of the working man?

  What is to be done to free the textile worker, the man in the field, the hauler, the stevedore, the grimy factory operative?

  What is to be done to feed his belly, to nourish his brain, to realize for him and his fellows the intrinsic dignity of the worker?

  With eloquence, with learnedness, with disputes sometimes so heated that a man throws down his work, stalks out, and is not seen again, the cigar makers among whom my Uncle Baron spent his first years in America asked always the same question, in many forms: “What is to be done?”

  Sometime in 1873 or 1874 Uncle Baron disappeared from the Broome Street address.

  David Jeremy, in the entry for Bernhard Baron in his volume Business Leaders of England, places him at that time in New Haven, the tobacco center of New England, selling cigars to Yale College students, and then has him in New York working through 1875 or 1876 for F. S. Kinney, who produced the Sweet Caporal cigarette, the first European-style parparo produced in the United States.

  Kinney would have done well to hire Uncle Baron; he was among the most aggressive Americans hoping to make the cigarette sell. A more interesting possibility, though, is that in 1875 none other than James Buchanan Duke spirited Baron away from Kinney in one of his many raids on Kinney’s workforce, taking to his bosom the man who would, twenty years later, foil Duke’s takeover of the European cigarette business. This would explain my Uncle Baron’s claim to have spent many of his early nights in America in “tobacco sheds,” as well as his frequent reminder that between 1875 and 1895 not a year went by that he did not see for himself the cultivation, harvest, and cure of the tobacco grown in Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas.

  Perhaps it begins to explain as well the pity, the sentiment, the passion that inspired Baron as, in his last bent years, a scion of London with every comfort, he seemed unwilling to allow himself or anyone to forget the world’s unfortunates, so that he sometimes appeared gripped by memories he could not keep down, his voice on the speaker’s platform going reedy with urgency.

  He had himself seen the epitome of human exploitation in the lot of the tobacco workers of Brest and Rostov. There he had seen the haze of golden dust disperse, the fine brown particles settling on the sleeve, and had cocked an ear to hear the telltale cough. He had observed fetid alley homes and the cramped planks where men and women slept, immodest, filthy, hungry. He felt indignation that anyone should be forced to work in hard or unhealthful conditions, felt with conviction that the duty of the fortunate is to assist the unfortunate.

  It was then that he fell prey to a tenderness—this perhaps more than anything else—for the poor mother’s child who, at the end of a long day, made his bed in a tobacco shed.

  In the Baker Library at Harvard University I first see Uncle Baron in high resolution, as he was when Jacob Levy first met him in Baltimore.

  The original ledgers of Dun’s Baltimore credit inspectors, now held at Baker Library, contain long entries on Uncle Baron. The inspectors reported on him twice a year, noting his energy and success in building a growing tobacco concern.

  In careful, close handwriting the inspectors note (November 1879) the establishment of Baron and Company Cigars in Baltimore, headed by one Bernhardt Baron (of Russian Jewish extraction), whom former employers call an “honest reliable man: prospects excellent.” After the next visit, observing that Baron is said to be “upright in all his transactions,” the inspectors also describe him as “an active, pushing man doing a good cautious trade.” In June 1880 his capital is estimated at “3 to 4 thousands,” but a few months later they round it off to 5 and note, approvingly, the acquisition of a partner, one Bernhard Heinebach, who adds $12,500 to the capital. Inspectors on February 7, 1881, report that while Baron has been burned out of his former factory space, he is insured, and that by March, with working capital of $10,000, he is moving into new larger spaces on East Pratt. By 1884, “encumbered by a ground rent” he has “15 or 16 thousand in capital, is in good repute at his bank and works with comparatively light expenses.” The handwriting of a new inspector notes the acquisition of a new investor and partner, Hy Krauss.

  He notes too that Baron is now “employing a number of the boys at St. Mary’s Industrial School.” Krauss attends to financial matters, the inspector notes approvingly, while Baron shuttles between the Pratt Street factory and spending time with the Negro boys of the Industrial School.

  In 1884 his business is estimated to be worth “30,000.” He works 150 hands, sells to the best trade, to “first class parties.”

  It is clear that Dun’s inspectors like and approve of my Uncle Baron.

  I am swept up in the excitement of his rising success.

  Uncle Baron has been dead for 90 years, and it is almost 120 years since he left Baltimore, but as I read and reread volume 9 of Dun’s I feel proud of his honesty, his good sense, a
nd his exceptional kindness. The boys of the St. Mary’s School, the poorest of the Negro unfortunates, have few patrons like Uncle Baron, the man I see more and more clearly as solid, serious, with a warm face under his bristling hair.

  I see him in various scenarios—journeying by streetcar to St. Mary’s, returning to his red brick house—a whole house, large enough for a family—on Sharp Street, writing letters in his cubby of an office, in a firm and careful hand. By this time, summer 1884, the Dun’s inspectors note that though “burnt out again” he is again rebuilding. My great-grandfather Jacob would have arrived in Baltimore by then and met the man who would profoundly affect his family’s destiny. I cannot picture Jacob yet, but his mentor, his patron, his new marvelous friend holds the center of scenes fully formed in my mind.

  One scene has lodged in my imagination so long that I believe it happened.

  A summer’s day in August 1884. The closeness of the inland town unbearable, heat like a lid on the fetid streets, Uncle Baron sits under the fan in a pump room on Thames Street, Fells Point. There is a breeze, if a somewhat noxious one; the moist air off Locust Point brings the stink of oysters, tomatoes, and beans rotting to mush on cannery floors.

  Leaning forward at the wooden bar, Uncle Baron pushes his stein across the slick bar, buffs the wobbly circle dry with the tail of his coat. Then he draws a pack of oblong papers from his pocket, then a little chamois pouch, breathes its sweet moisture, and shakes something out on the precious slip of paper.

  The tobacco is warm and moist from the humidor of his trouser pocket, but the paper is so dry and silken he can’t catch it on his calluses, can’t roll a smoke of uniform length and bulk with any reasonable consistency. If Bernhard Baron can’t roll a perfect cigarette more than two times out of three, who can?

  What option is there, he thinks, what choice for a man of advanced views, but to use some machine, some device for rolling the cigarette. Not, he thinks (now experimentally pressing the cylinder into the bar’s guttered lip; bracing the roll on either end with two matchbooks) to do away with a manly craft. Not (and this would be worse) to visit on little hands of children the burning, the numbness, that he and every cigar roller sometimes suffered.

  But somehow, rather, to preserve and also to humanize this more delicate work for men of craft—while also making it pay for one such as he, one devoted (as his circulars promised, and as he told Dun’s adjusters) to “liberal and progressive” enterprise.

  He would never deny that the cigar mold had brought on deepening troubles. Through the 1860s and 1870s cigar rollers had pronounced the cigar mold the weapon of capital, and what’s more, the end of the rollers’ manly independence. A device that made it possible for any “colored” woman, any Russian Jewish child, to roll a cigar was a threat to the old guildists and the New World protégés alike. Their arguments had merit.

  But he knew too, in his own fingers and wrists, just how damaging the manly craft of cigar rolling was to hands. Late in life, if in sleep his right hand should curl a certain way, reflex would lock it in an angled cup, and he would wake, working nervous fingers up and down a wrapper, the pain locking his thumb to wrist, elbow to scapula.

  In the new factory on East Pratt, Baron and Company, he would need to have Kraus watch sharply. The workers should rotate tasks: mornings, palms up; afternoons, palms down. Kraus would have to see to it that the “Germans” gave the colored men their turns at rolling while they trimmed or bunched.

  Not that any of the men, except for the few yeshiva bred, minded the dark girls trimming for them. It was sharing the bench with the men that raised hackles. Baron had often seen younger Bohemians “teaching” the girls how to roll, their gartered sleeves wrapping the thin backs. This was another matter Kraus would need to manage.

  He had, of course, let himself in for more of it last night. Boarding the train back from the Wilson auction—his shipment paid for and due at Locust Point by month’s end—he had hoisted his satchel into the Negro car. Amid the crumbs and greasy paper of Negro families, he slept fitfully, drifting in and out over the rattle and the bickering of three boys whose parents were too exhausted to scold. At dawn he had hired the whole family—mother, father, and boys—to work for him.

  Experience told him that the mother would be easiest to put in the line, for her fingers were slender and long. But she would soon see a better opportunity, putting herself out to service on Lombard Street.

  But her man, half her size, needed the indoor job more. Too slight for dock work and unlikely, with that short curing-house cough, to adapt to the wind and slush of the oyster sheds, he would, with luck, prove to have a good eye for examining tobacco. Someone needed to look out for badly cured lots or too much cheap burley. Baron liked the idea of this man, with his quick looks and air of caution, becoming a silent adjutant to Kraus. He added an offer to slip the two older boys in with the St. Mary’s lads. They could learn the trade and also have some schooling. The little one would have to stay with some alley-house woman.

  In Baltimore in the early 1880s Baron had begun work on the machine that would carry him and others to London.

  After the boys of St. Mary’s finished sweeping up and Heinebach left, Baron stayed in the factory, tools scattered around his workbench—wrenches, tiny screwdrivers, and baskets of standardized parts, the kind that came in kits obtainable through Inventors magazine.

  Big manufacturers were crying out for an automatic cigarette rolling machine. Prototypes had been built; the Bonsack, winner of Allen and Ginter’s contest, was the first. But none so far could run continuously, and so Baron used his many lonely evenings to stay at the factory, working on his own version of the automatic cigarette machine.

  He was often alone in these years. Within three or four years of arriving in New York he had acquired a wife, which meant a wife and parents, who were in-laws of the tidy, fussy, German Jewish kind. Moving them all to Baltimore in the late 1870s had been harder than he’d expected. His son Louis, a softhearted, loving boy, showed an aptitude for the business, even accompanying him to the factory and to St. Mary’s, though his wife expressed her worries about Louis befriending the boys there. The girls, however, longed for their cousins back in New York. They found Baltimore hot, alarming with its roving Negroes, and too full of steep hills.

  So more and more he sent his wife and the girls on the train to New York, which was why he spent so many nights at the factory, sometimes falling asleep, as so often in the past, with the smell of tobacco, the siftings of tobacco under his head.

  In 1881 or 1882, with business thriving and the newspapers reporting a clear downturn for Jews all over the Russian empire (even in Riga there were incidents), he hit upon the idea of finally bringing his two sisters to join him.

  He knew in his heart that he could have done this long before and that the idea now was for selfish reasons. He had concluded that more family—girls in particular—might help his daughters acclimate to their new city, might provide more of that atmosphere of giggles, bows, and furbelows they craved. His sister Deborah was a dowager with children. Her girls—Amelia, Lena, Lilly—were more or less his girls’ age and hardly a comedown, hailing as they did from Riga, as elegantly “German” as one could desire.

  Moreover, Sarah, eight years younger than her dour sister and still unmarried, might act as older sister, taking some burden off his wife, who was not robust. He was under no illusions that the whole plan would be cheap. Deborah would be, if he knew her, disinclined to bestir herself from where she was, being suspicious of America and miffed to be summoned after so long. She would need a house big enough for her crowd of petticoats, and her husband Moses Elfant—Morris, they could call him—would need some sort of employment, something to write on the line in the city directory next to the address. Oh well. He would not be the only skinny pious apple of his family’s eye to find himself in America assisting his stout, bossy wife at the counter.

  Best perhaps he would bring the younger sister, Sarah—round
, sweet, curly haired Sarah—first. She had a beau, a boy at polytechnic studying agronomy and one who’d already changed his name from Perel or Pinchas to Paul and whom Deborah and Morris suspected of “radicalism.”

  So much the better!

  Perhaps an agronomist with progressive tendencies might be just the help he needed—showing talent at choosing leaf, an expert in worms or acidity of soil. He had a need for competent, educated people at Baron and Company, and he could use a capable brother-in-law. Or two. If the boy Paul was serious about Sarah, he’d bring him over and his younger brother Jacob also.

  This was how it happened that in 1881, when Jacob visited Paul in Riga, where he’d met his brother’s beloved Sarah, he might first have heard from Paul about the notion of going to America. Bernhard had written more than once to say that Baron and Company was now on solid footing, and why shouldn’t Sarah come to Baltimore. If she and Paul were serious about each other, she could bring Paul along as well as his brother Jacob. As soon as they said the word he would send steamship tickets—Bremen to Baltimore.

  SEVEN

  Beautiful Machines

  Down the hall to Aunt Myrtle’s apartment I went, walking slowly, a week after her funeral in 1995, to see the things still left unclaimed and to choose what I’d like to be mine. It was the first time I had ever walked that hall without finding Aunt Myrtle there to greet me.

  Aunt Myrtle and Aunt Fanny lived, for the first ten years of my life, in two garden apartments in the same sprawling brick complex in Philadelphia. In the mid-1970s, when their father’s business—begun in 1900 in his Baltimore basement, its name now changed from Levy’s International Shrinking Company to Synthetics Finishing and its clients now worldwide—was thriving, my aunts’ sons Fred and Dan moved both of them to elegantly appointed condominiums so that they could enjoy their last years in style.