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

  One has to wonder, though, whether Jean’s fond memories of her father handing out bread on street corners were not in part a feint, a screen. A diversionary narrative, colorful and innocent and focused on Jacob’s generosity, would have been of help to a girl desperate to retain innocent memories of childhood. Such a talismanic memory would distract attention from the period of Jacob’s intense political activity, a period when Jean’s own world, along with her father’s, was turned upside down.

  This was the period, with World War I raging in Europe, when she was married and widowed so quickly that her first son, Earle, could not remember the father who was off to France before Earle turned two. Her second, Jerry, was born while his father was dying of influenza in camp. And so she began her service as helpmeet and partner, secretary, aide de camp, hostess, and comrade to a distracted, irritable congressional candidate, while at the same time, in the years before she shunted such work off to Myrtle, functioning as cook, nursemaid, comfort, and scold to her five younger brothers and sisters. By 1913 her mother became too much for anyone to handle and Jacob committed Amelia to an asylum in Baltimore. Then he saw his first son off to London (ostensibly to pursue a musical education) and, with three boys and two more girls still at home, took the giant step of leasing a factory in Philadelphia. All this was in addition to launching a campaign to represent Baltimore’s Third Ward, its industrial heart, in Congress. It was quite a year, 1914.

  With the steady wartime demand for shrunk woolens, it made sense for Jacob to take a business risk by opening a second facility in a second city. The move entailed long-term possibilities.

  But the run for Congress?

  That was harder to square with the responsibilities this forty-five-year-old man had: the institutionalized wife; the unmarried daughters; the rowdy, restless sons; the boiler to light, workers to placate, orders to get out, trucks to keep in repair; the first son abroad; the second son assuming decision-making powers beyond his years; the worries of the in-laws, of his wife’s sister, of his brother Paul; his own constant worries. Perhaps he ran to get away from it all.

  He must have felt sheer terror when he realized what was happening to his family. Perhaps he developed a desperate resolve to fill his days and thoughts with distractions. A new business! A new city! Escape from the heart ’s cares. Thus do men of a certain active, intellectual sort climb aboard bullet trains.

  Jacob’s lucky break was in finding a train that seemed bound for glory. He climbed aboard the express train of the Socialist Party of America, a party that had gained so much strength and influence that in 1912 its candidate for president, Eugene Debs, garnered a million votes.

  Debs’s spectacular showing, the remarkable respect and influence wielded by Socialist Party members in Congress, especially Morris Hillquit, gave the party a level of momentum and visibility inspiring to many. The party’s remarkably successful campaign to marginalize Bill Haywood’s Wobblies as radical extremists of the Wild West, and then Hillquit’s besting of Samuel Gompers in a debate, made the Socialist Party seem to be, in 1913 and 1914, defining the terms of national debate.

  A visitor dropping into a Socialist club in any major city might mistake the speechifying, leafleting, canvassing, and such for the signs of nonstop campaigning. The party’s embrace of journalism as a dynamic tool in the spread of socialist thought gave persons of ideas immediate political relevancy. Despising the merely material gains sought by Wobblies and unionists, the 1912 platform of the SPA decried organization by industry or craft in favor of solidarity by class, and it encouraged its members toward more universal gains than the shorter work day or a union wage. Appealing to new unity among all those “forced to work for a living, by hand or brain,” the party’s first objective came to be constitutional reform, gradual but sure, toward the “cooperative commonwealth.”

  To get where they were going, the Wobblies wanted pageants of worker unity, nonviolent or violent as the case required. The unionists wanted to be at the table with management. The Socialist Party wanted candidates for Congress, and my great-grandfather Jacob answered the call.

  To bring socialism and the party and its ideas into the mainstream, the SPA needed candidates for national, state, and local offices. With the party’s need for candidates coinciding with his own need to find a distracting occupation, no wonder Jacob ran.

  Had Jacob not had Jean at home, could he have done it without her? Without Jean, smart, capable, and ready to spring into the vacuum Amelia left, would he have run for Congress?

  Probably not. The fact that her father depended on her was probably one reason Aunt Jean in later years romanticized his socialism, even as she avoided discussing the time of his greatest activity. While Jacob canvassed the Third Ward, singing the praises of Debs, mouthing the slogans of Hillquit and some of his own, it was Jean, the eldest daughter, who kept the family on track.

  Pictures of the period show how imperious, how imposing she looked, even as a girl of seventeen. Hair swept into a chignon, her forehead smooth, her wide belt cinched over her hips, and her coat’s flared hem brushing her tapered heels, Jean presents a smoother version of the ninety-year-old woman before whom we children trembled, slipping with our Coke and ice cubes past the brocade chair.

  It was Jean, I surmise, who traveled from Baltimore to Philadelphia and back in one day, acting as her father’s emissary to bankers and landlords, to trade journals, and to the printer with orders for the company stationery. It would have been Jean proceeding to rental agents and around the unfamiliar city to find a house for all of them. It would have been Jean who, back on the train and then home to her brothers and sisters, sulked at what they were now, so far from what she expected them to be. Jean would have reminded them of the duties the family now required of them, since the newly hired maid was not good for much at all. Jean would have told her sisters that, since Amelia’s care ate up precious funds, their father would need more effort from them and, perhaps, a move away from Baltimore.

  Of course Jean did all this in the same year she became pregnant with her first child and married Percy Adler. And in that order.

  Although her sisters, nieces, and nephews always had pungent words to say about Jean’s typical brazenness, in particular how she began an affair with her third husband, the brother of her second husband who was dying of Parkinson’s, no one ever breathed a word about her hurry-up first marriage. I learned about it from Jean’s English niece, Paula, who had it from Jean’s first son Earle, conceived before his mother and father wed. The marriage occurred just before Percy went off to war and proved useful to Jean, for it got her out of Baltimore, away from the burden of brothers and sisters and, for a few years, to the relative freedom of the family’s Philadelphia outpost. As Jacob’s scout and on-site manager, the size of her belly kept safely beyond the calculations of the Elfant in-laws, Jean’s residence in Philadelphia gave her a reprieve from endless supervision of her brothers and sisters. As for Jacob, living in Philadelphia gave him some breathing space away from his glowering mother-in-law Deborah and the insufferable Morris Elfant. Even before Amelia’s illness and Jacob’s decision to put her in the home near Paul’s farm, the Elfants had blamed every untoward event on him, showering disapproval on the pair of Levy brothers to whom Bernhard Baron had paired their girls.

  No, the Elfants did not like Paul or Jacob. Paul, the dreamer, the crazy farmer, had dragged Sarah off to the goyish wilderness to share his foolishness. But Jacob the “social-eest,” as Deborah called him, had been a disaster.

  In the beginning he ’d looked like a more than suitable son-in-law. He spoke perfect German as well as Russian and Yiddish, and wrote English without error. He had excellent taste in haberdashery, a habit of wide reading, and the conversation of an educated man. Fifteen years after arriving in America, he ’d transported himself and his family out of East Baltimore to a tonier section of the city, West Lombard Street. Deborah and Morris deemed it unreasonable that no Yiddish was spoken in the household, and
that the children were forbidden the happy casual running about the streets allowed to the neighbor’s children while, shockingly, they were permitted milk with meat, Sabbath breaking, and all manner of loose behavior.

  But the warning signs were there. The Elfants might have guessed that something was off when, after some economic success, Jacob did not move out of the city like other Jews, but stayed close to the wharf on the other side of the bay from the industrial center. All the clothiers to whose back docks he delivered the woolens made their homes in the apartments whose broad lobbies glowed golden with tawny marbles and low sofas. Contributing handsomely to the Hebrew charities and attending proper religious services, such Jews comported themselves with decorum and seriousness.

  Not Jacob.

  Although he might have lived among Baltimore ’s elite, he maintained a house near the Loft District on Lombard, within smelling distance of the bay. As for his politics, as Baltimore Jewry raised its tone, he let his sink. Not for him the pat pat pat of hands, the sedate supper served before the lecture, the swish of gloves and gowns as the leading citizens entered the Lyric Theatre to hear their honored speaker, Supreme Court Justice Brandeis, expand on the glories of citizenship. Brandeis compared his fellow Hebrews to the early American pilgrims. The lights of the theater silvering his handsome head, Brandeis—Harvard trained, modern but Jewish—epitomized that progress, that refinement to which the decent Jews of Baltimore aspired. Was Jacob even there on the breathless night when, unified by patriotism, “Representatives of every Jewish class and group were present. . . . throughout the house could be seen workingmen and women, and not infrequently a patriarchal beard and even a shaidl.”

  Probably not. From the genteel and tidy rim of his residential street, its narrow townhouses brightened with white marble steps and its rises flanked with ironwork, Jacob plunged—inexplicably—back into the sink of the city with its strikes and crowds and agitations. Dangerous. Dirty. Embarrassing. Not nice. Not proper. Not respectable.

  Given the level of alienation existing between the Levy and Elfant families, I assume that Jacob returned his in-laws’ disgust, not hiding his scorn for those who considered “social-eest” a term of opprobrium. Why should he associate with people who did not understand that he was not nearly as radical as he might have been, that his party was, far from rowdy or unlawful, in love with the law? His own run for office was part of the party’s nationwide effort to put Socialists inside the tent, to elevate American citizenship and not, as the Elfants claimed, to threaten it.

  He left no diary of the period when he plunged into politics, but hints of what he read and where he went, of the company he kept, suggest the Elfants were mistaken about him.

  To be a candidate for the Socialist Party meant he was no radical, no rabble rouser, but rather a respectable member of the optimistic ranks, hopeful that ideas hatched in Europe might—at long last—be applied in America. Big Bill Haywood thought the Socialists’ leader, his own Hillquit, a milksop. Haywood mocked the “pink teas” where Hillquit was a popular speaker, suavely assuring the ladies that “socialism didn’t care how many dresses they had.” Both from the right and the left, Socialists were criticized for being out of touch with the workingman and in love with theory.

  Hillquit, from Jacob’s native region in Lithuania, used just those terms to draw Jacob to his party. Hillquit did not seek to tear down civilization but to build it up. Courtly and eloquent, Hillquit smoothed the way for the socialist advance by assuring ladies at their pink teas and workingmen in the halls that it was “ever improving methods of wealth production, ever growing keenness and profundity of the human mind . . . and so [an] ever rising level of human morality” that guaranteed the survival of civilization. Haywood and Gompers might mock Hillquit’s popularity among the better educated, but Jacob thought that Hillquit’s socialism was the enlightened creed, not just politics but a philosophy and an intellectual practice.

  Why should Jacob be bound by these petit bourgeois Elfants, these ghetto Jews with their worship of Eutaw Place and not even two thoughts in their heads?

  For their part they called him Luftmensch—someone who lived on air, neglecting his family and lacking decent feelings or opinions. They said that Mr. Jacob M. Levy was a disgrace, a man who’d choose a workmen’s lecture series over a shabbes dinner. What to do with a man who preferred a book to human contact, who sat in company with his face behind the daily newspaper, nothing but his plume of cigarette smoke drifting above? One could not, after all, live in books.

  One of my greatest regrets is that at some point in the 1970s, when I was already an avid reader myself, I didn’t visit and perhaps take a few souvenirs from my great-grandfather’s library.

  It makes me wince and also, I admit, brings out my own intolerance, my snobbishness, that in contrast to all the goblets and ramekins saved for me and others, no thought was given to saving Jacob’s books. Would I not trade, I’ve said to myself, the set of six flowered dessert dishes or the pink vegetable bowl, the green painted scene of a Chinese girl bending under a willow tree, or the nut or pickle forks (still wrapped in plastic) for just a few of the moldy books? Salt cellars, parfait dishes, cake servers I have in quantity, but not one book from my great-grandfather’s fabled library, books floor to ceiling, which even my mother, age four when he died, remembers.

  Of the large collection he amassed over forty or fifty years all I’ve seen are his Morocco-bound Bible, in which he kept the notice of his firstborn son Edward ’s name change, and one other book—an illustrated Don Quixote—now possessed by Aunt Myrtle ’s granddaughter Carol. And that is all. A picture of him holding a copy of The Call, the organ of Morris Hillquit ’s Socialist Party of America; copies of the election results of November 1914, Jacob Levy, Socialist candidate for the Third Ward; and certain pungent letters on the rights of landlords and workers are all I have to tell me what he read, to give me a picture of the ideas he entertained.

  It vexes me, frustrates me, and makes me blame myself for not catching on sooner, for not getting myself to the factory annex where, from 1939 till 1979, my great-grandfather’s books remained unread and unloved, until they were carted away to a dubious destination after the Philadelphia plant was closed in favor of new ones in the suburbs and in North Carolina. I feel not only frustrated but angry that I failed to realize the value of that library in time, that I’ve had to go to some lengths to retrieve my great-grandfather’s personal catalog by other means.

  At a certain stage of my quest I thought I might get help from librarians at some of the branches where he’d gone to quiet his nerves with a day of reading. But my inquiries won me only a rebuke; the librarian I spoke with was unwilling even to entertain the idea of sharing a borrower’s reading record. What was a public library, she reminded me, but a bulwark of intellectual freedom and privacy? Would I want someone seeing what I’d checked out?

  This failing, I’ve spent more than one afternoon lost in various historical collections, my interest not just in the ideas of Chernechevski, Lasalle, Sorge, and Hillquit, but in the imprints of 1899 and 1903, whose bindings I’ve fingered lovingly, thus creating on the floor the virtual library he would have read. I’ve thumbed and leafed through all manner of paper-bound tomes and pamphlets, glorying in the distribution networks, the marvelous freedom in the democratic country, imperfect but yet free, that allowed a Jew from Siauliai, Lithuania, to purchase, unchallenged and unmolested, a whole library of subversive classics such as the Intercollegiate Socialistic or the National Ripsaw; to read, if he chose, The Call—sedate, thoughtful, cautious, patriotic—or perhaps the naughty Masses ad that waggishly reassured: “Anarchists! O Dear No! Law and Order is our Middle Name! THE MASSES should be on every library table. It will entertain the babies, upset Ma and give Pa a jolt regularly once a month. WE GUARANTEE TO ANNOY. Have you a little dynamite in your home?”

  Which of these books did Jacob own—all of them, none, more radical or less? I could easily have learned what he a
ccumulated in his library had I gone to see it. But I have only the memories of certain afternoons with Jacob’s grandsons and nephews, who loved to recall their grandfather’s trove of red journalism; his enthusiasm for Marx and Engels and Stalin’s five year plan; his zeal for the American communist Earl Browder, for the Spanish Republic and the Jewish homeland in Birobidzhan. Looking at each other, leaning back in their chairs and laughing, they would describe his collection as “a whole library of subversive literature!”

  “If they ’d ever raided grandpop’s annex next to the plant, can you imagine what would have happened?”

  The answer, of course—the amazing, fantastic, inspiring answer—is that Jacob might, in 1914, have trumpeted from street corners, in circulars, and from speaker’s platforms anything he wanted to say. Nothing would have happened. The Socialist platform’s first political demand was “absolute freedom of press, speech, and assemblage,” and Jacob was its Baltimore standard bearer.

  In America he could have any ideas he wanted, no matter how incendiary, and express them without fear of retribution. Whether in the library, where his right to read as he chose was safe in the hands of the ladies in shirtwaists, or in the offices of the city clerk, where he filed his intention to run, or the fact that the name the clerk printed on the ballot (Candidate: Socialist, Jacob M. Levy) was Jewish, did not matter any more than the name his brother registered as owner of his acres in Glyndon.