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

  For Jacob, though, the family put a cheerful face on Friday evenings. The tenderhearted Paul and Sarah had nothing but the deepest pity, but they did not know what to do for him. After they heard his tread going up the stairs to the small loft bedroom where Jacob slept with Emil, they would discuss his troubles. Amelia, they agreed, had become a burden Jacob’s family could not handle. On the other hand, it was hard to know what to say about Eddie, whose desertion to join Uncle Baron in London clearly hurt Jacob more than he could express.

  How had it happened, Paul and Sarah wondered, that this dark-browed boy with the sweet smile, the boy who had, just a few summers before, gone like any Baltimore swain to meet girls at Tolchester and Emory Grove, was now sporting British aristocratic manners and sending his little brother, Emil, souvenirs the boy would not leave alone? The pretext of Eddie’s going to England to complete his musical education was quickly swept away as Louis drew Eddie into the Baron family firm, asking him to help out and then offering him a position, and then, amazingly enough, a new name. The carte postales Eddie sent his brothers showed him in a series of foppish get-ups. He sent Emil tags from country hounds, tickets from clubs and outings, a silver cigarette case the boy carried about, feigning smoking. Moreover, Paul and Sarah worried, could it be long until Jacob lost his son Paul as well?

  Young Paul showed no interest in machines nor in his father’s internationalist vision, nor did he seem to care that his swagger and audacity offended the factory hands, Czechs and Lithuanians, who were already showing signs of restiveness against Levy’s odd work rules. For now, young Paul was happy to drive the truck for his brother Bob, but his restlessness was obvious. As tidings came across the ocean, along with the clippings, the full-page advertisements, the records in the Times of the Carreras tobacco company growing growing growing . . . scarcely meeting wartime demand, young Paul distanced himself from his father and sisters, as if preparing for the moment he would leave.

  It was not fair, Paul and Sarah agreed, that they should be so happy and Jacob so sad, that they should have so much in the way of love and Jacob so little.

  And so brother Paul desperately tried to divert Jacob from worrying about his son Paul with conversations about their brothers Max and Isaac, back home in Lithuania and Latvia, where the European war was pressuring them as the Germans advanced from the west and the Russians from the east. They reassured themselves that Max, the solid citizen, had escaped from the battle zone, for they had received a letter from him, telling a strange story.

  One second he was Mr. Lawyer Levy, the next, a Jew on the road with his rucksack. Putting three hundred rubles in the bank on January 1, 1914, and directing his wife to deposit the same amount the following day, he was off for Lianna. Max, who had such princely sums to deposit, was sent packing like any refugee. Later Max wrote from a town in Russia, sending a picture of a picnic, as if all was well. Paul reminded Jacob that things in their homeland were ever the same for the Jews.

  Official communiqués from the German and Russian commands were brief. On April 15:From Headquarters of the High Command. To the north of the Neman (River) enemy advance units, passing through Rossieny, approached on the morning of 15 April the line of the Dubysa River.

  Suvoikin, the military correspondent of the newspaper Rech, relying on stories of refugees, gave further details:The strongest German column attacked along the banks of the Neman from Jurburg (Jurbarkas). Reaching Borki (Baraiciai), the Germans reached deep into Rossieny (Raseiniai) district and began to make their way through the forests. Passing through Girtakoli (Girkalnis) and the Gruzishki property, they began to reach the rear of Rossieny (Raseiniai). A second German column also attacked from Jurburg (Jurbarkas), but along a different route: through Erzhvilki (Erzvilkis), Nemokshty (Nemeksciai), Tsaritsyno (Sarapinai), and on to Siauliai. This column was weaker, but acted more forcefully. The path along which the enemy attacked was all in flames.

  On April 17:

  High Command (Oberste Heeresleitung). The battle of Siauliai has been successful for us. Suffering great losses, the Russians burned the city and fled toward Jelgava (Jelgava). Pursuit continues.

  Unofficial publications are more detailed:

  In Siauliai. According to eyewitness accounts, before 8 A.M. on 17 April peasants had rushed in and announced that strong German reconnaissance units were moving toward Siauliai, at a distance of a few versts from the city. There arose a terrible panic among the residents, the more so when barely half an hour after the warning by peasants German shells began to fall on the city. A panicked flight began on the only free road out, to Ianishki (Joniskis). On the road, not far from the Etulery station, residents were able to observe the capture of our communications unit by German cavalry. But, suddenly, there appeared from the direction of Gruzda (Gargzdai) a strong German reconnaissance force, which opened fire on the fleeing residents.

  A chemist, Dr. F., who was working in the Frankel leather factory and escaped just as the Germans captured it, stated: “The German units at first did not prevent the exit of residents, but when the last of them were already 5 or 6 versts from the city, in the direction of Ianishki, opened fierce artillery fire. In general, residential buildings suffered little. Some residents were captured by the Germans. Goods were taken from warehouses. Locked shops were smashed in, windows broken.

  Gradually further details became clear:Siauliai under German rule. Germans spent in Siauliai . . . 11 days. Already on the 15th of April concern grew, because refugees from Rossieny (Raseiniai) had appeared, but there was no panic. It was hoped that residents would manage to leave Siauliai in complete safety. However, on the 16th one could begin to hear strong cannonades, and the flight of the population began . . . The city burned from artillery shells, and since there was no one to put out the fires, they spread and continued until the evening of April 18th.

  According to the words of those who have arrived from Siauliai, the German unit had hardly entered the city when indiscriminate looting began. Warehouses, depots, private apartments were all looted. The looting was accompanied by arson in which rabble from the suburb of Shimshi (Sancai) took an active part. These dregs of society served as guides for the “valiant soldiers” and together they carried out “requisitions.”

  With the Germans stalled in Lithuania, locals blamed their advance on the Jews.

  In Headquarters there is the conviction that the Jewish population in the war theater is a focus of espionage and complicity with the enemy. Thus arose the idea of the necessity of cleansing the strip of the front of Jews. Application of this measure began in Galicia. Authorities in the rear have begun to send thousands and tens of thousands of Austrian Jews into Russian gubernias in the interior. The mass of evacuees included the sick, the crippled and even pregnant women.

  Far from the scenes of desperation that their brothers endured in Europe, Jacob and Paul were preoccupied with the ordinary problems of family life in peaceful Glyndon. Photos show that this summer marked a turning point in the life of young Theo. His long weeks with Mother Earth had not convinced Theo of the value of the simple life, or drawn him nearer to his father’s and Uncle Paul’s way of seeing things.

  Sweating out the summer eating vinegared cucumbers and the stringy chickens from the coop, working all week with no one to talk to, by the weekends he was in a sputtering rage. While he tossed quoits with Emil on the flattened grass or dragged a stick along the railroad ties, he fumed and stormed, casting dark looks at the two men on the porch—his father with his eternal newspaper and foolish Trotskyism, anarchism; cooperation, electrification.

  Bored, stealthy, cutting into the backdoor of the house on Saturday after lunch, Theo would lead Emil out of the heat. In the cellar, amid the jars of Aunt Sarah’s interminable canning, they spread Eddie’s carte postales on the cool basement floor. While they eked out what pleasures could be had in the sweltering Baltimore of malcontents, their brother lived the larger life of a tobacco baron in London, the life of those who had no truck with
social-eests.

  Dressed to the nines and mentioned frequently in the Times reports of shareholder meetings, Eddie led a different, a better life. He had shown the way, Theo explained, the way young Paul would take when he turned eighteen next year and he, Theo, would take in turn. And then, Emil, you too. You too will come to England, will become a bigwig and a Baron, a rich and lucky man.

  Jacob Levy on Paul Levy’s porch, sometime in the 1920s.

  Which is how—more or less—things actually worked out, though not for my grandfather Emil who never, until he died in an institution just as his mother had, forgot that he’d missed his own chance to be a bigwig and a Baron. For the few years of his young manhood, when his oddities were mistaken for those of a boy in his right mind, he was, my mother tells me, a man about town, reckless, generous, flashing his cigarette case, behaving very much like the heir apparent—though heir to what his family were never quite sure. It seems reasonable to suppose that had he not “taken sick” sometime during the trip to Europe with his father in 1928, perhaps he too would have broken away, remained in London, and would now lie, like his brothers, in Bernhard Baron’s large and handsome family tomb in North London, the name Emil Baron inscribed alongside those of his brothers, Edward Baron, Paul Baron, Theodore Baron, instead of next to his sisters Jean, Myrtle, and Fanny in a cemetery in Philadelphia.

  If he in fact lies near his sisters Jean, Myrtle, and Fanny, this bed too was made before 1917, when Jean, pregnant without benefit of nuptials, was sent to find her family a place to live, a place where Percy, home on leave, might marry her and where she might keep house for her father and her brother Emil.

  For by the time Jean had her second child, Jerry, conceived in 1917 on one of Percy’s leaves, Jacob and his eldest daughter had forged the partnership of mutual benefit that would succor both of them through the years to come. Fortunately Jacob had Jean, with whom he discussed his idea of adding a second plant to Levy’s International, this one in Philadelphia. And it was Jean, two babies in tow, who helped him establish a second household. Into the early 1920s, she was apparently content to act as family duenna and listen to her father’s business plans and schemes. Until her sisters were safely married, who else was there to keep house for the whole clan as they moved to West Philadelphia, who else to temper their father’s sometimes erratic judgments with practical sense? It was she who surmised the unsuitableness for children of the West Philadelphia neighborhood their father had chosen—no place for Jewish girls to meet husbands—then found the proper house and also the two smaller adjoining dwellings on George’s Lane, not nearly so grand as Eutaw Place but with shade trees on culs-de-sac and a handy route into town to the plant by taking the Girard Avenue streetcar.

  In the 1920s as business picked up and Myrtle and Fanny acquired husbands and babies and moved their husbands and babies into George’s Lane, Jean began to show the determination she had always exhibited as a girl. She was liked and clearly needed at the plant, where her father’s preoccupation with the machines and his prickly management style, together with the workers’ endless union demands, left her to keep deliveries on schedule, customers happy, suppliers in line. She was not afraid to raise her voice when occasion required, and she was not afraid to get off the streetcar at Front and Oxford, the industrial district. She began to find it more and more convenient to spend the evening in town or a Saturday in town, ringing her sisters by phone to ask them to keep an eye on the boys.

  Housekeeping and nose wiping—not to mention the ironing, dishes, and managing their father’s books and newspapers—she left to her sisters. They would mutter among themselves that they worked at the plant too, but it was she who took responsibility in her father’s weak areas. And she did payroll, dispensing cash to her father and sisters, and paying herself as well.

  Their aunts would complain that Jerry and Earle saw of their mother less than was good for them. She was at the plant when they went to school, and on Fridays their grandfather took them with him to the farm, along with their Uncle Emil. She came overdressed to the farm when she came, but more often she did not come. She was in town. She was at the plant. The boys boarded the train with their grandfather and Emil.

  Thus she pretended not to see their mouths tighten on some mornings when she had come home late the night before, as she passed her sisters in their quilted housecoats, pulled on her coat, a fur smelling of perfume, pinned her chignon at the hall mirror. And was gone.

  ELEVEN

  The Arcadia Works

  When Earle and Jerry, age twelve and ten, said good-bye to their mother in the spring of 1928, walking up the gangplank of the ship with their Uncle Bob, they did not wonder why they were being sent on so lavish a holiday in March.

  That their trip during the spring holiday would not bring them back to school with their classmates seemed odd, but it was far more fun to enjoy the sail on an ocean liner. Snapshots show them squinting into the sun, resting their heads, newly barbered, against the striped deck chairs. Earle even hopped into the lifeboat for a picture, not bothering to sit up straight and letting his legs in their stout socks sprawl a bit.

  Jean did not countenance such casual poses, so it must have come as a relief to them to be bound for England with no one but kind Uncle Bob to watch them, plus the prospect of visiting their uncles, Eddie, Paul, and Theo, in London. Their uncles’ version of “gentlemanly” seemed to be one they would like.

  The pictures and postcards their uncles had been sending them made clear that gentlemanly life was high life indeed. The pictures showed rolling lawns with little camp chairs. There was Uncle Eddie’s “town house” in Belgrave Square, tall, white, and imposing, and rumors of a country house as well, with stables.

  What they did not realize—until after Uncle Bob went back to the United States and Uncle Eddie tried to explain as well as he could—was that their mother, encouraged by her brothers, had decided it would be best for them to go to school in England, as English boys, and one day help run their great-uncle Baron’s Carreras tobacco business. They would be raised by Uncle Eddie and Aunt Bertha, eventually to become, as Eddie and Bertha had, one of Bernhard Baron’s perfect blends. Whenever it was they understood or were finally informed by their tiny but potent aunt Bertha, they couldn’t have guessed how much thought and planning had gone into the moment, and how completely their grandfather Jacob had been outmaneuvered.

  When Aunt Bertha explained the “wonderful provisions made for their future,” she also declared herself “so pleased” that their grandfather Jacob, along with Uncle Emil, would be present in London for the grand opening of the new Carreras tobacco factory.

  Hints, and then a formal invitation to the opening of the great factory, mostly from his son Paul, had been coming to Jacob since 1927. Careful to downplay what a great day it would be, what a triumph for the “Guv’ner,” and to emphasize the strides in social progress they had all made, Paul would be casual, dropping hints that Jacob might want to see what they’d done in the way of ventilation, what notions they’d had—similar to his own—about the drying of paper and such. Maintaining the offhand tone that he and his brothers used to ward off flare-ups, he’d outline the schemes they’d been able to put in place for the comfort and security of the workers, and if, Paul allowed, Jacob might not “have time” for the factory, he might want to look in at the Settlement House whose new building, thanks to Baron’s gift, was to be called the Bernhard Baron St. George’s Jewish Settlement. A place for East End youth—Russian Jews of the kind they had known in Baltimore—the settlement aimed to assimilate young Jews into their adopted nation by providing vocational training, brotherhood, and fun.

  Earle and Jerry’s grandfather had responded to the letters by dropping them on the porch at Glyndon for his brother Paul to pick up and file.

  Now, to hear from Aunt Bertha’s mouth that their grandfather would be coming in the summer, missing the factory’s opening but staying with them several weeks, was dumbfounding to the two young b
oys. Nearly as dumbfounding was the news that before coming to London their grandfather would first be taking Uncle Emil to visit relatives in Europe, with visas already obtained not only to England and Germany but to places much further east. Jacob and Emil would be sailing to Germany and then boarding a train bound for Latvia and Lithuania. They would visit three cities, two of which had unpronounceable names. Riga was the first. The second two were Siauliai and Raseinai.

  There was much Jerry and Earle did not yet understand in that spring of 1928. How their mother could bear to part with them permanently, why their grandfather and Uncle Emil were going to Latvia and Lithuania, and why their grandfather would be coming to visit them in London. But one thing was clear: Nothing they had ever seen in Philadelphia or Baltimore prepared them for the grandeur that greeted them in England. The large fortune and high position that Bernhard Baron had achieved with the help of a machine invented in Baltimore exceeded anything the boys could have imagined.

  By the time their Uncle Eddie arrived in London in 1913, the story of his great-uncle Bernhard Baron’s ascent from Baltimore tobacco foreman to London’s preeminent cigarette magnate had already claimed its own colorful chapter in the history of American trust busting. And by the time that Eddie’s nephews Jerry and Earle arrived in London in 1928, Bernhard Baron had secured a place as an admired figure of enlightened industry in Europe.