by Elisa New
Such is the modern world, he would say. Sons set off to make their fortunes! He might explain that the chances young men have in the West are so splendid that even his two young grandsons’ departure for London and Bernhard Baron’s cigarette business was an example of the wonderful spread of commerce.
The only catch here, he was aware, was that too glowing a report of the departed ones could set his son Emil off. In public, Jacob broadcast the hope that Emil, now twenty-one, would step up to take over the Philadelphia plant of Levy’s International, just as Bob had taken over the Baltimore plant.
The truth was, however, that Emil’s talk was all about the great Carreras cigarette empire; obviously he expected to be invited to join his brothers in their London life. To indulge Emil’s love of grandeur, his extravagance, had been one reason for this trip. In recognition of his coming of age, Jacob bought Emil some new suits, a traveling equipage, and promised to rent a roadster for the tour through their ancestral homeland. But Emil was, Jacob admitted to himself, prone to responses he could less and less successfully predict. The greater risk was that the relatives in four cities now making elaborate preparations to entertain them would see, in short order, what he feared: that Emil was touched, troubled, and maybe afflicted with a terrible disorder like his mother’s, and that he would never run Levy’s International Shrinking or join his brothers as Barons.
Later, lying in my tidy bunk by the ship’s casement—the sky now inky, though pierced with stars over the rippled slate of the Baltic—I looked over at the other bunk, at Yael sleeping there, her Russian dictionary in the covers. What worries had I that compared to the worry my great-grandfather Jacob would have had, traveling with an unwell son and headed, before long, to the scene of his rival’s and his prodigals’ triumph?
The next morning only increased my sense of roles reversed. The ship we traveled on might be called the Vilnius, the fleet’s Lithuanian company, Lisco, after the old Polish Lithuanian capital, but the languages over the public address system were—Yael stressed for me—Russian and German: Russian first, then the German. Interesting, she thought. The old Soviet influence was still so strong, despite the ship’s German port of debarkation. No Lithuanian at all. But she could tell? I asked.
Tell? Of course she could tell! Lithuanian being an Old Indo-European language, its roots tangled up somewhere with Sanskit’s, while Russian was a Slavic language; everything was different.
Her dictionary? On deck. For simple announcements? For the call to dinner, “Bar’s open.” “Kind passengers, please to bring your documents to the first deck station?” No, she did not need her dictionary for these.
Indeed, since everyone on the boat was old enough to have lived under the Soviets, and our ferry journeyed from what had been East Germany, she guessed that not one person, not even the truckers whom we’d watched latching their rigs onto the lower deck, failed to understand both languages coming over the PA system, German and Russian, plus their Lithuanian. Except you, Mommy! she laughed, as she counted out the euros into the cashier’s hand while I carried our instant coffee to a picnic table on the breezy, now sun-splashed deck. She said it fondly, I noticed, and I understood from her face that she was having fun, enjoying being with me again on the odd sort of adventure I liked and had taught her to like. Out in the middle of God-knows-where just taking it all in.
Our ferry hauled tractors and rail cars along with people, offering dinner and breakfast to those “respected passengers” who did not mind views of stevedores arriving at a destination. She knew I loved such views: great fork lifts arching over the deck, oil derricks and industrial signage crowding the foreground. The night before, certain men leaning on the rail in T-shirts had locked their rigs into the ship’s great lower deck and then taken their cigarettes into the little bar and gotten drunk. The German tourists, mostly middle-aged and elderly, had already brought their baggage to the dining room, while the younger ones, some with bikes chained below with the trucks, zipped things in and out of their backpacks. It was not luxury travel, probably even less luxurious than it would have been in 1928.
And so, putting the flimsy ribbed cup with its tepid coffee down, swinging her leg over the picnic table, Yael gave me the look I’d been coming to recognize and was learning to get used to—a look of fondness, of happy tolerance. Yes, she thought she understood and didn’t need to review the various questions I wanted answered. The lists of persons and places Jacob and Emil visited and where they went and what they wanted were fine. She’d looked up any phrases she might need and hadn’t needed to look up words for purge, extermination, repression, mass grave, and so forth. They’d been the basis—she looked wryly at me—of her second year Russian syllabus.
No, she didn’t need to look at the map either. I could amuse myself with maps in the car.
Nor was she especially concerned by the fact that somehow I’d left Berlin with only forty euros, that between us had spent them on dinner and breakfast, and we were now sailing along an industrial spit as prepossessing looking as maybe Galveston or Newfoundland on a good day. She was certain the driver I’d managed to find would be there to greet us.
As it turned out, the ship pulled in early, and the expected car was late, and so—confused and ambivalent—I held my peace while Yael smoked a cigarette. What had seemed necessary to do when she was eighteen—conceal her smoking—seemed stupid, puritanical so far from home. It seemed especially so, as we saw, strolling up the walk as she stubbed out her cigarette, our driver, stubbing out his.
The first time Yael and I had come to the Baltics, our guide had been Chaim, kindly, with a wandering eye and a big belly. Chaim had greeted us with a warm “Shalom” and gave us his best version of the Jewish roots tour. The second time I’d come, I’d hired a tireless, efficient translator, a young, non-Jewish woman named Victorija who showed with her briskness that whatever image I might have of Lithuanian women did not apply. Still, nothing in my past experience of Baltic guides prepared me for Alexejus.
As he presented himself before us on the walk I’m sure both Yael’s and my eyes widened slightly. When he wheeled our bags away Yael looked at me sternly, furrowing her brow as she saw I was not to be repressed from speaking my mind about him.
“Oh my God,” I said, sounding old and completely ridiculous. “He’s adorable.”
Siauliai, the town I called Shavli, as its Jews once did, was far hotter than when we’d arrived in town eight years ago. But it was looking considerably sleeker, richer, and more upscale than when I saw it on either of my last visits. Yael and I had the afternoon free. I’d hoped Alexejus would take us to Old Klaipeda to see its old Jewish center and the balcony from which Hitler reclaimed the town in 1939. And Alexejus was clearly disappointed because a mix-up had assigned him to another client after he transferred us to Shavli. All the way to the town I watched him glancing at Yael, taking in her lovely face and natural ways and Russian sentences. He hoped to be back the next day. But it was just as well. From our hotel we strolled to the cafés on Vilnius Street, remembering the place where we’d eaten borsht and fish with Chaim and noting the greater prosperity of the town, happy to see its pedestrian promenade lined with glossy shops, filled with strolling couples, its outdoor restaurants alive with conversation. In the summer light, the facades and bright trim of the buildings glowed and the antic sculptures for which the town was known gave the street great charm. In the refurbished tourist office, tastefully appointed, I learned that Shavli’s museums were all open—not only the cultural museum but also those devoted to bicycles, photography, and cats, and what I was most interested in, Chaim Frankel’s great art deco palace. Its upper floors, the tourism clerk explained, were now an exhibition space for artifacts of the landowning classes. Its ground floor boasted the furnishings of—what do we call it? she looked at her colleague—ah, yes a “vintage” cinema.
And the factory? I asked.
Oh yes, she answered. Some of it had been destroyed, of course, some carried off. B
ut much of the Frankel Leatherworks stood just as it had before the war. It would take us only a few minutes to walk to it, for the factory and the house had both once been the center of Shavli life.
Like everything else in Shavli, Frankel’s palace was getting a facelift, the fresh scaffolding around one wing an augury of the building’s eventual restoration as symbol of a history Shavli was not ashamed to claim. Certainly the building was gorgeous. Inside, the carefully hung walls and exhibition cases of the lofty upper floors held artifacts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as well as of czarist days (imperial era rubles big as placemats; cloisonné pipes and snuffboxes, and a whole wall of polished sabers, swords, and canes), but downstairs the stylized parquet floors and ceiling ornaments were unalloyed 1920s. This bottom floor included one room devoted to prewar Jewish Shavli (although considerably more wall space was given to the town’s leather, sugar, and chocolate factories) and also a complete replica of the Kapitol movie theater, an entertainment palace of neon, and poster art that had been run by Shavli’s Jews.
As we left Frankel’s palace, crossing the street to get its facade into a picture and looking down the slope to Tilzes Street, I saw in a flash my ancestral town as it might have looked to those preparing to welcome Jacob and Emil, arranging for their comfort in the small but nicely appointed hotel—Solomon having been sent by his father, Isaac, to check on his uncle Jacob and cousin Emil’s rooms.
Those engaged in such preparations would have had—I thought, with a little rush of pride—no cause to be ashamed of the town welcoming back its American cousins.
That Isaac was the easier, the more genial of Jacob’s two brothers was a conviction I formed early on. The brother remaining in the ancestral town, unperturbed by anyone else’s idea about ambition, would, I reasoned, have been the one you’d relax around.
Moshe too had described his father Isaac (esteemed by gentiles as “the Jewish tanner”) with pride for a man who managed so few airs; despite his German education, local workmen accepted him. Most convincing to me, though, is the fact that the one 1928 picture in which my grandfather Emil actually appears was taken in May in Shavli, and shows Isaac, his son Solomon with wife and children, and, at Jacob’s shoulder, Emil. Since Emil does not appear in the pictures taken in June and July, and since family stories trace his first “episode” to this trip, I surmise that he remained with Isaac while Jacob traveled on. Even after many years away, it was Isaac whom Jacob trusted enough to leave his son with him, Isaac he let persuade him it would be best for him and Emil that the family try to help the boy settle down while Jacob finished his trip.
What would Isaac have said, I wonder, to get Jacob to go? For one thing, perhaps, that it would be no trouble to spend time with the young man. When he retired from his work at Frankel Leatherworks, his son Solomon, a machinist and engineer, had taken his place, and Isaac, his own wife dead, had moved into the modern flat kept on Tilzes. Of course, they still owned the old family house on Smallprison Street, stone and wood and without central heat. Its location, just steps from the Frankel factory though in a poorer section, made it a convenient place for Solomon to think and tinker. His young family lived in more modern style near all the shops, the cafés and cinemas, and the little girl’s school. Grandfather would often walk her to class, the baby toddling along, and Emil could join them and then—if he liked—look in on Solomon at Frankel’s.
Frankel’s. One can imagine that Isaac and Solomon, like all of the thriving managers and “specialists” this cynosure employed, breathed the very name with pride and satisfaction. Most of Shavli had been destroyed during World War I, but Frankel’s energetic rebuilding—not only of his factory but of new synagogues and schools, of the town’s first fire department, and of new blocks of flats—had lured its citizens back, devastation yielding in just a few years to the return of civilization.
Evicting Shavli’s Jews in 1915 did not prevent the near leveling of the town, as Jews ironically observed among themselves. And it was the Jews’ return that brought the town back to life, even though they had almost got used to their resettlement in Russia. Solomon and his brother Aaron had both married there, and only when they heard Frankel was back with plans as big as ever did they return and find, within a few years, a prosperity justifying the risk in returning.
The prosperity paid for the lovely clothes that Solomon’s Russian wife Fanja wore, and for the indulgent fancy she lavished on her little girls. Kol kach yaffah—so beautiful—Moshe and Tanya had said long ago in Israel when we looked at the picture of Fanja, and beautiful too was their little girl, with the outsize bow in her hair and her hand on her little hip. Since Fanja had left her family in the east and would be homesick at times, Isaac saw to it that Solomon indulged her—what harm, after all, in a woman feeling adored? And what harm (whatever his brother Max thought) in children feeling they had lots of room, lots of freedom to be young. Isaac had not fussed or objected when his son Moshe had moved as far away as Palestine. Four of Solomon’s younger siblings were now in Riga, and who could blame them? Kalnu Iela was an excellent address, where Solomon’s daughter, Zarah, had no task but to supervise—though loosely!—the activities of the younger students and working persons who crowded into her Riga apartment.
Not that, Isaac warned, the Riga digs were always in shape for visitors! The phone rang off the hook, and behind doors was who knows what mayhem. But with a bit of warning the children would always set things to rights.
This was why I think Isaac would have insisted that Jacob should leave the boy and go. Isaac and Solomon would arrange some excursions for Emil. Picnics by the lakes. Strolls. The cinema. Jacob could drive on to Riga, enjoy the city, and not worry too much about his son. On his return Isaac would send Jacob—and he hoped Emil too—on to Raseinai.
At worst, if something happened, Riga was only an hour or so away.
That is also what, the next afternoon, Yael told me, giving me that indulgent scolding look again, after saying that if I didn’t mind being alone for dinner, she and Alexejus were going to Riga for the evening.
She explained how they had decided to go there. In Zagare, the signs for the border had piqued her interest and reminded her of Riga, only sixty kilometers away. When she mentioned to Alexejus that she was disappointed not see Riga this time, he asked her if she would like to go.
Alexejus had assured me earlier that what I planned to say about Riga in my book was true. It was, always had been, a great city for night life. Things got going late and went strong, sometimes until morning. It was a late sleeping town, what with so many students and so many bars.
A source of dubious comfort to me when Yael was still not back at 3:00 AM.
The Riga that Jacob explored alone in June 1928 would indeed have been as exuberant as the town to which, worrying a bit, I’d sent Yael and Alexejus. With its northern situation, its young and cosmopolitan population, but also its new role as free capital of independent Latvia, Riga circa 1928—like Riga today—was into its second decade out from under Russia’s yoke. Or Germany’s. Both neighbors loomed, and as right-wing governments and factions proliferated on all her borders, Riga noticed. But Riga, as ever, thrived, “flaunting,” as one historian puts it, her art nouveau facade and reasserting that “curious blending of St. Petersburg, Hamburg, and Vienna” that had ever molded her character.
In summer, Riga’s beauty prompts forgetfulness.
The breezes from the Baltic coast waft sea wind around the graceful buildings. Mornings, as the sun comes over the city’s walls, the lindens in the courtyards move, dappling the pavement with patterned sun and shadow. By noon, the open squares blaze with light, the matte gold of the cobbles shimmering with sun pouring down from the impossibly blue sky. Late afternoon, peering into the same courtyards that the morning’s press (of lessons, or business, or the list of purchases) left deserted, one sees domestic life—urban style—in its most charming aspect. Two friends sip tea on iron chairs disposed in the little courtyard garden,
a low table between them. Mingled voices from the stairwells. A small girl kicks up her hem, her shoe. Laughter.
Evening. Down the street. Into a larger square. Cool now.
What’s this? Cellos tuning up. Strains of a rehearsal leak from the Opera House, door propped open. As lights switch on, the older buildings of the city reassert the dated but still impressive majesty of breasted nymphs and chained rosettes looped in curlicue. Today the rage is for curved and linear, the archways low, their shallow polished staircases rising superfluous next to elevators. Yet the old burghers’, the old barons’ sense of the comme il faut remains.
Night falling. The sky not darkening so much as deepening. Returning to the Petersburg Hotel, one finds the lobby full of agitated types (the Sejm, the parliament, just across the street; the president’s residence, catty-corner). No matter. The provincials are easy to identify by their officious, harried, overeager mien. Riga’s true native, an émigré, is ever at home and does not imagine that street signage needs to be changed to reflect the times. Hotel Petersburg (where Jacob stayed) gives the czars’ heyday its due. The little café where you sip morning coffee offers only German newspapers; Latvian was for the countryside. The restaurant where one dines on cutlet of veal, potatoes, torte, and the other where one eats shocking pink borscht with sour cream, were the same at night. Both places are crowded with young men drinking, couples leaning against the wall, the girls with sweaters on their arms against the northern summer chill, the boys letting half full glasses rest against their ribcages, their jerseys dark.
