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

  Not even by closing the hotel window tightly could a visitor block out the sounds of Riga’s young as they trailed along the streets, their voices drifting up into the casements. Not even by pulling the pillow over the head, sighing at the absurd hours kept by the young, could one shut out the raucous voices, their accents free and mingled.

  What did he think about all this, Isaac might have asked Jacob. Of course, in Riga the young people carried on, walking in the chill air in thin jackets, taking the tramcar on a whim so they could loll bare legged on the dunes of Jurmala till late, eight or nine o’clock, when, shaking pine needles from their clothes, they crowded in next to others on the roadway crusted with sand and caught the last tram back to the city center.

  He and Jacob, Isaac might have said, knew how to leave well enough alone, how to give young people breathing room when they needed it.

  I did not overreact when, around 4:00 AM, Yael came back to Shavli from Riga, her voice, still speaking Russian, floating up from the street. Taking my cue from my forebears, at least as I imagined them, I drifted off to sleep, glad to live in the modern world, the moving, mobile world where a city like Riga played its own emancipating role. A city like Riga, so civilized, proved—did it not?—humanity’s glad transcendence of the dark past.

  Photo of the Levy family, Jacob holding the cane, next to his brother, Max Levy. The only one in this picture, besides Jacob, to survive the Nazis was Rivka Levy, far left with flounced dress and bangs cut across her forehead.

  Jacob Levy’s oldest brother, Max, judging from everything I’d heard and learned about him, would not have been so indulgent with a young person.

  Driving to Raseinai in the late afternoon with a new, less attractive driver on duty and Yael asleep in the backseat, I remembered some things Moshe had said about Max.

  Uncle Max, he told me, had ruled his family with an iron hand. His son Adolph, walking in Max’s footsteps, had been subject to certain nervous ailments, but it was hard to say whether his anxieties were his own or simply the result of being Max’s son. It was a demanding role. Although Isaac’s children were assembled for photos with their Uncle Jacob in, I surmised, haphazard fashion—many absent—no one in Max’s family would have even thought of not appearing for the family photograph with the American uncle.

  Later, Max had sent the photograph of this occasion to Moshe in Palestine, to brothers Jacob and Paul in America, and, I assume, also to every one of Jacob’s children. So many photographs mounted, packed, and sent was a tedious task for anyone to perform, and also costly. But this did not deter Max. No, the brother who had doubtless taken it on himself to make the proper arrangements for Jacob’s trip; the brother who’d gone to Sedova to order a presentation cane; who’d made the reservations for Jacob’s stay in Riga, deciding on the Petersburg Hotel just across from the new president’s palace; the one who made sure to bring a photographer to capture the three brothers at their father’s grave, would have gotten every last one of his family to Raseinai for the photo session, refusal impossible. I had seen the photo in four separate albums in the states, Aunt Jean’s, Aunt Myrtle’s, Aunt Fanny’s, and then in Buddy’s house a few months after first beholding the cane. And I had seen it at Moshe’s, too.

  Max also made sure to arrange for the photograph to be taken at home, the better to show the far-flung relatives and even posterity the handsome room with a Turkish carpet, draperies heavy with ball fringe, and Max’s family. Everyone had showed up as instructed; the sons and sons-in-law stood behind Max, the daughters-in-law at his side, and all the children gathered around their parents. For Max would not have it be said (though perhaps he knew it was said) that they felt they had no choice.

  Max’s son Adolph, named after his own uncle Adolph, had no choice but to come into his father’s law practice and live next door, taking over the files of the Fire Commission, the Board of Electors, when his father—Mister Lawyer Levy—had finished with them. Like his estimable father, Adolph worked in Lithuanian, German, or Russian, mediating relations between farmers and grain merchants, Jews and gentiles, the volatile, wet-behind-the-ears young nationalists of the fledgling Lithuanian government with the stolid burghers of their deceptively tranquil-looking town.

  Too much wheat and rye, too much milk and livestock traveled in and out of this town bound for the coast and beyond for the Jews and their representatives not to remain in active (Max emphasized) discussion with all parties. The job that had long been his—legal broker, pleader, Solomonic dealmaker of the Lithuanian breadbasket and buttery—he entrusted to his first son. To help his son make sense of it, Max left the files.

  Now these files reside at the YIVO archives in New York, where I turn their pages and imagine Max as he must have been—his ferocity, his overbearing ways.

  I imagine Max in order to understand Jacob’s pained look in the photograph Max had carefully arranged. But I also imagine Max in order not to let him die with nothing to mark his passing but the notice of “prominence” given in the volume of Lithuanian Jewry lost. I wanted to give him a full measure of life, not only of death, but to remember and honor the memory of this irascible, demanding, difficult man whom children obeyed but often resented, whom brothers placated or evaded, mollified or fled from entirely—but never forgot.

  Not an easy man, Max Levy. Far from it. Impatient, condescending, and brusquely dismissing those less accomplished than himself; these descriptors are written on the YIVO files in purple carbon. It would not be an easy man who kept tabs on the numbers of Raseinai students inoculated, corresponded with every American native of the town who sent money for the Talmud Torah library, maintained ties with the Zionists, inspired the young Pioneer Guards, was so persistent in petitioning the government for exempting schoolteachers from the military service that, in the end, the schoolteachers were exempted. No easy man would be so punctual in getting the letters out to sundry millionaires concerning vocational training for the poor, clothing for needy children and old folks. And no easy man would allow himself to be put upon, not only by Jews but gentiles, and not only by residents of Raseinai but of smaller towns too, towns to which he travels to straighten out communal budgets, determining what funds will go to the kindergarten, the fire wagon, the municipal cleaners of Pig Alley and Cow Alley, plus the joint funds for shopkeepers and the Independence Day parade.

  No, to leave so many signatures on so many pages was not a job for anyone, least of all for any Jew so very alive one day, then killed the next.

  But it was the job of someone I honor by journeying every year to read the papers of this Max Levy, who is as forceful and vivid as if his typewriter went silent only yesterday.

  Such a man would have tolerated no deviations.

  As to the matter of the uncle visiting from America and Max’s grandchildren appearing for the family photo, the children would come whether they liked it or not. All the sons and all their wives, not excepting those in Riga, would come to Raseinai on the day appointed.

  And they did, as the photo shows and gathers them together this one time so that I can see who they were, and how many, and then count those lost. Summoning them all together, Max would ensure that this historical record was achieved—the picture in which the brother from America (the magnificent new cane, token of the family’s respect, in hand) sat at his brother’s left hand.

  Disappointment over Emil’s failure to appear on this occasion becomes, after decades, more and more discernable in the faces of the patriarch and his brother. Now, nearly eighty years after Emil failed to appear, sixty-plus years after nearly everyone in the photo died in a Lithuanian ditch (this a year or so after Jacob’s death in America), and more than thirty years after my aunts explained to me that their brother Emil “took sick” in Europe, the expression on their faces is finally clear. Jacob, in his sleek creased suit and with his fine shaven chin, poses with his relatives, turning his face slightly sidewise and holding in his tense hand the cane, which had been ordered and purchased by Max and then
presented to him. If there had been some look of empathy in Max’s eyes as he presented the cane, some look of understanding kindness, Jacob must have missed it. Emil’s failure even to ride in the roadster with his father to pay his respects to his many cousins, his odd unsuitable behavior, affronted Max and caused Jacob agony.

  To me, this is all preserved on the ebony walking stick with the names of four brothers arrayed next to names of towns.

  In the picture taken in Raseinai, the picture taken without a son but with a walking stick, Jacob’s look expresses not arrogance but shame. Misery.

  Posture erect, temples sleek, he sits there suffering. Of five sons, not one stands by him to project the vision of family achievement and solidarity. Even a former prodigal like Jacob Levy believed it was the task of sons and fathers to present this united front.

  A few weeks later, Jacob was in London. This was the hardest part of his trip: greeting the prodigal sons and the little boys, Jerry and Earle, who still wondered what they were doing there. Managing Emil’s strange unreasoning insistence that he would stay in London and join his brothers and help run Carreras cigarettes.

  When of course he wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Emil would go back to America with his father, who would make out a will leaving Levy’s Shrinking in Baltimore to him; would even encourage Emil’s marriage to a lovely girl in hopes that somehow he would get over his strange ramblings and ravings.

  Which he did, or seemed to for a time before “taking sick,” as his sisters put it. His “taking sick” took the form of dreaming about being a London mogul, a man about town, a bon vivant with a cigarette case (I still keep the cigarette case in a china cabinet that once stood in his sister Myrtle’s sitting room). The events of that late summer in 1928 shaped, informed, gave color to a life of mental illness.

  A photocopy of the medals presented to Bernhard Baron’s workers on the day of the Carreras Factory opening. Gift to the author from Daniel Goldman.

  I do not know if the Arcadia Works factory tour was yet in place when my great-grandfather Jacob and his son Emil arrived in London in August 1928. The tour brochure I keep in my files is not dated, and so I cannot tell if the whole theatrical show was up and running when Emil spent three weeks there with his older brothers. Still, everything indicates that this last year of Bernhard Baron’s life, with the grand opening of the Carerras factory as its centerpiece, was about as close to a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie as Jacob’s son Eddie (now surnamed Baron) and his wife Bertha could make it. Other events of the year included the wedding of Bernhard Baron’s daughter Sarah, on the Riviera. Carlos Gardel, the international tango sensation, was hired to dance the couple across the floor with, photos suggest, Charlie Chaplin in attendance.

  Nor did the distractions connected with the factory’s opening keep Eddie’s publicity operation from branching out. The Prince of Wales himself was secured to spread his blessings at the groundbreaking of the Bernhard Baron Home for Boys. The year before he died, the Old Man had opened his checkbook and hired the architects of the Arcadia Works to begin construction of the world’s finest Jewish settlement house. All his life Bernhard had nourished a tenderness for children, and I believe this expenditure gave him great pleasure. How Eddie and Bertha beamed as the Prince looked on while hundreds of children sang this song:Good Mr. Baron said one afternoon,

  What do you want in the way of a boon?

  We said, “The Prince said, “he hopes very soon”

  Yes, very soon! O, very soon

  We shall rebuild in a sumptuous way”

  Our only trouble is who is to pay

  Good Mr. Baron said

  “I, if I may”

  Hip Hip Hooray, BB!

  Did Emil, on arriving, hear from his brother Paul the story of how, with a wink and a humorous shout (“Catch!”), Eddie gave Paul the job of getting three thousand employees from the City Road over to the new Arcadia Works without interrupting production? Did he hear of the journeys Theo took by liner in pursuit of the world’s best leaf—journeys to Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Turkey, and Egypt? Had Eddie perhaps conceived the idea of the Carreras factory tour with the vague, dazzled Emil as his audience, determining the stops on the tour as Emil looked on, trailing him through the great light-washed floors?

  Eventually a pamphlet, The Story of Your Cigarette, helped guide tourists, schoolchildren, and socialist pilgrims through the processes of stemming and cleaning the baled tobacco in the factory basement and up to the laboratories and inspection desks on the fourth floor. Its message was simple: Industrial progress furthers civilization.

  Long ago, tobacco operatives working by the piece in New York’s cigar quarter had no way to increase their meager profits but by more speed. In the 1880s, Eddie’s pamphlet explained, the falling price of hand-made cigars locked men to rolling benches, their lives narrowed to a blur of painful repetitive motion. This motion multiplied as first wives and then children took their places on the bench. Bernhard Baron himself, Eddie would explain to tourists, had been among those pushing muscles, tendons, and joints into spasm to beat the downward spiral of the cost of a cigar. True, even at Carreras, the “job of stripping leaves from center veins must still be performed by human fingers.” But the pace on the Carreras floor was regulated by a team of medical and efficiency experts, and the hand strippers were celebrities. Lucky tour groups might be treated to an old style tournament, the company directors all on hand, as Rocking Orse Minnie, queen roller of the Millionaires Gangway, stripped tobacco till she could strip no more, her handsome bounty a pound sterling for a pound of tobacco. “Her fingers specially trained to work with lightening speed,” Rocking Orse Minnie used a rocking chair to keep her rhythm going.

  Nor were tourists allowed to miss the fact that Minnie wore a mask. But on the next floor, the rolling floor, no masks were necessary: “Baron’s original machine, patented in 1895” had worker protections built right in.

  The Baron cigarette rolling machine justified the claim that Carreras was London’s “most hygienic factory.” Once cigarette workers had suffered the full range of ailments that airborne particles cause. Moreover, the poorer, unregulated cigar shops were petri dishes of the dread tuberculosis, which spread as hurried operatives licked wrappers closed, bit off ends, and nicked fingers while slicing with dull knives.

  The Baron machine’s slim polished rollers, rotary knives, filtration screens, and quick brushes not only spared wrists and fingers repetitive motion but also helped prevent lethal lung diseases. “A line of tobacco falls evenly on a continuous stream of paper,” sifting the tobacco through a “fine screen that collects the dust.” The machine then seals the wrapper: “One edge of the paper is turned up, and a small rapidly revolving wheel puts a thin line of specially prepared paste along its edge.” And then: “A rotary knife divides this giant cigarette into the correct lengths.” But not before those on the tour got a look at a giant cigarette. From one hundred machines, “eighty yards of paper enclosed tobacco in the form of one long rod comes out, every minute.”

  Two floors away, the tobacco was loosed from the rough twine denting the bale, moist, musky, yellow from the curing barn. By the fourth floor, this product of a Virginia or Turkish summer emerged dressed in sumptuous imagery, new for every season. There was the famous Black Cat cigarette, now soignée, now hugger-mugger; the fetching Chick, coy in feathers or putting her foot down; Turf, with its hint of horse stalls and the adrenalin of the race; the rainy London streetscape of the Passing Show. Here, on the packing floor, the brilliance of the papers and ink, the precision and cleanness of the printing, stamping, creasing, and folding operations all went on under soft illumination coming through the skylights.

  To the sound of piped-in music, workers tended the immaculate machines, doing little more with their hands than ensuring the cardboard fed straight into the mechanism that “creased, glued, folded and refolded the boxes into single hulls.” They ensured that the brilliant collector cards, emerging from the press “fitt
ed with a roller carrying steel engravings for printing,” were as vivid as they ought to be, their colors thick and true, before the cigarettes, swaddled in waxed paper wrapping, were gently pressed into the curled shells, and then the whole folded and the flap sealed in gold.

  Inspection—last stop on the tour. The workers of Carreras looked sharp, for they knew that others of keen faculties would “minutely examine” their work, using their eyes to “detect the slightest imperfection,” tapping the sealed tins bound for export with “light wooden rods,” and only those emitting the “proper high pitched tone” passed muster. Did the process defy any but modern imagination? Thousands of Black Cats, all sealed with gold paper tabs and tumbled into trolleys, were sent in lorries to ships and out to sea and then to shores and cities distant.

  Imagery of the last stage of the tour lingered on this theme. Pains were taken to distinguish perfection from standardization, regularity from monotony; the modern factory stood for the ingathering and dissemination of all the world’s copious variety, just as a person anywhere smoking a Carreras cigarette—blend of Virginia weed, Turkish sun, Portuguese cork, German ink, Canadian paper—touched the world to his lips, and all for a penny. The last stop on the tour was the laboratory where “atmospheric conditions ranging from the Arctic to the tropics can be reproduced . . . the temperature altered to correspond to the climate.”

  It was a temperate clime, and a fair one, that Eddie had found. The Story of Your Cigarette, written by Eddie Baron, ended with the reminder: “London may be shivering or sweltering, damp or dusty. Inside, every day is a fine day; all weather is fair weather.”

  THIRTEEN

  Blitzkrieg Barbarossa

  In green rubber boots reaching above my knees, I followed Dick Shergold, building supervisor of Greater London House—once the Arcadia Works of Carreras cigarettes—though the immense basement of the former Baron family factory.