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 a time, in the first years after seeing Jacob’s cane, I maintained the strictest sense of sacred and profane. With file folders and plastic tabs, color coded, I sought to quarantine and cordon off Baltimore from Shavli, Shavli from London, Brest from Rostov, and Germany from everything. My files were grouped by place of settlement, then surname, assigning Jacob to Baltimore, Bernhard to London, and then just letting the children fight it out. As in a fashion, they had.

  The shortcomings of such a system were obvious. Luck made Myrtle, Fanny, and Jean’s brother Edward Levy, notwithstanding his birth in Baltimore, into the most glittering of the Barons. But not even burial in a North London tomb, mingling dusts with his great benefactor, Bernhard Baron, could make him a real Londoner or into the man his mentor was. He and his brothers never understood that it was the beautiful machine, the labor-saving, lung-preserving Baron cigarette rolling machine, that made the difference between them and a man with a touch of greatness. What Baron had seen in Brest-Litovsk, in Rostov, and in cramped, choking New York and Baltimore, had driven him to try to improve the world he lived in. The London papers called him a “Prince of Benefactors.” I know now that the three Levys-turned-Barons were not like him, not the great men Uncle Baron promised he’d make them. He had a touch of greatness; they were just lucky—they were mere members of the monied class.

  I tried for a few years to work chronologically. But convergences and divergences of fates across the globe—terrible ironies of simultaneity—arrested this plan. How would it look, turning the pages, to see that just as Eddie sent his first postcard from London, his uncle Max fled from Raseinai after Lithuania’s entire Jewish population became subject to expulsion?

  Or that in the very months that my great-grandmother Amelia began to show clear signs of derangement, her uncle Baron was launching his first smash hit in advertising. The lucky Londoner who identified the Black Cat van cruising the Strand would win a sack of gold sovereigns.

  Or that, worst of all, in the same month Eddie received one of England’s highest honors—being, as my aunts wonderingly put it, knighted-by-the-Queen (though it was of course the King)—his nephews, cousins, and remaining uncles were being herded into grave pits and ghettos.

  The terrible irony of it did not mean that Eddie bore guilt for the enormities perpetrated on his relatives. He surely didn’t. Someone—I can’t remember who—once swore the family had “tried” to find out what happened to the European relatives, had tried to help by looking for them in Austria. Was guilt therefore to be laid at Jacob’s feet (he was of course dead by then) for falsifying facts? Still, I do not know whether Jacob might have passed through Austria and for that reason wrote Austria on his naturalization documents, anymore than I can be sure the cousins who shared the story of Aunt Jean’s out-of-wedlock child had had some motive, all too easy to imagine, for bringing down queenly Jean a notch or two.

  How could I know whether it had been in Bernhard Baron’s mind all along, on meeting the Levy brothers, to make them caretakers of his sisters in Baltimore and then breed from their loins his management team? Perhaps Good Uncle Baron was no less than the Rumpelstiltskin my great-grandfather took him for. What will ever tell me where and how the mysterious Riva survived, or whether, in his last minutes at Wolfgantzen, Jack had pain.

  Black dust powders the personal effects and mementos I once regarded under sconces swagged with silk, the album’s heavy pages lifting slowly and dropping heavily.

  History is a random business, made out of wanderings, guesses, luck, and old glue. Pity the investigator who ignores the glue or picks off the old scabs, banishing falsehood, curse, rhetoric, and rhyme. What but the story of a promise (“Send me your sons and I’ll make them great men”) followed by a curse (“May you never have sons”) is there, in the end, to keep the page, this page, from disintegration?

  For sentimental reasons, I buy a fresh pack of Craven A each time I visit Jamaica, where it is still manufactured. I don’t smoke it; I just look at it. The brand J. M. Barrie called the Arcadia mixture is still popular in former outposts of the British Empire, and the black cat on the pack remains the same as it was in the 1920s. The lipstick red is the same as the lipstick red of the Carreras sign that is still seen any day as one ascends from the Mornington Crescent tube.

  On a display shelf in a cabinet I keep my aunt’s sweet cameo mounted on black velvet, and a hand-painted plate with maidens disporting. I remember looking at both as a child. I keep there too, behind the cabinet’s miraculous curved glass, my grandfather Emil’s deco silver cigarette case, a page from Aunt Fanny’s diary, and a picture of a chicken coop on Paul Levy’s farm.

  But I keep in a drawer the plastic bag of gray-green borders sliced from the photographs taken in Shavli, Raseinai, and Riga in the summer of 1928. Produced in the old-fashioned way with rounded corners, the photos gave me anxiety, for no framing store I found could accommodate rounded corners and I could not bear the thought of some anonymous person slicing the edges off. Eventually I cut borders off myself with a razor and inserted behind each frame’s backing a little fan of cuttings. The drawer holds too the birch peelings I collected at the mass grave at Kuzhai and the photo of the monument next to the tree from which I peeled the bark.

  I do not display the photo of the monument but I keep it close at hand, for I think my aunts would have liked its refinement, the woman’s eyes drawn down, the rope of carven beads around her neck. And I think of it always when I look at the last photograph I’ve hung there, the one showing my little-girl mother sitting on Jack’s shoulders the summer before he went to war, both of them with shirts off, and Aunt Myrtle looking younger than she would ever look again.

  EPILOGUE

  We Expand from Shrinking

  I don’t know why I didn’t think of searching the Yad Vashem database for family survivors earlier.

  A few months after completing the manuscript for this book, I made one more startling discovery: Riva, the partisan fighter, Max Levy’s granddaughter and my great-grandfather Jacob’s niece, was still alive in 2008.

  Failing to find Riva earlier made me wonder how much else I’d missed. Riva had written to Aunt Jean in 1984, shortly after arriving in Israel from the Soviet Union, but the scrap I had said simply “Riva,” no last name. Finding a Riva, or worse a Riva Levy, in Israel seemed like a needle in a haystack, especially given her age.

  Nevertheless, in the summer of 2008, Yael’s younger sister Maya at my elbow, I tapped the names of the family dead—Max Levy first—into the database at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and up popped the old pictures. And more. Probable date of death. The occupation and standing of the persons in the picture. And more still. On an information screen was the name of the person who had completed the data; it also showed our own familiar photograph and the date of this person’s visit. It turned out that Riva, now Rivka, Levy had made a visit to Yad Vashem in 1999, about the same year that I first heard of her. Three minutes more at the information desk and we had her address in Holon, Israel. The next morning we stood at her door.

  Seventy years older than the child in the picture, Rivka could still be recognized as the little girl with square knees in a flounced dress, a bit of lace around her chubby neck. Yes, she had been in Raseinai that summer of 1941; she had been there when they took the men away, her grandfather Max at their head. As a community leader, Max had been singled out. Soldiers had stood him up in a wagon and tortured him before the crowd, yanking out the long hairs of his divided white beard in clumps before, half dead, he was taken with the others to the pit. He’d shouted at his tormenters, though, Rivka said, and called them fascists, and told his townsmen, his fellow Jews, not to be afraid.

  Had it actually happened this way? I wondered, watching Maya’s face and thinking of other stories I’d heard of this day. I remembered how Victoris Andrekaitis, standing in his driveway, had helped me see the line of men marching into the twilight in their coats and trousers. He did not mention the torture, but smiled in th
at odd embarrassed way people have when what they have experienced is not, will never be, processed. All day at Yad Vashem, watching the survivors testify on film, I’d seen that smile flicker at the corners of people’s mouths, and some version of it wreathed Rivka’s lips as she explained to Maya that she and her mother were fortunate enough to get out of Raseinai by running to Kovno (Kaunas) and the temporary safety of the ghetto there.

  Talking about her time in the ghetto, Rivka spoke Hebrew with me—in part to make things easier for her but also, I thought, to let me filter the stories for Maya. Maya wanted Rivka to know, and she told her in English, that her sister Yael spoke Russian—what a shame Yael was not there to talk to her. But Rivka assured her in English it was not a shame; how pleased she was, how overjoyed, to meet Maya herself. But yes, Maya was right, knowing languages was important. Many people were killed in 1941, she explained, for missing an order, mistaking a word, but she had learned some German from her grandfather Max, and she emerged as a leader among the younger persons in the ghetto. Later, after the war, after her time in the forest, she stayed in Kovno (Kaunas) and became an engineer, training in the Soviet Union and remaining there until the 1980s, when the Soviets began to let Jews leave for Israel. She had known Moshe and Tanya in Israel, yes, and was sorry I wouldn’t be able to see them again. She loved them. They had died a few years before.

  “But what happened to your mother?” Maya asked. Rivka looked at me for permission to explain. I nodded. Rivka said that when the teenagers heard about the Kinderaktion in Shavli, they knew it would soon be their time too. She was among those who decided to flee to the forest and join the partisans. Her mother, like all the other mothers, had begged her not to go. And yes, after she left, her mother was killed. Maya was silent.

  Too much! Rivka announced. Too much terrible talk for one morning. Would you like an apple, a cracker? Look at some pictures perhaps? Then Rivka led us into a small, neatly arranged guest room with pictures we’d never seen of persons we’d come to know.

  By this time we were not surprised at the pride of place Rivka gave the family photo I’d first seen in Myrtle and Fanny’s album, the photo in which Jacob holds the cane given to him by Max. That photo was taken not in Austria but in Lithuania. The same white scrawl, the name Raseinai that Moshe had pointed out to me ten years before was in the photo on Rivka’s wall. We pointed at it and marveled.

  Returning to the living room, before we all tired of the emotions of the morning, Maya and I began to tell Rivka all about how the uncle from America had moved to London, and about the marvelous opening of the Carreras cigarette factory.

  Cigarettes are bad for you.

  Despite ads claiming that Carreras cigarettes were “better for the throat,” recommended for “business and scholarly concentration,” and sundry other testimonials to tobacco’s desirable effects, Uncle Eddie and his brothers would surely have known well before Eddie began to receive ominous documents in the 1950s that the habit they’d helped spread around the world was toxic.

  Even if workers wore masks and marvelous machines protected the tendons of the wrists and hands; even if a Craven A was capped with a cork filter from Portugal, or a Black Cat was wrapped in hygienic cellophane, it was hard to deny that the “bewitching vegetable” shortened life, caused cancer and heart disease and emphysema. Smokers themselves, my uncles all died about the age of seventy, a good twenty-five years before their nonsmoking sisters.

  With the great Carreras plant no longer in the family, all of them, even Eddie, lived out their lives more humbly than they could have foreseen, and they became angry at each other for how it all came apart. Myrtle and Fanny didn’t doubt that Eddie “sold his brothers down the river,” and maybe this was so.

  I never met any of the uncles myself. By the time I began reading about them, looking at their pictures in my aunts’ albums, they were all dead. My own guess, which I know my aunts would reject, is that Eddie, Bernhard Baron’s handpicked Levy successor, always bore more of the Carreras burden and probably deserved more of the spoils. Arriving in England several years before his brothers and serving for forty years as the company’s public face, Eddie took on the heaviest responsibility. His correspondence of 1955-1957 with officials of the British medical establishment, and with the various Royal offices once so encouraging to the tobacco trade, has the sound of a man marking time, looking for an out. In 1958 he found a way out by selling Carreras to Rembrandt Tobacco Corporation of South Africa, which had taken a controlling interest in Rothmans in 1954. Then in 1999 Rothmans was acquired by British American Tobacco.

  One summer afternoon in 2007, I got myself to British American Tobacco’s archive in London and read through the three hundred or so memos recording the postwar decline of the company fortunes. The documents seemed to lead only one way. The war years were the company’s last hurrah. By 1948, 1949, and 1950, management experts were being called in to help the directors increase profits while preserving worker protections, and by the mid-1950s Uncle Theo was sending back reports on new and perhaps cheaper sources of leaf tobacco in Bulgaria. Newspaper clippings of that time show a division in the ranks of directors as pressures mount to streamline the operation and eliminate bonuses and the elaborate worker benefit schemes that had once made employment at Carreras so desirable. Workers Uncle Paul relocated to a new plant in Basildon wrote to complain of long trips on unheated coaches, the quick trip to work on the tube now only a memory. The final sellout had the look of a rout, with the millionaire South African mocking the old-fashioned methods of the Baron brothers and promising a more glorious future for their signature brands.

  The brands themselves, including the one J. M. Barrie loved so well, endure. The great art deco monument built by Bernhard Baron looms today massive and splendid as ever at the top of Regents Park. Recently restored and filling a commuter’s whole field of vision as he emerges from the Underground, Carreras is home now to hip advertisers and Internet groups. Smoking is allowed in its halls, but the building is no longer redolent with the scent of Chesapeake weed or the whish of long knives slicing six-foot lengths of wrapped tobacco into sticks. One would never know, passing through its halls, that it had once been hailed as a Temple of Tobacco; its builder, Bernhard Baron, as a Prince of Benefactors; or that his heirs were scions of a great tobacco concern.

  Until she died, Aunt Jean clung to the grandeur that her sons had enjoyed and the “sacrifice” she’d made to give them their big chance.

  Rising up, imperious, in her chair, Jean would repeat Bernhard Baron’s promise, “Send me your sons and I’ll make them great men!” But Myrtle and Fanny would just purse their lips, leaving it to their own loyal boys, Dan and Fred, to rebut Jean’s foolishness and to tell again the story of Jacob’s famous curse pronounced on any who did not keep faith with him. I remember Dan and Fred roaring, lifting a finger to mime the old man’s wrath and then laughing, leaning back in their chairs, reminding each other how-without exception!—Eddie, Paul, and Theo’s marriages produced only daughters, and then their daughters produced more daughters.

  I don’t recall anyone ever taking up my mother’s case—the fact that her father, Emil, was deprived of sons too, his meager issue the one daughter born before he was taken off to the inst-ee-tution, there to spend the rest of his days. It was always the family line that had Emil not “taken sick,” as Aunt Fanny put it, he would have had Levy’s International Shrinking Company on a silver platter. But he had never wanted it, never believed he was destined to be a shrinker. His silver cigarette case, bought at Aspreys in London in 1928, convinces me that had he been well he’d have followed his brothers to strut the streets of London until the firm went bust. Thus it seems right he had just one daughter, my mother, and he shared the curse with the brothers who went away. “Still, how brilliant that there should have been a curse!” chortles Uncle Paul’s daughter Paula, in England, as, finishing our lunch the day after I visited British American Tobacco, we toast each other, toast our dear dead aunt
s, and Jacob and Uncle Baron too.

  Paula and I have become friends. I visit her in Bath where she lives, and we lunch and chat between her exits from the restaurant for a quick cigarette. She is my best informant, the one who had confided to me the news that Aunt Jean’s firstborn, Earle, was (as he’d told her himself ) a bastard. And Paula is the person who helped me work through the one failure of the curse—the contradictory fact that Aunt Jean’s younger son, Jerry, was allowed a son.

  After all, Paula reasons, was it little Jerry’s fault his mother bustled him off to be taken care of by Eddie and Bertha? Not at all. It made sense, Paula insisted, that the older son, Earle, should have taken the curse on the chin. Remaining in Britain, dying as an Englishman, he would naturally have had only girls. But dear Jerry, who never wanted to go, who cried himself to sleep for months after being sent to London—for him it was only proper that the curse should fail—that after Carreras was gone Jerry would return, his English wife with him, to his birthplace in America—three sons in tow.

  As for us, mere women, Paula and I enjoy agreeing with each other during lunch that, between not being the object of a curse and being one, we would choose being cursed (so much more interesting!). When Paula returns from smoking her cigarette in the restaurant garden, we begin to discuss Jacob’s legacy and his company, Levy’s International, which still, to this day, expands from shrinking.