by Elisa New
The Philadelphia plant that Jacob opened shortly after losing his run for Congress survived the twentieth century and is now, at a new location, one of five owned and operated by Jacob’s male heirs. Jacob spent the last decade of his life pulling it through the worst of the Depression and giving Jean the management training he would have given Emil or Theo, Paul or Eddie. At the end of the Depression, when so many other businesses had gone under, Levy’s International Shrinking was still afloat.
Through World War II, Jean sat in the boardroom and Myrtle and Fanny stoked the furnace and rolled piece goods for the war effort. After Fred and Dan (but not Jack) came back from the war, Myrtle and Fanny’s sons scraped together enough cash to buy and customize machines capable of treating the fabric used for car seat covers, and then expanded into other variations on this activity, branching out from woolens and cottons into synthetics of all kinds, wovens and nonwovens, fabrics for domestic and a vast number of other uses.
Walk through one of The Synthetics Group’s factories with either Dan or Fred, or with Dan and Fred’s sons, Jack and Jeff, or their sons, now in the family business as well, and you will hear the unselfconscious rhapsodies of the machines, those beautiful machines that transform ordinary woven cloth into miracle fabrics that repel odors and wick moisture, that stay supple when suppleness is what’s needed and go stiff if that’s what’s called for. Once, in his factory space on Lombard Street, Jacob treated, inspected, rolled fabric for menswear, rainwear, and the odd shop awning. Now his grandsons’ and great-grandsons’ and great-great-grandsons’ machines do much more than shrink. They keep the wallpaper in your kitchen from smelling like stir fry and the batting around the smoked trout from absorbing oil. These beautiful machines keep the sateen on the box spring from sagging, the gauze from sticking to the toddler’s knee, and the drink you spill over the Atlantic from soaking your airplane seat. Nonwovens are as profitable for Jacob’s heirs as wovens were for him. The blue drapes on your doctor’s examining table and the padding around your hard drive. All of these have likely passed through TSG.
The last time I visited one of the plants I was shown Jacob’s original machine, still performing the tasks of cold water shrinking that Jacob patented a hundred years ago. Every time I visit I see military khaki running through, since uniforms, as Fanny’s son Dan explains, must breathe and be flexible in all weathers without stiffening or stretching out of shape. Some of what the company does is complex and modern, but I’m told that there’s still a call for old-fashioned shrinking and Levy’s is the last American company still doing it.
In other words, it is fair to say that the tortoise beat the hare. Bernhard Baron’s Carreras is gone, but Jacob’s firm continues to expand from shrinking, and even the boast of Jacob’s “international” has been vindicated. “Levy’s International” may have started as a few dunking tubs and drying rods in Jacob’s Lombard Street basement, but in its modern incarnation The Synthetics Group is one of the largest independent textile processors in the world.
Advertising card, 1923, for Levys International Shrinking Company, Baltimore and Philadelphia. Gift to the author from Alvin “Buddy” Levy.
Buddy, who ran the Baltimore plant and whom I visited years ago with my young daughter, died this year. His wife, Myra, keeps Jacob’s cane still. I have not seen it for a while, but I like to think the cane is safe in Baltimore, standing up in a closet on a cushion of carpet, the letters of my great-grandfather’s initials, and Max’s, and Isaac’s, and Paul’s gleaming through the louvers.
What does it mean that I let this cane seize me, let it bear me for nearly a decade of my life, carrying every day in my mind the gleam of those initials, the straightness of the cane’s dark length and graceful crook, carrying the cane as a pointer and a talisman?
I had just turned forty that fall when I first saw my great-grandfather’s cane, and last year I turned fifty. I realize that now I have followed this object, clung to my need to know about it, from the tobacco coast of North America to the Belarusian town of Brest-Litovsk, from Berlin to Baltimore, drawing my daughters after me to stand at gravesites and factories, farms and archives, and to a copse of trees in Alsace where Jack fell.
Just this year I’ve been to Jacob’s grave in Baltimore, and to that of his three sons who lie with Bernhard Baron in a stately London cenotaph, and I’ve been to the Shavli ghetto, where I held my daughter Yael’s hand as we absorbed the death of the Levy children in the Kinderaktion.
Every endpoint was a grave—all endpoints are—but I know that my great-grandfather Jacob’s cane is now mine as well. It has taken me somewhere I had to go, to a place where I needed to spend part of my own Jewish life. The cane took me into the hopeful heart and workshop of my great-grandfather’s civilization, into that worldly, cosmopolitan, emancipated Jewish century that ended in 1945. It taught me to love, honor, and pass down the breathtaking vision of modernity my forebears cherished. I keep it and press it into this book.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am immensely grateful to the many people who have helped me keep on writing Jacob’s Cane. First thanks must go to my three daughters, Yael and her sisters Orli and Maya, who have made real to me the commandment “Teach it diligently unto your children.” Their curiosity and faith have kept my diligence alive. Ronald New and Joan New, my parents, have been my first, best, and most constant fans. My wonderful husband, Larry Summers, has inspired me as the face of my ideal, though impatient and elusive, reader. This book has been part of all their lives for a very long time.
Many members of the extended Levy and Baron families shared their stories, their archives, and their time and hospitality. My three inimitable great-aunts, Jean, Myrtle, and Fanny, although they died before I began this book, left our whole family the example of civilization at its highest and most generous. I did not miss them while writing the book, but I shall now. Their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren carried on for me in their stead.
On Cape Cod, in the months before he died, Jerry Adler told me stories of his mother, my Aunt Jean, of his childhood in London, and of the tobacco business in the 1940s and 1950s. In Philadelphia, my Aunt Myrtle’s son Fred Rosenstein and daughter-in-law Anita Rosenstein, and Dan and Lenora Goldman, Aunt Fanny’s children, told me stories, photocopied documents and letters, and let me riffle through their albums and file drawers. They welcomed me to their company house in North Carolina and gave immeasurable support and help along the way. Jack Rosenstein and Jeff Goldman, now principals of The Synthetics Group (formerly Levy’s Shrinking Company), gave me tours of the factories in Philadelphia and North Carolina and provided news items and memorabilia. Carol and Joel Silver gave me support as well as a glimpse of the one book remaining from my great-grandfather Jacob Levy’s library—fittingly, Don Quixote.
In Baltimore, Buddy (Alvin) and Myra Levy and Anita Abrams, as well as Joyce and Louis Kaplan, gave me access to the cane that belonged to Jacob Levy, for which I’m eternally grateful, and also shared with me their stories, their cache of turn-of-the-century photographs of Baltimore, and on several occasions, their spare room. Donald Abrams showed me his short film of Levy’s Shrinking Company. In Baltimore, I was lucky enough to meet with Nancy Katz, of Pollan-Katz umbrellas, and with Abraham and Naomi Cohen, who told me stories and gave me leads.
In London and Bath, Paula Baron and Vanessa Baron Stopford talked to me for long hours, telling wonderful stories and also sharing their archives of clippings about the glory years of Carreras Cigarettes. Also in London, Elizabeth Luard shared memories of her grandfather, Eddie Levy, and in particular of his wife, her grandmother, the indomitable Bertha. Her memories of these grandparents can be found in her wonderful memoir with recipes, Family Life.
Of those thanked above, Buddy Levy, Jerry Adler, and Naomi and Abraham Cohen have all since died. Moshe and Tanya Levy, of Givat Ram, Israel, have also died, as I learned after the manuscript of this book was finished. Rivka Levy’s firsthand account of her grandfather
Max Levy, and of life in a Lithuanian ghetto, also came to me after the book was completed. I am deeply grateful to her for seeing me, along with my daughter Maya, on such short notice and for opening up her store of painful memories.
This book took me on three research trips to the Baltics, three trips to London, and many to Baltimore. I thank the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard’s Clark Cook Foundation, and the Robinson Rollins Funds for monies that proved crucially helpful in defraying the expenses of these trips.
Over the years, I had numerous drivers and guides in Eastern Europe, especially in Siauliai; each of the guides was superb in a different way. I thank Chaim Bargman for being an excellent mentor to a first-time Jewish traveler; he not only took me to key sites of interest in Siauliai and Kaunas but also drove me around the Lithuanian countryside. Had not Chaim known enough to take me to see Leibe Lifshitz and Vitalija Gircyte, chief archivist of the Kaunas Ethnographic Museum, this book would not have gotten off the ground. On my second trip, the superb Viktorija Urbanovicuite provided not only guidance in English but also translations from Russian and Lithuanian, plus introductions to Vilius Puronas (in Siauliai) and Victoris Andrekaitis (in Raseinai). I also want to thank Nerija Gulbinaite of the Tourist Information Center of Siauliai.
On my third trip, in 2007, my daughter Yael’s Russian language skills replaced Viktorija’s. Previously, Yael’s French, so much better than mine, had made my badly planned 2003 trip through the Belgian and Alsatian battlefields of 1944-1945 a great success. When we visited Belarus, Yael’s Russian made all the difference, as it did on the Baltic ferry Vilnius.
Over the course of researching Siauliai and its history, both Leibe Lifshitz (now deceased) and his friend and colleague, Vilius Puronas, chief architect and planner of the Municipality of Siauliai, went from being informants and guides to becoming characters in their own right. The year before he died Leibe invited me to come to his home, where he showed me his personal archive of ghetto documents and artifacts and allowed me to make copies of many of them. Vilius provided hours and hours of time, crucial documents, and access to and use of images from his archive. I am grateful to both for representing, between them, the best of Jewish and non-Jewish Siauliai.
I am grateful to Victoris Andrekaitis for sharing his memories of Raseinai between the wars as well as his personal reminiscences of Max Levy. I would not have found Victoris but for the efforts of Raimenslos Petrosevicius of the Raseinai municipality.
My descriptions of Riga owe a very great deal to Valtis Alpinis, who took me around Old Riga, into the Jewish ghetto, and also helped me find the apartment where my relatives had lived on Kalnu Iela. I am also indebted to Galina Baranova and to Reuben Ferber, of the Center of Jewish Studies, University of Latvia, and Marger Vestermanis, director of the Jewish Museum of Riga, and his assistant, Svetlana Bogojavlenska. Rita Bogdanova, at the Latvian State Archives, and Karmella Skorika also provided much-needed guidance and orientation. Access to and help in the Central State Archives of Lithuania were provided by Irena Gruenberg and Jovita Vainelidene.
My third trip to the Baltics, by far the best organized, was managed by MIR Travel, of Seattle, Washington. I thank Douglas Grimes and Annie Lucas for their expert planning and management of the trip, and especially for securing for me the guidance of our driver and friend in Lithuania, Alexejus Zobov. My guides to Belarus, and especially Jewish Brest-Litovsk, were Rabbi Haim Rabinovich and Natalia Padalko, and my driver was Vladimir Padalko.
Research in Baltimore would not have been nearly so fruitful without the assistance of dedicated curators and archivists of that city. The most important archival collections, and most valuable help, came from the Jewish Museum of Maryland; the Enoch Pratt Library, Central Branch; the Baltimore Museum of Industry; the Maryland Historical Society Library; and the Special Collections at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of Johns Hopkins University.
I am immensely grateful to Avi Decter, Virginia North, Abby Lester, Robin Waldman, Jennifer Vess, and other staff members of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, my home base in Baltimore. Nancy Perlman of the Baltimore Museum of Industry was generous with time and advice, and Francis O’Neill, of the Maryland Historical Society Library, helped me untangle the election of 1912. The archivist in the Special Collections of Johns Hopkins University helped me get my bearings, not only on the socially progressive traditions in Baltimore but also on the ambiance and feel of residential life on Eutaw Place. Francis O’Neill spent several days with me, helping me to understand tobacco commerce and the politics of the industrial center, and gave me a crash course in early photography. Thanks also to the staff of the microforms room in the Enoch Pratt Free Library, the reference room of the Maryland Genealogical Society, and the Baltimore City Archives. Gilbert Sandler, author of Jewish Baltimore, shared observations and encouragements.
I am indebted to Ann B. O’Neill of the Glyndon, Maryland, Historical Society for her insights and access to her archives as well as for a day of great talk about Glyndon. I am especially grateful to her for sharing with me and my superb research assistant, Orli Levine, the minutes of the Pomona Grange, circa 1914. And I am grateful to Christian and Mary Profacis for allowing me to tour Paul Levy’s old house, now theirs, on Bond Avenue, which allowed me to imagine what it might have been like one hundred years before.
In London, Richard Knight, at Camden Local Studies and Archives Center, and Aidan Flood, senior librarian, were helpful in sharing with me the history of Carreras Cigarettes, especially the effects of the factory on the neighborhood. The manuscript versions of the History Project of Camden collected there were especially useful. I am grateful to Susan England of Southampton University, where the Basil Henriques papers are housed; to Brian Darmand, archivist of the Bernhard Baron Settlement; and to Miriam Sopel, past warden of the Bernhard Baron Settlement, who kindly shared memories and materials of Basil and Lady Henriques and of Eddie Baron and family. The archivist of the Liberal Synagogue of London was generous with time and information, as was the staff of the British Newspaper Library.
The staff of Greater London House on Hampton Road—formerly the Carreras Cigarette Factory—could not have been more generous. Jeff Shergold, facilities manager, and Robert Hossen, assistant manager, showed me original plans, pointed out architectural features, and even took me in rubber boots into the waterlogged basement, once the Carreras air raid shelter.
John Casey, of British American Tobacco, gave me access to the papers of the Baron family still extant. I am also grateful to Jan De Plessis, Philip Scourfield, and Robert Rubin for making this possible.
In North Carolina, I was helped by the staff of the Tobacco Life Museum, especially Melody Johnson in Kenley, and also by Grethel Boyette. Joey Scott, of Wilson County, taught me about the growing of tobacco, from seed to curing barn. He gave me insight into the long history of tobacco cultivation in the Carolinas during the period I was writing about, as well as into the ethical complexities of raising tobacco.
In New York City, three libraries were important to my research. The staff at YIVO has always been immensely helpful. I was also helped by the staff of the Arents Collection at the New York Public Library, Main Branch, as well as archivists at the Science, Industry and Business Branch of that library. Suzanne Wasserman of the Gotham Center, CUNY, provided much-needed support.
Several Boston area libraries have been important research and work spaces. The curatorial staff at Harvard ’s Baker Library was kind to me for years, bringing out the same volumes of Duns Register for me to look at again and again and allowing me to set up shop in their basement stacks. The reference staff of the Hebrew College Library, especially Shalva Segal and Harvey Bock, provided crucial assistance, as did that of the Brookline Public Library. I made each of these places my study and home for weeks and months on end.
University and academic audiences at Harvard and elsewhere provided useful feedback as these chapters emerged. It was in John Demos’s class in my freshmen year at Brandeis that I lear
ned enough historical method to interview my three aunts, and others, with tape recorder running. I spoke and read to audiences at the University of Latvia, Brandeis University, Stern College for Women, the American Literature Association, Southern Jewish Historical Society, Harvard Americanist Colloquium, the Harvard English Department Faculty Colloquium, Harvard Summer School, and the University of Pennsylvania Kelley Writers House. I am especially grateful to Steve Whitfield, Eric Sundquist, Larry Buell, and Al Filreis for invitations to present materials not ordinarily delivered from an academic rostrum. In addition, I know I’ve benefited from questions and comments from Edward Serotta, Wendy Steiner, Paul Hendrickson, Peter Conn, Rebecca Bushnell, Ben Shen, Werner Sollors, John Stauffer, Peter Sacks, Marc Shell, Stephen Greenblatt, Ramie Targoff, Jared Hickman, Jason Puskar, Lara Scales, and Jim von der Heydt.
I owe deep thanks to Fred Levine for his faith in and support of this project, and me, through the years when the project was gestating silently and then beginning to put down roots. His listening and notetaking skills, especially at times when I was too emotional to write, have proven invaluable.
Editors and literary professionals who asked the hard questions that helped the book develop include Jake Sagalyn, Loretta Barrett, Albert La-Farge, David Black, Alane Mason, Jo Ann Miller, and finally my superb agent, Andrew Wylie, who knew just what to do with the manuscript of this book and when to do it. I owe deep thanks to Luke Menand for putting me in touch with Andrew. I’m grateful to Lara Heimert and to the wonderful Amanda Moon and Whitney Casser at Basic Books. Michelle Welsh-Horst was cheerful, patient, and meticulous in producing the book, and Jennifer Carrow, the jacket designer, turned tattered and faded artifacts into vibrant art.
Bill Chapman provided crucial help with images at the last stage. Sol Kim Bentley, faculty assistant in Harvard’s English department, did the hard work of inputting corrections to chapter drafts, draft after draft, translating my thickets of pencil edits into readable copy again and again. Her cheer and intelligence, and her dispatch, have been so important.
