Meanwhile, Mickey Cohen, who loved anything to do with a party, was in charge of American fund-raising, and was tossing more affairs in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and Miami, traveling with Ben Hecht as his principal speaker.*
But sometimes Cohen had to turn his attention to less festive matters. When, in one incident, three young Irgun guerrillas were killed by British soldiers and strung up in a public square in Palestine, Cohen decreed immediate vengeance. Contacting his Irgun friends, Cohen ordered that the same number of British officers be killed and hung in the same square. It was done.
Just how aware, in 1947, American Jews were of the role of organized crime in the fight for an independent Israel is unclear. Probably most were not aware. Those who were, numbed by reports of the Holocaust that were at last appearing in the American media, preferred to look the other way, or to take the attitude that the end justified the means. But Meyer Lansky and Mickey Cohen would always insist that all their activities of this period had the tacit blessing of President Harry S Truman. Truman, both men believed, had to have been aware of what was going on. Of course, he could not publicly condone or endorse it. But he sympathized with the Israeli cause. And, by simply doing nothing, he managed to lend his silent support to both the Israeli fighters and the work of the American men who were already being called the Kosher Nostra. “To me, he was the greatest man in the world, Harry Truman,” Mickey Cohen wrote in his hard-boiled English, “because of what he done for Israel and because he made it available for us to do.”
When, on May 14, 1948, Israel officially became a nation, and Britain withdrew its troops, there was cause for great celebration in that part of the Middle East. After nearly two thousand years of statelessness and dispersion, and a half-century after the first Zionist congress in Basel, Switzerland, the image of the Jews as a “rootless” group of “lost” tribes seemed erased from history forever. The preceding ten years had been the most tragic decade in Jewish history. On the continent of Europe, out of a Jewish population of 8,255,000, an estimated 5,957,000 had been murdered by the Nazis. Now those dark years were ending on a note of triumph. The price had been enormous, but now the score seemed to have been settled. The old arguments between Zionists and anti-Zionists seemed now to be both behind the times and beside the point. So did the endless discussions as to whether the Jews constituted a race, a religion, a nation, or a loosely defined “people.” They were now a nationality, and would carry passports to prove it.
Throughout the new country there were parties, dancing in the streets, the waving of flags and the tooting of automobile horns. One sabra—a Jewish native of Palestine—now living in America recalls the first long evening of revelry, which, for her and her young friends, ended up on a beach outside Tel Aviv while the sun came up over the Caesarean hills and lighted up the Mediterranean on what would be the first full day of the State of Israel. “We had been talking about our new country as though it was going to be a new paradise on earth,” she said later, “a kind of magical Land of Oz, a new Eden, where there would be peace and freedom and happiness for Jews forever. But then we began to pinch ourselves, and to remind each other that we had to face reality. We had to remember that now that we had a country of our own, it would be a country like any other, with all the problems any country faces. There would be Israeli heroes, yes, but there would also be Israeli burglars, Israeli rapists, Israeli muggers, Israeli pimps and Israeli prostitutes, Israeli policemen to chase Israeli purse snatchers, and Israeli soldiers to fight, kill, and be killed in—probably more Israeli wars.…”
Meanwhile, from the new State of Israel, its first premier, David Ben-Gurion, was throwing open his nation’s arms to Jews of all nationalities, urging, beseeching them to “return home” to Israel. To make the return easier, no bureaucratic paperwork was required. All who considered themselves Jews were welcome. But to most American Jews the idea of going “home” to Israel had little appeal. Home was not there, but here, and it was difficult to envision Israel except in a very abstract way.
There was also some confusion—a complicated panorama of mixed emotions. For the Jewish socialist movement, for example, the fact of Israel took much of the wind out of its sails. What was the point, now, in complaining about the unfairness of the American capitalist system? If the Jewish socialists were unhappy with the state of affairs in America, they now had their own country to go home to, where they could ply their political wares.
For the affluent, the emigration from Eastern Europe to the United States had turned out to be the most golden of all diasporas—and the luckiest. The journey from the tumbledown shtetls and ghettos of Russia and Poland to two-car garages and Saks Fifth Avenue charge accounts had been almost miraculously brief. Whose babushka-wearing grandmother, or even whose unlettered mother, would believe the sight of her offspring driving Cadillacs and walking poodles in Central Park? Dogs as pets? The idea would have been unthinkable just one generation earlier, when the dog had been the ferocious sidekick of the pogromchik. And yet it had happened. Somehow, the Eastern Europeans had arrived in America at the precise moment when their particular talents and energies—in the garment industry, the film industry, broadcasting, publishing, the liquor business—had been most needed. Success, for even the halfway enterprising, had been downright inevitable, and this seemed more wondrous than the creation, in another part of the world, of a state called Israel.
For most American Jews, yes, it was nice to know that Israel was there, for those who needed it, and as an alternative to assimilation, a place to retreat to should life in America ever for some reason become intolerable. But most Jews felt that they had assimilated fairly well, and that America had been good to them. What more, exactly, did Israel have to offer them? They had no need for a refuge now, even though that refuge was there, beckoning and demanding their attention and support. Most would be interested in visiting Israel, out of curiosity, as tourists. And, as a concession to old and almost-forgotten loyalties, most would be willing to buy Mr. Ben-Gurion’s bonds. But that was about the extent of it; most would not feel so deeply about Israel as to pull up their now firm American roots to go there to live.
Even the most recent American arrivals—those who had narrowly managed to escape from Hitler—felt this way. Anna Apfelbaum Potok, for example, had arrived in the United States in 1940, barely eight years before the creation of the State of Israel. Born in Warsaw in 1897, she was in the third generation of prominent Polish furriers. As a little girl, she had often visited her grandfather’s shop, where he had let her play with the silky skins, and where she had learned to love the touch, of sables particularly, and even the pungent, gamy smell of raw and untreated pelts. There was no question but that Anna and her older brother Maximilian would both join the family’s fur business, and after their father’s death in 1921, they took it over. The Apfelbaum family had survived the czarist pogroms with no inconvenience whatsoever, because the Apfelbaums supplied fur coats to the Polish nobility and all the high officials of the country. The mayor of Warsaw and the president of Poland were their customers. After the Russian revolution, they felt no pressure because leaders of the Communist hierarchy traveled from as far away as Moscow and Leningrad to be fitted with coats of Apfelbaum sable, lynx, and karakul. Even after the partition of Poland in 1939, and Warsaw’s surrender to the Germans, the Apfelbaums continued to feel secure, and though acknowledged as Jews, were permitted to travel freely about Europe—to the fur market in Leipzig, for example—as non-Jews.
By 1940, however, with the fall of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, and Rumania to the Germans, and with Hitler’s Final Solution grimly under way, things were very different. It was essential that the Apfelbaums get out of Europe or perish. There was a hasty family conference, and they discussed escape routes. But for several weeks no rail tickets were available out of Warsaw. Then two tickets were obtained to Switzerland, and the plan was for Anna and brother Max to use these, go to Zurich, get funds from Sw
iss banks, and send for the rest of the family, which included Anna’s husband, Leon Potok, their son, her brother’s wife and their daughter.
From Zurich, Anna and her brother went to Paris, where they planned to send for the others, only to find that Paris had just been occupied by the Germans. Then, in a terrifying decision, Anna and Max decided to return to Warsaw and personally collect the rest of the family. Somehow—aided by the fact that they both spoke perfect German—they managed this, and the clan regrouped in Warsaw. In the end, five people—Anna, her husband, her brother, and the two children—set off in a small car with a single suitcase, headed they knew not where. Max’s wife had agreed to stay behind. There was no room for her in the car, and it was important that the party look like ordinary travelers and not like refugees; she would be sent for later. Max never saw his wife again.
At first, the little car headed south, toward Rumania and the possibility of some Black Sea port, such as Odessa, where passage to some neutral country, such as Spain, might be found. They were stopped at the Rumanian border by Nazi soldiers. Then, in a quick decision, they turned north again, to make a dash for Lithuania, where they were able to make it across the frontier. From there, the little group managed to book passage across the Baltic Sea to Sweden, where, through the intervention of the American consulate in Stockholm, they were able to obtain visas to the United States, by way of Montreal. The consulate stayed open all night to handle the paperwork.
Anna Potok and her brother Max had often talked of introducing haute couture into their fur business, and Max Apfelbaum, who had read about glamorous American movie stars and their luxurious tastes, thought it might be a good idea to try that approach in New York. He was tired of designing cold-weather furs for Polish and Russian bureaucrats and their plump little wives, and so Anna, who had studied art in Poland, went to her sketch pad. Their first salon, on West Fifty-seventh Street, was small, but their first showing of luxury furs was a huge success. Their original clientele didn’t consist of movie stars, exactly, but it did include the likes of Mrs. William S. Paley, Thelma Chrysler Foy, Marjorie Merriweather Post, Mrs. Loel Guinness, and the Duchess of Windsor, who became regular customers for furs with the “Maximilian” label. The choice of the label was an accidental stroke of genius, carrying as it did connotations of grand, expensive, European imperial splendor. One wonders if the brother-sister team of fur designers would have had the same success with “Furs by Apfelbaum.”
Had “Madame” Anna Apfelbaum Potok, as the dowager octogenarian head of Maximilian Furs is now called, ever—after that frantic, frightening, zigzag journey across the face of Europe—ever considered emigrating to Israel, where the Jews had at last found a homeland? “Oh, never,” she replies. “We loved it here, we were happy here, we were lucky here, and we were successful here, from almost the first moment we arrived.” With a twinkle, she adds, “This was where we found our ladies,” and she points to the autographed photographs of the American First Ladies she has outfitted with furs, including Jacqueline Kennedy—whose inaugural wraps she designed—Lady Bird Johnson, and Nancy Reagan.
And so, for the majority of American Jews who saw themselves as part of a whole American success story, the new State of Israel had mostly a symbolic meaning. It was not their homeland. It did, on the other hand, provide a useful refuge for the persecuted, the misfit, the zealot, the radical, or the malcontent, a place for less fortunate Jews or, rather, those who had been more fortunate than the truly unfortunate who had lost their lives to Hitler—a place for the survivors of the Holocaust. And for Americans who had lost relatives and friends in the Holocaust, there was a certain amount of bitterness, too, and the feeling that Israel had been offered as a homeland too late.
*For Hecht’s activities on behalf of the Irgun, his books would be banned in Great Britain for a number of years.
14
TOUCHES OF CLASS
“If there was one good thing that came out of the war, it was the fact that it united the American Jewish community. The old social dividing line between the German Jews and the Russian Jews simply melted away.”
This platitude, phrased in various ways, became something of a commonplace in the years immediately following World War II, but was, alas, merely a platitude. The social line between the Germans and the Russians remained as firmly drawn as ever. When it became apparent that the Christian community, in terms of social clubs, did not wish to mingle with Jews as a class, the Jews had simply created social clubs on their own. But now, in nearly every American city of any size, there were at least two Jewish country clubs—the “good” one (German), and the less good (Russian). In New York, the best Jewish country club was the Germans’ Century Country Club in suburban White Plains. The second-best was the Russians’ Sunningdale Golf Club in Scarsdale. There was even a third-best, also Russian—the Old Oaks Country Club. In the city, the elite Jewish men’s club was the Harmonie (German).
Even Jewish houses of worship remained divided along the same lines. New York’s splendid Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue, one of the largest Jewish houses of worship in the world and certainly the costliest, had been founded early in another century by German Jews whose fortunes had come out of the Civil War. Of course, Temple Emanu-El could not bar any Jew—or non-Jew, for that matter—from attending services there. But, with its board of trustees consisting of members of the German-Jewish Old Guard families, it could create the distinct impression of not welcoming Russian-Jewish congregants. For one thing, all the best pews belonged to German families. The dividing line went even deeper. At such German-Jewish-founded hospitals as New York’s Mount Sinai, Russian-Jewish doctors were not welcome on the staff. It was a situation that was galling to all but the most insensitive. If Jewish Americans as a whole were treated, socially, as second-class, then the Russians were third-class citizens.
All this simply added to the Russians’ ambivalence about their Jewishness. If, the feeling seemed to be, they were not—even with all their money—considered good enough to rub shoulders with the goy elite, perhaps there was a reason. After all, they had not been considered good enough in the old country, either.
Perhaps, to be sure, it had something to do with the lines of work the Russians had gone into. The garment industry was, after all, even when it was creating hundred-thousand-dollar sable coats by Maximilian, still known as the shmattes business, or “rag trade”; Maximilian was just a glorified tailor. The entertainment industry was, after all, just “show biz,” and even such a “great lady of the screen” as Joan Crawford had started her career as a prostitute and making pornographic films. The liquor business remained seriously tainted by Prohibition, and so on. No Jew could say, “I am the president of the Manufacturers Trust Company,” or “I am chairman of the Aetna Life Insurance Company,” or “I am a senior partner at Sullivan and Cromwell.” Instead, a Jew was forced to identify himself to the outside world with a little shrug and a little grin that was almost an apology. Even Frances Goldwyn, when explaining what her husband did for a living, would say, “Oh, he’s just a little old movie producer.”
To fight these feelings of social and professional inferiority, the new Russian-Jewish millionaires used various tactics. Helena Rubinstein, on her way by 1947 to becoming one of the richest women in the world, was always “Madame” Rubinstein in the office. But, outside it, going to meet people she didn’t know, she would always remind her escort, “Don’t forget—introduce me by my good name,” which was Princess Archil Gourielli. In the Samuel Bronfman household, there were several taboos. The word booze could not be used, nor could the expressions “bootlegger” or “rum-runner.” Banished from the family vocabulary, too, was the word Prohibition. And Bronfman’s children, who were too young to remember it—the oldest was born in 1925—were brought up as though Prohibition had never existed, and though they eventually learned that it had, were never told that it had had any effect on the family’s fortunes. (This rewriting of family history for the children evidently work
ed. In 1969, at the age of forty, Sam’s son Edgar would write in the Columbia Journal of World Business that until Repeal, the family had done no business outside of Canada, and write this with such sincerity that it would be apparent he believed it.) Similarly, the Bronfman children grew up believing that Joseph E. Seagram was some distant Canadian ancestor, and since it had been explained to them in a vague sort of way that they were Jewish, the children assumed that Joseph E. Seagram was also Jewish.
Still, in very private moments, and with very old and trusted friends, Mr. Sam’s eyes would get a faraway look, his brow would furrow, and he would say, “How long do you think it’ll be before they stop calling me a goddamn bootlegger?”
In Hollywood, the movie moguls were particularly sensitive to gossip that portrayed them as illiterates or boors. And yet, when they tried to be genteel and refined, the results were often somewhat less than subtle. One of Louis B. Mayer’s favorite words, for example, was class. He recognized it in others, and longed to acquire it himself. One of the pet actresses in his stable was Greer Garson, who, with her gently demure good looks and polished English accent, seemed to him the personification of class. But when Mayer, the former junk dealer who had been born in a village outside Minsk, tried to be classy himself it just came out awkward and inept. Someone had told him that golf was a classy American sport, and so he immediately took up golf. But he never quite understood that golf is scored in strokes, and seemed to see it, instead, as a kind of footrace across the golf course. To increase his speed from the first hole to the last, he played with two caddies. When he hit a ball, one caddy was posted down the fairway in order to locate the ball immediately. Meanwhile, the second caddy ran ahead to station himself for the next shot, with Mayer running behind. At the end of the game, Mayer would check his watch and exclaim, “We made it in one hour and seven minutes! Three minutes better than yesterday!”
The Jews in America Trilogy Page 120
