The Family

by David Laskin

  In the Russian annals of the family, the wives are all but silent. They worked, they sacrificed, they looked after their families, they faded into their husbands’ shadows. Between them Gishe Sore and Beyle bore at least nine daughters, starting with Itel. It was the lot of these daughters to emerge from the shadows, break the silence, leave a mark on the world that everyone recognized as theirs. Gishe Sore and Beyle were not timid, but they were obedient and they did what was expected of them. Their daughters were different. They did what no one expected. Starting with Itel.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY

  Itel took it for granted that she would work for a living like her mother and grandmother before her—but not in a grocery store. Forever fussing with jars and sacks and barrels, dickering with peasants, bartering foul-smelling kerosene for eggs and vegetables, keeping the books, sweeping the floor—it would kill her to be chained to the daily round of small-town retail. So what was left? The daughter of a scribe did not work in a factory. Itel was not cut out to be a lady’s maid, cook, or governess. So she learned to sew. Before her thirteenth birthday, she was apprenticed to a Rakov dressmaker to be instructed in the arts of measuring, cutting, basting, fitting, embroidering, lining, pleating, and hemming; and soon her shy younger sister Ettel joined her. The girls proved to be wizard seamstresses, quick, nimble, astonishingly intuitive in translating fabric into fashion, and when their apprenticeship was done, Gishe Sore bought them a sewing machine of their own and set them up in a corner of the house. The Kaganovich sisters: quality clothes at affordable prices. Rakov did not generate enough orders to keep them occupied, and so in the slack periods Itel traveled to nearby Minsk and not so nearby Warsaw to drum up business—daring behavior for a teenage Jewish girl back then. Volume duly increased—word spread that these diminutive sisters had something special—but the uptick in business was nothing compared with the upheaval in Itel’s consciousness. Rakov at the turn of the last century was sunk in deep, seemingly unshakable sleep. But Warsaw—for a girl with Itel’s temperament, Warsaw was pure intoxication. Itel became drunk on life’s possibilities. “She was never really a seamstress,” a relative said, “she was always an entrepreneur.” Always is stretching it a bit. The entrepreneurial spirit awoke when Itel first went to Warsaw.

  —

  In 1901, the year Itel turned fifteen, her uncle Yasef Bear emigrated to America—the first of Shimon Dov’s family to depart from the Pale. It was the tremor of a seismic shift that no one recognized at the time. An opportunity arose, a path was chosen for reasons long forgotten, one door shut and another opened. No landmark, monument, or even a scrap of paper commemorates this private earthquake. But a large family lives and prospers today as a consequence.

  Yasef Bear, Shimon Dov’s second son, was thirty years old, married, and the father of three young children when he left Volozhin by himself and sailed to New York. He passed through Ellis Island and made his way to Hoboken, New Jersey, where he eventually found work as a teacher in a Hebrew school. Joseph Cohn, as he called himself in America, established the beachhead in the New World—and other family members followed quickly. Herman, the youngest, was nineteen when he joined his brother, in 1902; the next year Joseph sent for his wife, Ethel, their son, and two daughters. When none of them was attacked by Indians, lost in the wilderness, or converted to Christianity, Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore decided it was safe to send an emissary from their own family. Ettel, the second daughter, had come down with typhoid and the parents thought a change of climate would do her good. So in July 1904, the seventeen-year-old girl boarded a ship in Hamburg and made her way to Ellis Island. She moved into Uncle Joseph’s house in Hoboken, shared a room with her cousins Sarah and Rachel, and went to work in a dress factory.

  All over the Pale, the shtetlach were emptying. Those left behind felt small and abandoned. With the departure of Joseph and Herman, only two of the scribe’s six children—the fourth son, Arie, and the daughter, Leah Golda—remained in Volozhin to comfort the aging parents. Even the famous yeshiva had closed—shut down by order of the tsar’s government, in 1892, when the Netziv refused to include secular course offerings. “The third temple is destroyed,” wailed Volozhin Jews as they stood by the locked doors and shuttered windows. Some swore they heard a soft sobbing sound coming from deep within. Though the yeshiva later reopened, the prestige and preeminence of Chaim the Volozhiner’s original academy was gone forever. The old and the precious were vanishing before their eyes and nothing good arose in their place.

  —

  Itel reversed the customary sequence in the stages of growing up: first she went to Warsaw to look for work, then she stayed there to go to school. In the Russian Empire at the time, Jews were admitted into public schools on a quota system based on population, with the number of Jewish students capped between 3 and 10 percent depending on the region. Warsaw, because of its size, had a fairly generous allotment of places for Jewish students, and somehow Itel, despite the fact that she had received no formal education, managed to snag a spot in a gymnasium (a school that roughly straddles American high school and the first years of college). She studied math and Russian, initiating a lifelong passion for Russian literature and a proficiency with numbers that would come in handy in the years ahead.

  Itel was seventeen years old and a student at the Warsaw gymnasium when anti-Jewish riots broke out in Kishinev on April 6, Easter Sunday, 1903. The accounts published in underground Jewish newspapers electrified her—electrified every Jew in the Pale of Settlement. There had, of course, been pogroms before in the cities where Jews and gentiles lived together in desperate poverty—but this was her pogrom, the one that seared the consciousness of her generation. The young had assumed the twentieth century would be different—modern times, a new age. Trams ran up and down the stately boulevards of Warsaw; electric lights blazed in shopwindows; women smoked openly in public; young Jewish girls left their families and struck out on their own. Yet in the provincial capital of Kishinev people still believed in the ancient blood libel—the hideous lie that Jews required gentile blood for their religious rituals. A child had been found dead in a village; an anti-Semitic writer claimed that local Jews had slain the child to use the blood to make Passover matzo. Word spread in the usual way and the fabrication took on a life of its own. Starting on Easter Sunday, the holiday that traditionally triggered pogroms, the city of 125,000 people erupted in three days of uncontrolled violence. Nails were driven into the heads of Jewish men and the eyes of Jewish women; Jewish women were raped, their breasts hacked off, their stomachs torn open; Jewish babies were tossed out of windows with their tongues cut out of their mouths. Itel read the eyewitness accounts and burned:

  The riot was now at its height. Windows had gone, the frames were following, the stoves had been smashed and the furniture and crockery broken up. Pages of scripture and of the sacred books lay scattered on the ground. Piles of feathers were to be seen in the courtyard and all around the house. Feathers and down flew about in the air and covered the trees like hoar-frost. In the midst of this mad inferno, in the din of destruction and wild laughter and savage roars and cries of terror, the thirst for blood awoke. The rioters at this point ceased to be men. Their first rush was for the shed; they found there but one man, the glazier Grienschpoun. A neighbor . . . was the first to stab the glazier in the neck. The unhappy man rushed out, but they seized him and dragged him on to the roof of the outhouse, where they finished him off with sticks and cudgels. . . .

  Civil authorities stood by while the citizens of Kishinev killed forty-nine Jews, wounded some five hundred, ransacked and looted over a thousand Jewish residences and businesses, and left two thousand Jewish families homeless.

  It was “the last pogrom of the Middle Ages and the first atrocity of the twentieth century.” A few weeks later, when the blood was dry but before it had been scraped off the walls and paving stones, a young Russian Jewish poet named Ch
aim Bialik (a former Volozhin yeshiva student) traveled to Kishinev at the behest of the Jewish Historical Commission of Odessa to interview survivors and report on what he heard. Bialik’s response was an epic poem, a prolonged howl of agony and shame that he titled “In the City of Slaughter.”

  Descend then, to the cellars of the town,

  There where the virginal daughters of thy folk were fouled,

  Where seven heathen flung a woman down,

  The daughter in the presence of her mother,

  The mother in the presence of her daughter,

  Before slaughter, during slaughter, and after slaughter! . . .

  In that dark corner, and behind that cask

  Crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks,

  Watching the sacred bodies struggling underneath

  The bestial breath,

  Stifled in filth, and swallowing their blood! . . .

  Crushed in their shame, they saw it all;

  They did not stir nor move;

  They did not pluck their eyes out; they beat not their brains against the wall! . . .

  They died like dogs, and they were dead!

  And on the next morn, after the terrible night

  The son who was not murdered found the spurned cadaver of his father on the ground.

  Now wherefore dost though weep, O son of man?

  Bialik’s indictment of Jewish passivity, Jewish terror, Jewish helplessness in the face of gentile violence galvanized a generation. It certainly galvanized Itel. Everywhere she went young Jews were in an uproar. Slender bespectacled students announced that they were quitting school and moving to Palestine to work in the vineyards. Sons and daughters of shopkeepers gathered in the corners of coffeehouses to whisper about the weapons they needed for underground cells. Emigration to America spiked, doubling in the year after Kishinev. A new wave of Zionist fervor—the ecstatically idealistic Second Aliyah—began to build. The word suddenly on everyone’s lips was self-defense. Never again would they stand by while their women were raped and their children hacked with axes. Never again would they be cornered in attics, chased into cellars, stabbed in the neck by laughing neighbors. No city would ever again be a city of slaughter.

  In the welter of post-Kishinev Warsaw, Itel was exposed to every shade in the radical spectrum. Each faction assured her that if she signed on with them, a new revolutionary day would dawn—while the other factions were certain to plunge the world into immediate and irredeemable doom. She chose to join the Bund.

  —

  Itel had known of the Bund—the socialist Jewish labor organization that held sway in the Pale in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—before she went to Warsaw. She was twelve years old when the organization emerged in 1897. But she was old enough to thrill to the story of how the first Bundist agitator infiltrated Rakov.

  One Friday evening in winter, when the pious were ushering in the Sabbath bride as usual with song and prayer, a handsome young man with a disturbing little mole on his nose appeared at the door of the prayer house used by the shtetl’s young breakaway congregation. The youth was tall, his smile was broad and pleasant, his greeting of “Sholem Aleichem” set everyone at ease—and so when he politely implored the congregants to take one of his pamphlets home and read it (“but please not in the presence of your parents”), they all readily complied. They assumed this young fellow was a new-hatched magid—an itinerant preacher—come to spread God’s love. “Until late in the night, each of us was immersed in this thin pamphlet,” one of the congregants wrote later, “and something new, strange, and not understood came to us from its pages. It seemed to be written in Yiddish; yet it was not the familiar language or the familiar words. What words! Beyond understanding! Words like ‘conspiracy,’ ‘expropriation,’ ‘confidence,’ and many more which we had never heard.” The next morning, they gathered again for Sabbath prayer and conferred. Did you read? I did read. And what do you think? I did not understand. Happily, the charming young pamphleteer with the mole was on hand to explain. Smiling the same irresistible smile as the day before, the stranger removed his overcoat and revealed his rubaska—the traditional long Russian shirt that flows from shoulders to calves—colored a bright red and cinched by a bright red band around his waist. The innocent young Jews of Rakov were so dazzled by the smile, the red shirt, the mysterious pamphlet, the confiding manner that no one had the nerve to tell the man to cover his head in the presence of God. He begged permission to talk, and soon it became clear that this was no magid and his enchanting words had nothing to do with God. The young man was in fact a representative of the newly established revolutionary socialist workers’ party—the Bund—and he had come to Rakov from Minsk as part of a concerted program of agitation and recruitment. Rakov’s breakaway congregation was won over to a person. “All of us, as one, signed up for membership then and there. And thus, instead of a rabbi to teach us the lessons of ‘Ein Ya’akov,’ that young man was teaching us, every evening, the lessons of the Bund and of the revolution.”

  The story of the handsome stranger with the mole and the pamphlet and the red shirt made a deep impression on the young Itel. Five years later, a seventeen-year-old student and a garment worker roiled by the Kishinev atrocities, she was ready to don the red shirt herself. She attended secret meetings in shuttered back rooms (secret because the Bund was illegal), she read pamphlets by the score, she listened to shining-faced comrades sing the Bund hymn:

  We swear our stalwart hate persists

  Of those who rob and kill the poor:

  The Tsar, the Masters, Capitalists.

  Our vengeance will be swift and sure.

  Earth with its heaven hears.

  Witness: the bright stars,

  And our oath of blood and tears.

  We swear. We swear.

  Itel swore too. She had always been headstrong, outspoken, impatient, entitled. She had always lashed out against injustice. Now, the Bund gave her a way to channel her energy and ego into something larger than defying her parents and lording it over her brothers and sisters. With the Bund she had an ideology and a platform for organized resistance. She was a party member. She was a comrade. She was a fighter in the revolution. By a strange twist, history gave Itel, the born revolutionary, a revolution to join just as she crossed the threshold into maturity. Not merely talk of a revolution—but an inchoate mass struggle that was escalating, coalescing, and spreading through the Russian Empire. The Bund, from its founding in Vilna in 1897, had pledged to overthrow “those who rob and kill the poor.” Now, in the aftermath of Kishinev, the Bund leadership passed a resolution calling for members to “organize armed resistance.” Itel swore the oath of blood and bullets. When she left Warsaw to return to Rakov, she was a committed Bundist prepared to take up arms against the tsar and his reactionary henchmen.

  The return home cannot have been easy. Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore wanted only security and piety for their children—the boys should be scholars and scribes; the girls should be plump happy wives. And now they were harboring a bomb thrower under their roof. How could the scribe of God have sired a daughter who never set foot in shul except to attend a Bund meeting? The parents were not blind. No Hebrew prayer was ever on the child’s lips; no sign of respect ever dimmed her wicked eyes. She smoked cigarettes—a daughter of a Kohain, smoking in public. And soon there was talk of a young man, an admirer, a revolutionary no less, who followed her to meetings and hung on her every word. Where would it end?

  It was true. Itel was in love. Wolf Rosenthal was five years older, strapping (at least compared with her), dark-haired, clean-featured, not quite handsome but certainly striking, with the intense black burning eyes of a fanatic or madman. The piercing gaze and gruff barking voice were deceptive: though he looked like a Jewish Rasputin, Wolf had a kind heart, a healthy young man’s appetites, and the undying fidelity of a born h
usband. Wolf gazed adoringly as Itel, all four feet eleven inches of her, stood up at Bund meetings and thundered to the rafters about the overthrow of the tsar, the rights of all working people, the bourgeois self-delusions of Zionism (the Jewish faction that the Bund opposed most fiercely in this period), the liberation of women from the shackles of tradition. He was smitten. She was smitten. The revolution had come. Desire, like the will of the people, was irresistible. What were they waiting for? It would have been a crime against nature not to act on their feelings—and a crime against freedom to hide or lie about their relationship. Their mothers could only pray that the neighbors didn’t ask too many questions.