by David Laskin
The city was “prepared for anything short of invasion” reported the New York World—but the registration of some 610,000 New Yorkers unfolded peacefully. There was certainly no trouble from the Cohen brothers. Harry and Hyman filled out their cards under the watchful eye of registrar Edward P. Kearney, while Sam submitted his card to one D. H. Leary at Precinct 152. Though all three were citizens now, none of them showed much appetite to serve in the armed forces of their adoptive country. On line 12 of the registration card, in the space beside the question “Do you claim exemption from draft (specify grounds)?” Harry wrote “Yes break up the business and support of father and mother.” Sam wrote “Weak lungs.” And Hyman wrote “Yes. Support of mother.”
Six weeks later, there was a lottery drawing in Washington, DC, to determine the order in which registrants would be called up, and as luck would have it, all three of the brothers received very low numbers. Hyman, convinced that his civilian days were numbered, managed to get himself invited to the Catskills summer resort where his sweetheart, Anna Raskin, was vacationing with her family. Might as well make time while there was still a chance. Hyman could be gruff and scrappy, but he pitched as much sweet woo to lovely Anna as the senior Raskins would tolerate. By the time he returned to Brooklyn late in the summer, the couple had evidently reached an agreement. Sam and Harry, meanwhile, toiled away at A. Cohen & Sons and anxiously checked their mail.
The U.S. War Department intended to have 687,000 new recruits in uniform by autumn, and the first round of call-up notices went out at the end of August. Sam was one of the lucky recipients—but the army didn’t want him. At his physical, the examiners concluded he was too nearsighted to pick off German soldiers. In any case, he was short and stout and married and claimed to have weak lungs, so all in all not very promising soldier material. Harry was also refused. So that left Hyman. He got the call a few weeks after returning from what he called his “long date” in the Catskills. The War Department ordered him to report to his Brooklyn draft board for processing and warned that he was now “in the military service of the United States and subject to military law. Willful failure to present yourself at the precise hour specified constitutes desertion and is a capital offense in time of war.” Hyman showed up at the appointed hour and got in line for his physical with hundreds of other tense young Brooklynites. Medium in height and build, good-looking in a kind of hooded way though none too muscular after years shuffling papers and schlepping flatware samples, Hyman was a perfectly adequate specimen of Jewish American manhood. Neither flat-footed, alcoholic, myopic, or sexually degenerate, Hyman passed his physical with flying colors. The examiners told him to get dressed, go back to work, and await the next communiqué from Uncle Sam. It wouldn’t be long.
—
All that summer and autumn, as the United States shambled into war, violence and uncertainty convulsed Russia. The Germans had facilitated Vladimir Lenin’s return to Petrograd, in April, on the assumption that the Bolshevik leader would further destabilize Russia, and they were right. Fierce, grim, and disciplined, Lenin pushed for the extreme solution. He demanded that the bourgeois provisional government be overthrown at once and replaced by a government of those at the bottom of Russian society—urban workers, disaffected soldiers, and the disenfranchised rural poor. Russia must withdraw immediately from the world war; rural estates must be broken up and redistributed; food must be made affordable for the starving masses. Large angry crowds took Lenin’s call for “all power to the Soviets” to the streets. The message hit a nerve—even Lenin was surprised by how rapidly the ranks of his supporters swelled that summer. In June, Alexander Kerensky, a moderate socialist who was then minister of war and would shortly take over as head of the provisional government, launched a disastrous military offensive that only played into the Bolsheviks’ hands. Morale collapsed in the army; desertions increased exponentially. In the first week of July, the streets of the capital filled with half a million armed deserters and militant, radicalized workers. In September, the Moscow Soviet went over to the Bolsheviks, and on October 23, the Bolshevik Central Committee called for the armed overthrow of Kerensky’s provisional government.
The triumph of the so-called October Revolution was swift and all but bloodless, at least in the capital. Led by Trotsky, the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace on the night of November 8 and took control of the government. “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order!” Lenin proclaimed in his harsh monotone to a rapturous crowd.
In Rakov, hundreds of jubilant young Jews marched to the marketplace to the strains of the “Marseillaise” blared out by the band of the revolutionary Russian army. “How bestirred were our hearts!” wrote a nephew of Sarah’s named Zelig Kost, who was among the marchers. “The whole town rose with us, the marchers, like waves in a stormy sea. We had great hopes. We sang about a new emerging world, a superior world where the tortured Jewish people would find their rightful place. Ah! How quickly the illusion vanished.”
A scant seven months had passed between Lenin’s return and the raising of the red flag over the Winter Palace. A “decree on peace” was the new leader’s first proposal to the Congress of Soviets. It was approved unanimously.
Peace was what the people most fervently hoped for. But as Zelig Kost and his young comrades in Rakov discovered, peace was the first illusion to vanish after the revolution.
—
Hyman turned twenty-five on November 5, a Monday, three days before the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace. A full day of work lay ahead of him at A. Cohen & Sons. Though Hyman and Harry were no longer roommates—Harry, at the age of twenty-eight, had finally left home and moved into a place of his own on West 150th Street in Manhattan—they were still brothers and partners, and they still spent every day but the Sabbath working together side by side. Nonetheless, Hyman felt compelled to sit down that morning and write Harry a long, emotional letter. His orders from the War Department were due to arrive any day, and the birthday letter had the urgent self-dramatization of a young man face-to-face with his own, possibly heroic, death.
“You know me to be a poor writer,” Hyman began, but he needed to explain his “present feelings in my own poor way.” He had recently heard at a lecture that “when a boy enters his twenty-fifth year he at the same time enters into manhood, and a man should therefore take inventory of himself, look over and examine carefully what he has done in the past, and make new plans for the future.” And so:
I have taken inventory of my self to-day and I can tell you that with the exception of a few minor things not even worth mentioning I was pleased with my past work and I started to make plans for the future, but I couldn’t go very far, and didn’t make many plans, as at the start of my planning I remembered my self that this birthday came in a month in which I may have to give up all my plans for a while, as our government will very soon start to do all the planning for me.
Hyman waxed nostalgic over the five and a half “very pleasant” years he and Harry had spent as business partners:
We struggled together when everything about looked complete failure, and we were, and are, both sharing the honor now that we have brought for our business a little success and its good name in the “business world.”
I am approaching very rapidly the day when I’ll have to stop for a while to take active interest in the business, and while I appreciate the hard work Sam has done for us, we know that he only can do hard inside work (labor) and he couldn’t run the business even for a week. I therefore want you although you will have to work much harder, [to] do some of my work, follow my principals [sic], and also protect, and take care of my interest as well as of your own, during my stay in the “National Liberty Army.”
To Harry Cohen my friend I have this to say, we have been friends for a very long time, our friendship started in 1906 in the little city, or town of Smargon, Russia, when we worked to-gether in the little old Watchmaker’s shop owned by M
r. Rudnick. You undoubtedly remember how you worked for 2.50 Rubbels [sic] a week, and with your small salary we lived to-gether in a little room 10 X 6. . . . When in 1909 I came to this country to-gether with our parents and our sister Lillie and our late sister Anna, our friendship was resumed, and in fact we were more united, and if on one or the most two occasions we had a misunderstanding it only kept up for a few hours, our friendship couldn’t stand much longer.
Moved by his own eloquence, Hyman signed off emotionally:
We have seen brothers drifting apart from one another, but we have always stuck together, we were real brothers, and as my brother I don’t ask any more but I demand of you in other words I draft you to take good care of our parents, protect them, support them, and keep up their spirits. . . . Take care of my interest, and when I’ll return, and I hope in the very near future, we will start life again as the best Partners, Friends, and Brothers one for all, and all for one. Unity the key of success. Yours for an early and general world Peace your Partner your loving brother your Friend Hyman.
Hyman’s induction orders arrived in the mail two weeks later and he reported as instructed to Camp Upton out in the scrub flats of central Long Island. The 77th Division—the so-called Melting Pot or Times Square Division, assembled from raw immigrant recruits from the ghettos of the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and the Bronx—was training at Camp Upton when Hyman got there. The division’s commanding officer despaired when he learned that the men he was in charge of spoke forty-three different languages—“the worst possible material from which to make soldier-stuff.”
Hyman soon found out that anti-Semitism was rampant in the army. He wised up fast: if a guy called you a kike, there was no use whining to your sergeant—you had to deal with it with your fists. Anyway, it wasn’t just Jews. Hunkies, Pollocks, Guineas, Chinks all got razzed, picked on, shoved out of the chow line, denigrated as hyphenated Americans or not American at all. While the Ivy League officers perused Madison Grant’s 1916 best seller The Passing of the Great Race, which claimed that “the wretched, submerged population of the Polish Ghettos” was polluting the “splendid fighting and moral qualities” of America’s old “Nordic” stock, the draftees—20 percent of them foreign-born—traded ethnic insults and occasionally came to blows. Hyman never breathed a word of it in his letters home. What would be the point?
“No one is allowed to leave the barracks,” Hyman wrote home on December 10. “Whatever may turn up we are getting ready and are singing in the barrack our camp songs Pack up Your trouble in your old kit bag and smile smile smile and also Where do we go from here?” (The latter ends with the memorable refrain: “Where do we go from here, boys? Where do we go from here? Slip a pill to Kai-ser Bill and make him shed a tear, And when we see the en-e-my we’ll shoot them in the rear, Oh, joy! Oh, boy! Where do we go from here?”)
Around Christmas, Hyman returned home to Brooklyn on a three-day pass. He and Anna had one last date—dinner and a show in Manhattan. Back at Camp Upton a couple of weeks later, Hyman received word that Sam’s wife, Celia, had safely delivered twins on January 9—Dorothy and Sidney, a girl and a boy, the first great-grandchildren of Shimon Dov. Three days later, Hyman’s unit was finally issued their “complete field outfit”—rifle, bayonet, ammunition, mess kits, and metal water bottle. On January 17, they were ordered to assemble in the bitter cold at the rail platform for the train to Long Island City. Here they boarded ferries bound for a pier in New York harbor. Stowed like steerage passengers on the lower deck of a British troop ship—“We were just live freight,” wrote Hyman—they set out across the Atlantic. The crossing proceeded without incident until the final day, when, eight hours shy of Liverpool, Hyman’s ship collided with one of the freighters. Sirens wailed as passengers and crew were ordered to evacuate to lifeboats. “Here, I learned how men react in emergencies,” said Hyman. “Strong men prove to be panicky and weak men become strong, some cry, some pray, some sing. I was among those who sang. Normally, I don’t carry a tune.” Upon inspection, the damaged ship was deemed seaworthy—and so the weak and the strong, the tuneful and the teary, reboarded and steamed on to Liverpool. After a few days regrouping in dank unheated wooden-floored tents at a camp near Winchester, they boarded ships at Southampton and crossed the channel.
“Arrived safely,” Hyman cabled from LeHavre on the Normandy coast on February 3. “Feeling great love to all.”
He spent his first two months of war marching, training, and feeling sorry for himself because not a single letter reached him from the States. All the replacement recruits from Camp Upton were in the same boat: because they were constantly on the move, shuffled from unit to unit, neither their mail nor their pay caught up with them. “We began to feel we were all among the forgotten men,” Hyman lamented.
Finally, on March 10, 1918, his permanent assignment came through. The forgotten men were piled into dun-colored French rail cars—no American soldier failed to remark on the words “40 hommes, 8 chevaux” (40 men, 8 horses) prominently stenciled on the side—and transported to the city of Toul east of Paris. Hyman reported to Company K, 18th Infantry, First Division. The company’s commanding officer, Captain Joseph Quesenberry, a boyish twenty-three-year-old honors graduate and former football player from the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Las Cruces (now New Mexico State University), informed Hyman of the great honor that had befallen him: he had landed in the fabled Big Red One. The First Division prided itself on being first in every way: it was the oldest division in the U.S. Army, the first American division to arrive in France after the United States entered the war, the only American division to parade through the streets of Paris on July 4, 1917, the first to fire a shell at the German line, and the first to suffer casualties. When Hyman and the other replacement troops fell into line at Toul, Captain Quesenberry laid out their sacred mission: “The First Division has been in every war the country was in. It came out with honors every time. I expect to maintain the good name of the division in this present conflict, so we can wear the Red One [the divisional insignia] with pride.” There was another First Division first that involved the captain personally—on March 15, he had participated in an attack in which the Americans took their first German prisoners of war. After bouncing around for five months, Hyman was at last in a permanent outfit with men who had “pride in their company, regiment, and division.”
Above all, pride in their commanding officer. “He was a great officer, a soldiers’ soldier,” Hyman wrote of Quesenberry. “He was the idol of our outfit.” The 250 men in Company K were ready to lay down their lives for their young captain. Hyman felt the same.
—
“There is no doubt that it will be a shameful peace,” declared the newly empowered Lenin when faced with the dilemma of how to extract Russia from the war, “but if we embark on a war, our government will be swept away.” The most the Bolsheviks could hope for was to minimize the shame. This they botched as well. Peace negotiations with the Germans opened in the city of Brest-Litovsk three days before Christmas of 1917 and culminated in a dramatic stalemate in the middle of February 1918. The Russian delegation under Trotsky announced that Russia was pulling out of the war but refused to commit to any kind of peace treaty. “Neither peace nor war” was Trotsky’s sly position. The Germans’ response was to mount a rapid push east into Russian territory. In five days, the German army advanced 150 miles, swallowing more Russian territory than in the previous three years. With Petrograd in imminent danger, the Bolsheviks moved the government to Moscow. On February 23, the Germans made one last ultimatum for a peace treaty, and Lenin conceded: “It is a question of signing the peace terms now or signing the death sentence of the Soviet Government three weeks later.” The treaty of Brest-Litovsk was formalized on March 3 and it was indeed shameful. Russia lost not only all of its western territories—Poland, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, most of Belarus—but a third of its population, a third of its arabl
e farmland, more than half of its industry, and nearly 90 percent of its coal mines. The dismembered former empire would devote what remained of its resources to a protracted civil war.
Rakov and Volozhin were now under German control. After three years near the front line and six months of lawlessness following the Bolshevik revolution, Shalom Tvi and Beyle were subjects of the Ober Ost—the German name for the territory they had taken from the Russians during the war. The regime change came as a huge relief. The family had lost everything during the chaotic “neither peace nor war” weeks in February, when a gang of armed bandits and deserters took over Rakov and terrorized the townspeople. “For three days they rioted, looted, and plundered, with no one to stop them,” one resident wrote. Sonia, now almost eight, and her two older sisters, Doba and Etl, were hidden away in a closet while the marauders went from house to house. Their mother crept into the garden at night to bury the family’s money and silver. Then, a week into March, the Germans rolled in and the reign of terror came to an end. The girls emerged from hiding. Beyle went to the market to see if there was any food for sale. Shalom Tvi salvaged what he could of their shop and factory. The family, like all of Rakov’s Jews, had high hopes from the Ober Ost. The provisional government had been powerless. The Bolsheviks had brought nothing but plunder and chaos. Maybe under the Germans life would return to normal.
And indeed for a while it did—or something that approached normal. German officers requisitioned rooms in the finer houses in town, but they treated the home owners, Jews and gentiles alike, with respect. Germans did not steal from Beyle’s garden as the Russian soldiers had. Shops reopened in the market. The peasants once again trundled into town on Monday and Friday, bought and sold, got drunk, and staggered back to their villages. Relatives of Shalom Tvi in a nearby shtetl had a German officer billeted in their house, and the daughter reported that he was a perfect gentleman who did everything he could to keep the family safe and comfortable. When Passover came on March 28, the German authorities made sure that Rakov’s Jews had kosher flour to bake matzo. Shalom Tvi was astonished when a couple of German Jewish soldiers showed up at shul for Shabbat services. Germany’s Jews were far more assimilated than Russia’s, and most of the German-Jewish soldiers who occupied the shtetlach were appalled by the poverty and backwardness of the Ostjuden—the Eastern Jews. But for a few, the life of the shtetl stirred some deep atavistic longing. “On the earth this is the last part of the Jewish people that has created and kept alive its own songs and dances, customs and myths, languages and forms of community, and at once preserved the old heritage with a vital validity,” wrote one German Jew serving with the Ober Ost.