The Family

by David Laskin

  Sonia and Doba spoke endlessly about the boys. Did Sonia think Shimonkeh was too skinny? Doba was concerned that he had never fully recovered from his bout of scarlet fever. His legs were sticks, his chest like a bird’s—you could see every knob and rib. But he thundered up and down the hall day and night, he insisted on cropping his blond hair close to his head like a soldier, and though he was only ten, he had learned to ride a bicycle. He took after his father—tall, thin, serious with a bit of sly mischief. As for Velveleh—what was there to say? Six years old and already a dreamboat. Who could resist those big, dark, shining eyes of his? (May the evil eye be averted, Doba was careful to add whenever she ladled out even a teaspoon of praise on her children.) Could there be anything sweeter than the way the boys held Leahleh’s hand when they crossed the street or how they laughed at her Hebrew (Leah was speaking again, but only with other children)? Doba didn’t like to boast, but Shimonkeh promised to be a brilliant student—musical too. Maybe if he stopped, for a minute, tumbling on the floor with his brother he’d sing something nice for his aunt Sonia.

  When the children went to bed their parents discussed the future. Everybody had said Sonia was crazy for leaving Rakov for the wastes of Palestine, but with Poland the way it was now, she looked like the sane one and they should have their heads examined. Sonia had a house and a farm, Chaim made a decent living driving Kfar Vitkin’s truck. Shepseleh was forty-two years old and still no steady paying job in sight. He was trained as an accountant, and he looked like an accountant with his slicked-back hair, high-waisted trousers, and prominent ears; but for him employment was one long tale of woe. For a couple of winters he sold wood and coal, but the profits were meager and storage an issue. Then there was the friend in Tel Aviv—the rich son of a Vilna rabbi and a distant relative through Abraham’s wife, Sarah—who might be able to wangle him a toehold in the Land. If he learned Hebrew and a little English, he told Sonia for the twentieth time, maybe he could get something in Tel Aviv as a bookkeeper or small merchant? Shepseleh was always writing letters, dropping hints, visiting consulates and agencies. In the end here he was in Vilna, still looking, still hoping. Sonia listened, advised, sympathized, and finally lost patience. For years this brother-in-law had been singing the same song. Why didn’t he do something about it? Though she would never breathe a word to Doba, Sonia was starting to think of Shepseleh as a superfluous man out of Turgenev or Chekhov—always dreaming, never deciding. She was mystified how he and Doba managed to afford the lovely flat, the stylish clothes, the dacha on the banks of the Vilnia River. Maybe Shepseleh’s family had money? He was brainy and cultured, a doting father, a sweet husband, but Sonia could not imagine him driving a truckload of tomatoes on the dusty road to Haifa or grafting shoots onto a thorny orange tree. One day in the sun at Kfar Vitkin and he’d wilt like a lettuce leaf.

  —

  As the end of the visit approached, Etl traveled to Vilna from Rakov—without her husband or child—so the three sisters could be together. There is no record of the date but it was probably well into the autumn—maybe the beginning of November.

  Before starting the arduous journey back to the Land, Sonia took Doba aside and handed her the twenty-five-dollar check that Uncle Hayim had given her in Rakov. Doba protested—she had a check of her own from Hayim—Sonia should keep the money and buy something nice when she returned to Kfar Vitkin. “She did not want to take the money,” Sonia told her children, “but I told her, ‘Dobka, we lack for nothing in Eretz Yisrael. We have a garden and a cow and plenty of food. Here the situation is not so good so maybe you will need this.’ For years afterward, I was so happy that she took the $25.”

  —

  December 7, 1938

  Pivno Street 6/8

  Vilna

  Dear Sonia,

  You cannot imagine what we have gone through since you left. Everything seems like a dream, something sweet that cannot come back. We were so emotional and confused at the end. You probably remember that even before you left, our mood had not been so good, and your leaving has devastated us. Etl did not go back home that day, because we wanted to be together at that moment.

  What state was the house in when you returned? How did Chaim look after everything while he was alone for so long? How is Leahleh feeling? Does she mention us? Volinkeh says now that she could have stayed a little longer because Mireleh will not come here to us.

  Warm regards to Chaim and thanks for the cards. Kisses for Leahleh.

  From your sister Doba

  Doba made no mention of Kristallnacht. Why should she? Enough weighed on their hearts already without piling on insanity. Anyway, Sonia had still been in Poland when the madness broke and she had seen the newspaper accounts herself.

  The Nazis had been looking for an excuse for a mass pogrom and they found it in Paris on November 7, when a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan took a loaded revolver to the German embassy and shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath. Supposedly, Grynszpan decided on the assassination when he learned of the summary expulsion from Germany of thousands of Polish Jews, including his parents and sister, and their internment in a refugee camp on the Polish-German border. But another, more shadowy motive may have been at play: vom Rath, a notorious homosexual, and Grynszpan had been lovers, and by some accounts Grynszpan was driven to violence by an intimate grievance or betrayal.

  When word reached Berlin on November 9 that vom Rath had died of wounds inflicted by a teenage Jew, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels unleashed gangs of SA storm troopers throughout Germany and Austria with instructions to torch synagogues, smash Jewish store windows, destroy Jewish property, and haul young Jewish men off to prison. Ninety-one Jews died in the violence; some thirty thousand were sent to concentration camps. Jews were beaten to death before the eyes of their neighbors and families. Nearly every synagogue in Germany and Austria was either destroyed or damaged that night, Jewish cemeteries were torn up and desecrated, Torah scrolls and prayer books were burned. Scores of Jews committed suicide while the pogrom raged.

  Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass—signaled the Nazis’ transition from economic and social oppression to physical violence and murder, though they continued to extract as much money as they could from the remaining Jews. In the aftermath, the German government decreed that German Jews must atone for the assassination of vom Rath by paying a collective fine of 1 billion reichs marks—roughly 5.5 billion dollars in current currency. They extracted the money by confiscating 20 percent of all Jewish property. In a final stroke of diabolical “justice,” all the insurance money owed to Jews for losses on their property and businesses was seized by the government to cover “damages to the German Nation.”

  Doba did not mention Kristallnacht in her letter of December 7, but Sonia could read between the lines. She already knew how frightened and desperate her sister was. While she was still in Poland, Sonia had heard Doba beg Uncle Hayim Yehoshua to take her and her husband and sons back with him to the United States. Doba swore she would repay every penny of the cost. It wasn’t so easy anymore, Uncle Hayim Yehoshua explained; you needed family sponsors, visas, certificates of good conduct, bank records, all of it submitted in multiple copies. It required time and money. He promised he would do what he could when he got back to New Haven.

  —

  February 10, 1939

  Sonika! I don’t know where to start. I have so much to write about, but when I take the pen in my hand I get confused.

  First our situation has completely changed. Hayim Yehoshua and Sarah Leah [Hayim’s sister] have written from America and they want us to come to them. They have even hired an attorney. They want all of us to come together. The plan is that father and mother will come to you [i.e., to Palestine]. The problem is that one cannot take money out of here, and we do not know what will happen. The parents and Etl are in Rakov, and it is hard for me to think of parting from them. We have to brace our
selves with patience. Everything will clear up with time.

  Father has written to Avram Akiva and to William Rosenthal about the goings-on here, so everyone is taking part and we hope that something will come of it.

  Your sister Doba

  But nothing did come of it. Some link in the chain broke. Winter dragged on, and Doba and Shepseleh and the boys remained in Vilna; Shalom Tvi and Beyle, Etl and Khost and their daughter, Mireleh, in Rakov. Some unpleasantness had bubbled up between Etl and her husband, but its nature and cause have also vanished. Doba told Sonia, “In every letter I ask [Etl] what is going on with her, and she answers me that the situation has not improved. I can imagine what she is going through.” Had Khost betrayed his wife with another woman? Squandered her dowry? Insulted her parents? “He [Khost] had planned to come to Vilna and enjoy himself a little,” Doba wrote in disgust, “but I have not responded because I don’t want him to come to me and I cannot look at him.”

  Winter ended, the sweet season of lilacs and peonies commenced, Shepseleh looked for work, Khost taught school, was forgiven or tolerated for whatever offense he was guilty of. Nothing changed in their private lives. Whatever changes took place around them, they ignored or refused to speak of.

  —

  But change did come finally, suddenly, irrevocably. Early in the summer, Shalom Tvi and Beyle sold their leather business in exchange for promissory notes payable in September. They retained some merchandise—hides, leather garments—to sell, just in case, but everything else was liquidated. Free of the business they had run together for forty years, husband and wife traveled to Vilna, leaving Etl and Khost behind with Mireleh to look after things in Rakov. Shalom Tvi and Beyle visited with Doba’s family, prayed at the Taharat Hakodesh synagogue, took in the sights and pleasures of the city. On the last day of June, Shalom Tvi hugged and kissed his two grandsons, embraced his oldest daughter, shed tears in the arms of his beloved wife. They parted at the Vilna rail station. Beyle went back home to Rakov. Shalom Tvi and Shepseleh caught a train for Gdynia, a port city on the Baltic a few miles west of Gdansk. The next day, July 1, Shepseleh accompanied his father-in-law to the harbor and saw him safely aboard the HMS Piłsudski, a resplendent new two-funneled steamer run by the GdyniaAmerica Line. Shalom Tvi was sailing alone to America.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “THE WORLD OF TOMORROW”

  The Piłsudski, named for Poland’s recently deceased leader, arrived in New York harbor shortly after dawn on July 11, 1939, the final summer of a low dishonest decade. Shalom Tvi stood on deck with the other passengers to see the fabled skyscrapers shimmering in the white sky; he saluted the Statue of Liberty; he watched as the ship approached Ellis Island. The engines shuddered and died, and now he was close enough to make out his family waving from the pier. Abraham and Sarah (Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore they would always be to Shalom Tvi), as well as his brother-in-law Hayim Yehoshua and sister-in-law Esther were there to welcome him to America. Already the first- and second-class passengers were streaming off the ship, and now the crew was lining up the third-class passengers and ordering them to have their documents ready for inspection. Shalom Tvi handed his papers to a man in a blue coat and waited. Other third-class passengers were being waved through on either side. But him they detained. A “special inquiry” had been deemed necessary, so instead of disembarking, Shalom Tvi had to stay on board the ship. Even through the Yiddish interpreter, it made no sense. His brother was ready to vouch for him; he had money in his pocket, documents in hand, a place to stay—what was the problem? “Special inquiry,” the interpreter repeated. It meant they were not letting him in.

  For two days Shalom Tvi stayed on the empty creaking Piłsudski with a handful of other detainees. Then at 9:40 on the morning of July 13, Inspector Kaba summoned him for the special inquiry. Through an interpreter Kaba swore him in, after which he fired away with his questions: full name, age, country of residence, race, marital status, occupation in Poland, who paid for his passage, purpose of his visit to the United States.

  The alien was dimissed, and Inspector Kaba turned to his colleagues Inspector Magee and Miss Cozzolina. In Kaba’s opinion the case was routine. The alien was traveling on a tourist visa; he had failed to obtain an immigration visa, which would have entitled him to remain in the States and look for work; he claimed he had come to visit his family—but Kaba was dubious. That’s what all the Jews were saying these days, but most of them really intended to stay indefinitely. Kaba moved that the alien be required to file a bond of fifty dollars guaranteeing his departure after three months. The vote was unanimous in favor.

  At 12:35 P.M., Shalom Tvi was summoned back and Kaba delivered the verdict through the interpreter: “Bond has been furnished on your behalf to guarantee your departure from the U.S. within three months. You must so depart; otherwise you will be here in violation of the law, subject to arrest and deportation and forfeiture of the collateral on the bond, and while in this country you should not accept any gainful employment or engage in any business, for then too you will incur the same penalties. Do you understand?”

  Shalom Tvi replied “Yes” but in truth he did not understand. When his brother came to America three decades earlier, he had waltzed through Ellis Island. Now just to visit he needed a passport, favorable report from the local police, doctor’s certification of good health and absence of “physical handicap which might make him a public charge,” birth and marriage certificates, detailed bank statements indicating assets and income, affidavit filed by the sponsoring family indicating their assets and their ability to support the newcomer—all of the documents properly authenticated and valid simultaneously. Shalom Tvi had applied, filed, stamped, duplicated, and paid. Still it wasn’t enough. Now they wanted fifty dollars as a guarantee that he would go home in three months.

  Inspector Kaba was correct when he wrote “doubtful” on Shalom Tvi’s file. Shalom Tvi himself was doubtful about the purpose of his trip. Strictly speaking, he had come to America neither as an immigrant nor as a visitor but as a kind of scout. In a world without forms, he would have looked around, talked to the relatives, scoped out the job prospects for himself and Shepseleh, borrowed money to help get the rest of his family out of Poland. But in 1939, forms were absolute.

  In the end, early in the afternoon of July 13, the officials in blue uniforms let Shalom Tvi off the Piłsudski with the understanding that the fifty-dollar bond would be refunded when he boarded a ship bound back to Poland on or before October 13.

  —

  July 16, 1939

  Dear children Sonia and Hayim,

  May you have much nachas from your dear daughter Leahleh.

  Today is my fifth day in America. I arrived on the boat at eight o’clock in the morning on July 11 and everybody had come to welcome me, relatives from my family and from mother’s. Unfortunately, they were not allowed to come close to me, and they detained me and other people for a few days. They asked me many questions, and it went on for two and a half days. On the crossing, I had had a few bad days and I almost regretted going on the trip. But now, thank God, I feel well and all the members of the family are here and healthy. We all gathered in the house of Avram Akiva, kissed each other and celebrated. With God’s help we shall all continue to celebrate.

  Mother and Doba are now in Druskininkai [a spa town in Lithuania]. I wrote to mother that it would be beneficial for her to go and rest, because she is sad without me. She is not used to being away from me for such a long time. Mother had wanted to come with me [to America], but from the beginning I had not wanted to draw such a large sum, and she is in poor health. But it seems that they wouldn’t have given her a visa, because there had been instances even with wealthier people when they did not give the wife a visa to America. Perhaps it is better that she has not come. The journey was very difficult and it’s not at all like Rakov and Vilna here. You can’t go anywhere by yourself—you have to drive everywhere and the
re is no one to drive you. Everyone here is very busy.

  Write to me what is going on with you in the Eretz, I want to know everything.

  Be healthy.

  Wishing all of you well, your father Shalom Tvi Kaganovich

  The Americans were determined to show him a good time in the land of plenty, and Shalom Tvi complied. He couldn’t drive, he spoke no English, he found the scale and pace of New York overwhelming—so he let himself be wined and dined and taken around like a tourist. After a couple of weeks in the Bronx, he went to stay with Hayim Yehoshua, in New Haven. The brother-in-law, married to Beyle’s sister Esther, had a cottage on Long Island Sound, so Shalom Tvi got to swim in salt water and relax on the beach. Then it was back to his brother in the Bronx and up to the Catskills to the cuchalain (bungalow with a kitchen) that Abraham rented—Shalom Tvi called it a dacha in his letters home. “We are having a good time here,” he wrote Sonia. “We bathe in the river and tan in the American sun.”