The Family

by David Laskin

  For background on Zionism, HeHalutz, and the early collective Jewish colonies in Palestine, I relied on the following: My Country: The Story of Modern Israel, by Abba Eban (New York: Random House, 1975); A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel, by Gudrun Kramer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); The Return to the Soil: A History of Jewish Settlement in Israel, by Alex Bein (Jerusalem: Youth and Hechalutz, Department of the Zionist Organisation, 1952); Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, by Gershon Shafir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Berl: The Biography of a Socialist Zionist, Berl Katznelson, 1887–1944, by Anita Shapira (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Arrow in the Blue, by Arthur Koestler (New York: Macmillan, 1952–1954); Palestinian Identity, by Rashid Khalidi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine 1880–1948, by Mark Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); A History of Zionism, by Walter Laqueur (New York: Schocken Books, 2003); Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement, by S. Ilan Troen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); A Tale of Love and Darkness, by Amos Oz (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004); The Blue Mountain, by Meir Shalev (New York: Asher Books, 1991); Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel, edited by Deborah S. Bernstein (Albany: State University of New York, 1992); Pioneers in Israel, by Shmuel Dayan (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1961); The Promised Land: Memoirs of Shmuel Dayan, by Yael Dayan (London: Routledge, 1961); The Plough Woman: Records of the Pioneer Women of Palestine, by Rachel Katznelson-Shazar (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002); Pioneer Youth in Palestine, by Shlomo Bardin (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1932); The Israelis: Founders and Sons, by Amos Elon (New York: Penguin, 1983); Moshava, Kibbutz and Moshav, by Dov Weintraub (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969); and The Moshav in Israel, by Maxwell I. Klayman (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970).

  Some twenty-eight thousand tons of metal: Evans, They Made America, p. 311.

  equal shareholders in a newly incorporated: According to a document titled “Minutes of First Meeting of Incorporators and Subscribers,” in the Maidenform Collection, this happened on August 31, 1922—but other sources including Evans, They Made America, and an entry on “Ida Rosenthal” in Great Lives from History: American Women Series, Vol. 4, by Catherine Coleman Brawer (Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 1995), pp. 1547–1550, say that the partnership began in 1921. Brawer puts the year in which Itel and Enid stopped making dresses as 1925.

  Mrs. Bissett had a brainstorm: Maidenform salesman Jack Zizmor in an interview with Hy Lieberman on June 27, 1973, transcribed and edited by Kathryn Salwitz, in March 1986, said that Mrs. Bissett “got the idea of the first bra from a dance set that she used to wear.” In Uplift, Farrell-Beck and Gau date brassieres, or at least breast supporters, back to 1863. In the intervening decades there had been various types of support including “breast puffs” and so on.

  Mrs. Bissett christened the garment: Evans, They Made America, p. 312.

  In 1924 they registered: Brawer, Great Lives from History, p. 1548.

  “same old story”: Isaac Babel, 1920 Diary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 12.

  the Tarbut Gymnasium: Tarbut, the Hebrew word for culture, was an interwar network of Hebrew-language schools that prepared students for life in Palestine through a grounding in modern spoken Hebrew and a mainstream Zionist curriculum; Chaim’s older brother Yishayahu was one of the founders of a Tarbut school in Volozhin in 1925.

  He felt not the slightest twinge: Some of the details of the train ride and voyage, and the phrase dust of exile are from S. Y. Agnon, Only Yesterday (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 21.

  “still mostly stony desert”: Koestler, Arrow in the Blue, p. 138.

  “but thorn and thistle, ruined cities . . .” Elon, The Israelis, p. 85.

  Was it I who long ago . . .: Ra’hel, Flowers of Perhaps (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2008), p. 47.

  “We dreaded comfort”: Quoted in Katznelson-Shazar, The Plough Woman, p. 61.

  “In those days we were a band . . .” Dayan, The Promised Land, pp. 17–18.

  depression and suicide were “rampant”: Elon, The Israelis, p. 143.

  They had “dreamed of a life rich in heroic deeds . . .”: Katznelson-Shazar, The Plough Woman, p. 60.

  “Every single person who left . . .” Dayan, The Promised Land, p. 18.

  Then he called it quits: A third group of halutzim tried to make a go of Har Kinneret in 1927, but they also gave up after a couple of years. “Most of the last remaining settlers up there were crazy,” remembers one old-timer whose father pioneered the first lakeshore colony. “By 1929 only one family remained. When Smoshkavitz, the last settler, died of malaria, that was the end of Har Kinneret.” Today groves of mango, eucalyptus, and date palms stand on the slope where the Har Kinneret halutzim tried to farm. Nothing of the settlement is left and nothing has replaced it. Beside the dirt track that wanders past where Chaim and Etl and their comrades once lived, there is a sign in Hebrew and English that reads “Switzerland,” referring to a bit of nearby forest with a fabulous view funded and maintained by a Swiss group. But for the wind and the drone of insects, the silence is complete.

  “Joe Bissett was, in my opinion, a hot and cold sales manager”: Jack Zizmor interview, June 27, 1973.

  “I understand you’re with Maidenform”: Robert A. Brawer, Fictions of Business: Insights on Management from Great Literature (New York: Wiley, 1998), pp. 70–71.

  Family lore has it that Itel: “Uplift” (support of women’s breasts by undergarments) had been around for half a century by the 1920s. Maidenform’s signal innovation was to provide uplift from above.

  “Two stitches more or less . . .”: Martin, “Her Half-Billion Dollar Shape,” pp. 28–78.

  Then the chills returned: Dayan, The Promised Land, p. 9.

  feasting on the hemoglobin: Sonia Shah, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), pp. 18–19.

  “We worked and suffered”: Katznelson-Shazar, The Plough Woman, p. 63.

  “the enchantress-bride . . .”: Shapira, Berl, pp. 58–59.

  It was like the Model T: Brawer, Great Lives from History, pp. 1548–1549. This new “section work” production process is not to be confused with the piecework pay scale that was implemented in 1937.

  Abraham and Sarah made the classic hopscotch: It has been impossible to ascertain Abraham’s and Sarah’s birth years definitively because of discrepancies in the documentary evidence. In the 1920 census Abraham and Sarah both gave their age as fifty-five, which would indicate a birth year of 1865; in the 1930 census he is sixty-five and she is sixty-two, which would put his birth year at 1865 but hers at 1868; on Abraham’s death certificate the birthday is omitted but his age at time of death in 1940 was given as seventy-eight, which would put his birth year at 1862; Sarah’s death certificate gives her birthday as February 7, 1862.

  Arab village of Ijlil al-Qibliyya: For more about this village, which Palestinian sources say was abandoned by its Arab inhabitants on April 3, 1948, because they feared for their safety under the new Israeli regime, see the Palestine Remembered Web site, www.palestineremembered.com/Jaffa/Ijlil-al-Qibliyya/index.html. The Web site says that the original village was “completely destroyed and defaced” by the Israelis.

  “You want to found a state without bloodshed?”: Quoted in Elon, The Israelis, p. 161.

  “not a Jewish soul”: Maurice Samuel, What Happened in Palestine: The Events of August, 1929: Their Background and Significance (Boston: Stratford, 1929), p. 120.

  The casualties on both sides were heavy: Statistics from Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington: Indiana Universi
ty Press, 2009).

  the end of a Zionist era: Shapira, Berl, pp. 166–167.

  Self-defense now occupied: Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 177.

  The idea of peaceful coexistence: Ibid.

  Sam’s buy was thirteen shares: Cohen, As I Recall, p. 61.

  10 billion dollars in stock value: T. H. Watkins, The Hungry Years (New York: Holt, 1999), p. 32.

  America’s Jewish community was emerging: Johnson, A History of the Jews, p. 460.

  CHAPTER TEN: THE DEPRESSION

  Unemployment more than doubled: Watkins, The Hungry Years, pp. 43–44.

  right parietal lobe: Lewis Rosenthal death certificate, August 4, 1930; additional information on Lewis’s death came from interviews with Drs. Leona Laskin and Jay Epstein.

  respect for Abraham and Sarah: According to Inda Epstein Goldfarb (Ethel and Sam Epstein’s daughter), Abraham and Sarah were on summer vacation in the Catskills in South Fallsberg and unable to get back in time for the funeral; but Leona Laskin recalls that the men went to South Fallsberg only on weekends and returned to work during the week—so since the funeral was on a Tuesday, Abraham would have been around; as a Kohain he was forbidden to enter a cemetery but he could have attended the memorial service beforehand.

  The year 1930 was bad: Watkins, The Hungry Years, p. 44.

  Stocks continued to sink: Robert T. Patterson, The Great Boom and Panic 1921–1929 (Chicago: Regnery, 1965), p. 194.

  That summer, drought decimated grain crops: Ibid., p. 191.

  New York City soup kitchens . . . 40 percent of Chicago’s workers . . . in Detroit it reached: Watkins, The Hungry Years, pp. 44–45, 59.

  Dow Jones industrial average bottomed out: Patterson, The Great Boom and Panic, p. 194.

  over a quarter of the nation’s population subsisted: Watkins, The Hungry Years, p. 44.

  the biggest parade in its history: The Jersey Journal, October 17, 2009.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: “WE WILL BE GLAD TO TAKE YOU BACK”

  a considerable sum: An authority on Polish economic history notes that teachers earned an average of three hundred zloty a month then.

  CHAPTER TWELVE: IN LOVE IN THE LAND

  the bitter women in the kitchen: Bernstein, Pioneers and Homemakers, p. 64.

  even the priest: In Sonia’s Story, the memoir written by her son Benny, Sonia says that Shepseleh played chess with the son of the Catholic priest but this must be an error.

  He found his checkbook and wrote out a check: The dates here are extrapolated from the letters; it’s possible he wrote the check somewhat earlier since in a letter sent before Sukkoth—which started the evening of October 4 in 1933—Shalom Tvi wrote Chaim that Avram Akiva still had not received a receipt from him, Chaim, for the two hundred dollars he had sent. Actually, he could have sent the check in midsummer, given the slowness of mail in those days.

  Back in the autumn of 1929: This date comes from the Kfar Vitkin Web site. According to “The Tenants of Wadi Hawarith: Another View of the Land Question in Palestine,” by Raya Adler (Cohen), International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 20, no. 2 (May 1988), p. 204, the date of first plowing may actually have been September 6, 1930. Adler writes that settlers “were able to continue their work only under the protection of a British security force.” The protests continued—when the Jews tried to plow during the winter of 1931–1932 Bedouins “threw themselves in front of the tractors” (Adler [Cohen], “The Tenants of Wadi Hawarith,” p. 206). Police came in and twenty-six members of the tribe were arrested. Adler (Cohen) writes on p. 207: “The violent incidents against the Jewish settlers in Wadi Hawarith resulted above all from the tenants’ spontaneous resistance to their miserable existence. . . . The tenants reacted with the only weapon at their disposal—their power to sabotage their neighbors’ fields.”

  Adler (Cohen) notes that the British government floated a number of resettlement ideas to the Wadi al-Hawarith Bedouins, including ones guaranteeing appropriate housing and compensation for crops—but all were rejected by the tribe.

  a Bedouin woman struck the landlord and drove him off: This is from the history section of the Kfar Vitkin Web site, www.kfar-vitkin.org.il/.

  moved quickly—and perhaps unscrupulously—to snap it up: “Mandatory Land Policy, Tenancy and the Wadi al-Hawarith Affair, 1929–1933,” by Raya Adler (Cohen), “Studies in Zionism, vol. 7, no. 2, 1986, pp. 233–257. On pp. 233–234 of this article, Adler (Cohen) writes: “In secret collusion with Yehoshua Hankin acting on behalf of the JNF [Jewish National Fund], and for the consideration of a bribe, the lawyer representing the claimants . . . succeeded in foiling a compromise between the creditors and the landowners. This ploy led to the outright sale, in the guise of a public auction, of the Wadi al-Hawarith land to the JNF.” Adler (Cohen) goes on to point out that “a forced sale by order of the court” “annulled the tenant farmers’ rights to protection under the Protection of Cultivators Ordinance, as well as their right of first purchase of land put up for sale (the right of preemption under Ottoman law).”

  The tenant farmers fought: Adler (Cohen), “Mandatory Land Policy” says the total number of Bedouins dispossessed was two thousand.

  “the basis of justice”: Albert M., Hyamson, Palestine Under the Mandate, 1920–1948 (London: Methuen, 1959), p. 39. Hyamson also states on p. 87 that “the urgency” of legislation to protect Arab farmworkers’ rights “was due to the relatively large purchases of land that were being made by Jewish agencies from large landowners resident in Paris, Beirut and Cairo, without any regard for the moral if not legal rights of their tenants who had been long established on their land. . . . The vendors, having no local interests, were, of course, anxious to sell at the highest prices. They quickly found at small cost a means of circumventing the legislation” and protecting tenants.

  “directly through the courts”: Adler (Cohen), “The Tenants of Wadi Hawarith,” p. 202. Adler (Cohen) presents a full and nuanced account of the sale: “In fact, the land had secretly already been sold to Hankin for three times (£136,000) the sum fixed by the courts for the auction. Thus, the entire transaction was extremely profitable for the Tayan family . . . and since it was ostensibly carried out by a court auction order, it was not considered a voluntary sale of land to Jews . . . by making the purchase directly through the courts, the JNF was granted automatic ownership. Accordingly, the tenants’ right to preemption (i.e., priority of tenants according to Ottoman law to buy the land they cultivated when it was offered for sale) was null and void.”

  another parcel fifty miles away: Adler (Cohen), “Mandatory Land Policy,” p. 203.

  camped out at the side of the highway: Adler (Cohen), “Mandatory Land Policy,” p. 240.

  a large traditional Arab agrarian community: Adler (Cohen), “The Tenants of Wadi Hawarith,” p. 203, reports that the head of the Jewish Agency’s Settlement Department stated that the tenants were not deeply rooted in the area, and that in 1929 “the Wadi Hawarith tenants numbered 850 persons who cultivated one-tenth of the land.” On pp. 214–216, Adler (Cohen) points out that “the Zionist aim was to attain political control of the country rather than merely formal ownership of the land,” hence they offered and accepted no compromise with Bedouin neighbors. “The Wadi Hawarith affair illustrates how problematic the question of Jewish land acquisition became when this entailed eviction and how central it was in exacerbating the conflict between the Zionist and Palestinian Arab national movements. . . . The Wadi Hawarith tenants were fighting with all their might to maintain their traditional tribal framework and to stay in their place of birth. . . . Had the JNF compromised with the tenants and allowed them to cultivate part of the land as they demanded (and as was proposed by a Jewish peasant journal), the affair might have ended differently. But the JNF’s goals were national rather than economic: it could not
content itself with legal ownership; Jewish settlers had to replace the Arab tenants. The displacement of the Bedouin violated the customs of Arab society and united the community in protest against this blatant injustice.”

  I would like to add a personal note. I was initially alerted to this battle by Salah Mansour, whom I contacted through the Palestine Remembered Web site. Mansour wrote me, in rather inflammatory language, that the Bedouins of Wadi al-Hawarith were “the first to be dispossessed and thrown out by the Jewish colonizers in the early to mid-30s. . . . Many came to my village Qaqun in the mid-thirties and became day laborers (an insult to a proud farmer). You can find most of them in Tulkarm refugee camps and in Baq’a’ refugee camp in Jordan. What a terrible experience; it should have been an early warning to all Palestinians. We have paid dearly for it. . . . Zionism is a terrible disease of mind. I feel sorry for whoever carry [sic] this dangerous ideology.”

  I find Mansour’s rhetoric offensive, but as a result of his message, I was able to track down Adler’s (Cohen’s) articles and report on the legal battle that accompanied this sizable and highly controversial land deal. The history of land transfers in Palestine has become explosively politicized, which makes it all the more critical to bring the facts to light.

  third-largest land deal: Adler (Cohen), “Mandatory Land Policy,” p. 233. In “The Tenants of Wadi Hawarith,” p. 200, Adler (Cohen) goes on to state that the main difference in the Wadi al-Hawarith purchase was that “communal lands . . . were being purchased, thus undermining the infrastructure of the countryside . . . its purchase involved the eviction of a large number of tenants, and the fact that it became an issue for the Palestinian national movement makes it relevant to the struggle against the displacement of Arabs in the 1930s.” Adler (Cohen) further notes on p. 213 that the tension with Arabs and the isolation were exhausting and debilitating for the Jewish settlers, including, presumably, Chaim and Sonia and their comrades at Kfar Vitkin: “Irritated by constant tensions with the resentful neighbors, exhausted by the work of swamp drainage, and socially isolated—for geographical reasons—from other Jewish settlements, the settlers were not able to increase their numbers significantly” in the first years. In 1934, there were only one thousand Jews in “11 pioneering groups living there.”