Jacob's Cane_A Jewish Family's Journey From the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore; A M

by Elisa New

  Shavli was, Leibe now stressed, no little burg, but the district center! By the time of the war it was a modern place. A place of culture, progress, enlightenment. I would have read, of course—and Leibe looked at me, testing—of Shavli’s history. Did I not know of Shavli’s role in the Jewish Enlightenment—the Haskalah?

  In his memoirs, the Russian Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam describes a woman, a stranger to his family, who, on the strength of having come from Shavli, demands that her parents find her a Petersburg husband.

  Mandelstam marvels at the woman’s confidence that this mere name, this shibboleth, Shavli, would give entrée to the metropolis. He reports, nevertheless, the self-same feeling of Baltic pride among his Riga-born grandparents. For such Jews of Russia’s western edge, the fertile inland plains from Tartu down to Koenigsburg and even to the Black Sea, to Kiev, to Odessa, was all—though the czar might claim it—Enlightenment land. Which was to say: emancipated, or, in short, German.

  In his classic study, The Haskalah Movement in Russia, Jacob Raisin singles out my great-grandfather’s region in particular as fostering and promulgating the spirit of the German Haskalah. Go fifty miles in nearly any direction from Shavli and one finds the home or birthplace of a maskil, an enlightener, or a cluster of them, who had agitated for the full emancipation of Russian Jewry. At Zagare and Kedaniai, at Salantai and Raseinai, and in Shavli, the largest city of the region, throughout the nineteenth century Jews of idealistic and artistic temper struggled for emancipation in all its forms. Hebraists conjugated, novelists scribbled, poets lent their talents to societies for the freedom of the young, civic emancipationists lectured, and through it all, commerce grew and grew, and Jewish confidence with it. Farther north, crossing from Lithuania into Latvia, identification with all things up-to-date and Western was even more pronounced. “Few struggled so intensely for their intellectual and civil emancipation as those in the provinces of Courland and Livonia,” writes Raisin. “A great many could be seen here dressed after the German fashion, speaking pure German, and having their whole household arranged after the German custom . . . the children visited the public schools, the academies and the universities.”

  This passion for emancipation, not just intellectual but also economic, was only enhanced as steam and railways shortened the distances between east and west. By the mid-nineteenth century, the roar of Germany’s mighty industrial complex—its factories turning out new chemicals, new metals, new machines—sounded across the border and increased the traffic across the Baltic Sea. The railroads throwing their ties across East Prussia and into Russia brought ideas that had been developing in Germany for more than a century, ideas the Jews of the Baltics had been most eager to receive. Along with purely intellectual pursuits, there were practical advances—new techniques for growing crops, for mass-producing cloth and crockery, for emancipating workers from drudgery.

  Not that the eastern Baltic rim hadn’t fixed its gaze westward long ago. Before the age of transoceanic travel, during the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, the Baltic had emerged as Europe ’s major trade basin. Commercial interests, too long hampered by highwaymen or, worse, the prohibitive tolls collected by every minor duke and feudal lord, established a league of free cities bound together for mutual protection and mutual interest. These German cities of the so-called Hanseatic League sent big-bottomed wooden cogs from Bremen, Lübeck, and Hamburg to run smartly along the yellow dunes of the Baltic coast. Nosing into the gulfs and lagoons, these coastal and riverine craft gave access to the granaries and timberlands of eastern Europe. At the south end of the Baltic, at the Gulf of Gdansk where the Vistula twists into Poland, and the Bug into Byelorussia, the Germans founded Danzig. At the north, they established Riga, where the river Dvina flows east from the sea toward Novgorod and eventually to Petersburg. Between the outposts of Danzig to the south and Riga to the north, at spaced intervals along the warm Courland lagoon the Germans built other cities: Koenigsburg, outpost of philosophy; Nida, seaside haven for thinkers; Libau, splendid baronial capital; Memel, hub of trade and traffic. The river Neman from Memel dropped down first to Kovno and then as far as Grodno. It was a mighty artery.

  Chronic incursions from all sides—now from Sweden, now from Russia, now from Germany—shifted jurisdiction over these rich meadows, from czar to grand duchy, Scandinavian queen to Baltic baron, through the ages. But the battles for control rarely halted economic activity. No conqueror wanted an interruption of the Baltic grain trade, nor of commerce in the maritime staples—hemp and flax, tar and wax—extracted from the meadows and especially from the oaks and the pines. The beamed cottages of many Cotswold villages, the half-timbered outer house walls of many towns in Alsace or Normandy, or the oldest buildings in the City of London, are Baltic timber. As architectural fashions of the late Middle Ages depleted the oak forests of western Europe, that region began to procure slow growth oaks from the relatively unharvested eastern timberlands. In high demand also were tall firs, useful for ships’ masts and beams.

  By the Renaissance, centuries of commerce between and among disparate peoples had diluted the tribal and linguistic homogeneity of these once fierce pagan lands. Large, fortress-like castles began to rise over the bends in the rivers, as second sons from Saxony came to colonize the vast open spaces of the east and Polish dukes established estates in the rich Lithuanian meadowlands. Some came only seasonally to hunt, remaining in the West but deriving fortunes from the Ostland. To protect their interests they sent emissaries who brokered and bargained, hauled and shipped and kept trade flowing from the hinterlands to the coast. Fanning out, these so-called Germans hired the reapers and the raftsmen, organized the work gangs from among local tribesmen. With tiny offices at river landings, with yards full of carts, contracts for horses, inns, taverns, these emissaries bargained wages down for landowners. In all the little towns, these “Germans” were the ones who moved the goods, dispatching logs and flax, butter and milk, cucumbers, fresh plucked down, and even live geese, over the sea to northern Germany and Scandinavia.

  These non-German Germans with their foreign ways—Germany’s and Poland ’s agents—were Jews.

  Two years went by before I could get to Shavli again, but this time my goal was to learn about the life of Shavli’s Jews through the centuries. My informant was Vilius Puronas. A large, smiling man with a rough gray beard, Vilius was Shavli’s chief designer and, locals told me, its most serious archivist. “Shall I tell you,” he asked me, “how the first Jews were allowed to live in Shavli?”

  Inside his cubicle in city hall, Vilius settled himself before a massive book, carefully homemade but huge and full of clippings. Looking over his beard, his pink face beamed as he opened the album to a picture of a figure that looked half superhero, half fool. Skull cap on his head, the figure held between his teeth a length of rope and, tied to the rope, a massive bell.

  His name, Vilius explained, was Nurok the Diver.

  As you know—and with this Vilius looked at me encouragingly—Christianity came late to Shavli, for the natives, the Samogatians, were loath to give up their gods of thunder and oak. They kept them, after all, longer than any other Christians in Europe.

  But by the early seventeenth century, even the pagans of Show-Lay (this was how he pronounced it), fiercest of all, had been Christianized, had built themselves a church, and bought an impressive bell. Delivered to the edge of Lake Talksa, the bell sat neglected. How to get the bell across the lake? How to get it hung in time for Easter? As I had seen for myself, the terrain outside Shavli is hilly. In summer, the land undulates in grassy knobs hard enough to maneuver with a loaded cart. And in winter, the cart ’s wheels would sink and then freeze in the mud. Who would risk his ox or horse on such a dangerous task?

  Nurok, the Diver. From the collection of Vilius Puronas, Siauliai, Lithuania.

  Thus, Vilius relates, the village elders hatch a plan. When the river freezes, they will grab their chance. Centering the bell on a sleigh, they begin to dra
g it over the frozen crust. Others wait on the farther edge with ropes, ready to pull the heavy bell from the ice onto shore. The ice seems to hold, but then, in the very middle, it cracks, taking down sled, horse, cart, and bell into the freezing water.

  Shavli’s new Christians fall into despair.

  Imagine then, their joy and surprise when they behold Wolf, the Jew, diving under the icy water, bell rope in his teeth, and swimming to shore. Wolf is a slight man, and the bell is many thousands of pounds, but this Jew nonetheless delivers the bell intact to Shavli.

  “What can we do for you?” ask the grateful, joyful Christians.

  “Nothing at all,” legend has Wolf replying modestly.

  “No,” protest the townspeople. “We insist. What can we do for you? There must be something.” At this Vilius shows me sketches of Wolf, a local folk hero, albeit a Jew.

  Wolf ponders. Jews in increasing numbers have been moving to the city environs, residing in villages thereabouts. But they are not yet allowed residence in the city.

  Wolf proposes, “Let the Jews who live outside the city be allowed to live inside.”

  So, as the legend goes, it was Wolf ’s service to the Christians that gave the Jews the right of residence in Shavli. For his valor, Wolf is given a new name, Nurok, which means diver. He and his kin prosper in Shavli. Eventually, when the Nurok family opens its shoe factory, its bank, and its companies for railroad development, the logo of Nurok enterprises features a picture of a diver, bell rope in his teeth.

  Now Vilius will not deceive me. Show-lay, like all towns, had its share of those who did not like Jews. Many were the tales of Jewish greed and of the Jewess with her cackling laugh and wiles. Here she was—and Vilius produced another sketch—guarding the market, a warning to children straying from school to purchase sweetmeats on the sly. And here was her consort—the Jew who let his kinsman hang while he vaunted his patriotism. But for centuries relations were generally warm and cooperative.

  “Another story?” Vilius asks with a confiding smile that makes me think of Moshe. “Another hero’s story? This one of a Jew important not only to his co-religionists or even Show-lay, but to all Russia—and beyond!”

  The year—Vilius tells me, setting the scene—is 1812, a hundred or so years after Nurok’s feat. Jews comprise a quarter of Show-Lay’s population.

  The Jewish Crone in the marketplace. From the collection of Vilius Puronas, Siauliai, Lithuania.

  Napoleon, returning to the west through Russia, has stopped to rest his troops in Shavli. Bored, the French soldiers quartered in the town beseech their general for some entertainment, and so he turns to Shavli’s mayor, giving him to understand that his restive troops will find their diversion, come what may.

  The mayor wracks his brain. He calls his council. What will they propose to amuse the troops?

  A Jewish wedding! suggests a member of the council. Perfect! What luck, marvel the Christians, that the Jews are to marry one of their richest on the very next Sabbath, the festivities expected to last a week.

  To make a long story short, Vilius continues, Napoleon’s men enjoy the wedding immensely. They eat, drink, and cavort, and all on the tab of the Jewish community. Nearby towns are stripped of all their provisions, but the troops do not loot Show-Lay. Moreover, the Jews, who have once again saved the town, accept in payment for a whole regiment of guests nothing more than a token: one gold louis d ’or, stamped with the head of the king. And yet—Vilnius brightens visibly—the Jews will be rewarded!

  In 1877 Chaim Frankel, a Jew laying the foundation for a small tannery, finds a huge chest of gold louis d ’or, now worth many times their weight. With these gold coins, Frankel constructs not a simple tannery but a magnificent factory, the largest in the Russian empire, the products of which—at least through 1941—win gold medals at the Paris Exposition. And now look—Vilius says—at what Frankel built! With a flourish, he shows me etchings of this magnificent fabrika , and advertisements, their lettering in Lithuanian and German.

  Of course, Vilius reminds me, tanneries had long been Jewish businesses. Jews of the region had made a specialty of silk-purse-out-of-sow’s-ear trades. Furs, boar’s bristles and goose feathers, gloves of ox hide and pigskin and kidskin, lambs’ wool and lanolin—Jews were proficient at all the trades that took products sticky with mud or hair and blood and readied them to appear in drawing rooms. City people in far-away Bremen or Baltimore, London or New York, never thought, as they lifted boxes made of “Russia leather,” of the tanneries along the riverways, or the stink of the tanning pits before the Jews made the leather smell like wealth and ease.

  Yet as Vilius insisted, turning over a heavy page, this Chaim Frankel really was something different, something special. And now he points out to me again a handsome lithograph: a picture of the solid factory front, “Frankel’s” in letters shaded to project dimensionally. Of all the men of industry, of all the region’s innovators, none—Vilius swore—achieved what Frankel did. Not only had Frankel brought the techniques of modern industry to the town, but he also nurtured the tradition of Jewish-Christian cooperation that Nurok the diver pioneered.

  The managers of Frankel Leatherworks had kept both Jews and Christians on their payroll. Clever Jews were sent to Prussia to learn the latest chemical processes and machine technology. Meantime, Frankel hired a greater number of Christians to work in his tanning factory. Jews were diverted into research and development, accounting and management, but the traditional functions of tanning were left to the Christians, who scraped, boiled, and stretched hides.

  There were interruptions, to be sure, such as in 1915 when the Jews, Frankel included, were sent east on suspicion of collaborating with invading Germans. But Frankel came back, stronger than before. Later Hitler changed everything, but even then Shavli’s surviving Jews owed their lives to the Frankel Leatherworks.

  “Would we be wrong in believing,” Vilius asked, smiling tentatively, “that had not Hitler come, and Stalin before him, such amity as existed between Christians and Jews would have perhaps lasted forever?”

  Standing in Shavli on a summer day after leaving Vilius, I, who had seen Moshe ’s fond, faraway expression, might be pardoned for believing so, for believing in the creed of progress so long nurtured by the Jews of Shavli.

  The Christians raised the livestock and the crops. But the Jews made sure the butter arrived in the city fresh, the cucumbers un-bruised, the flour free of weevils, meat fit for the table. The Jews refined beet sugar for the tea, and they procured the cattle and the church bells, proving adept at moving unwieldy goods, just as the legend of Nurok told.

  The Jews brought in the comforts and amenities of urban life. From Riga and Memel and Libau, and from Germany beyond, they brought the elegant, narrow-toed shoes, the silver salt cellars and cut glass cruets, the wool of Swedish blankets boiled into thick felt to keep out the chills. They brought in all the “colonial goods”: Maryland tobacco; cocoa, pepper, coffee, and tea from Brazil and India; nuts and seeds; wines and spirits from France and England; plus local distilled goods the Jews made and sold.

  The Jews built workshops to turn wood pulp to paper, linen to lace, beeswax to candles, cocoa to bonbons, and tobacco to cigars. In town, their shop windows glowed with coal fires and then gaslight, and long past dark the Jewish salesmen purveyed bicycles and walking sticks, napery, and furs cut to more exacting patterns than local furriers knew.

  In the shops, they lifted the boxes of shoes down from the wall with ceremony. Some of the shoe leather was tanned in Frankel’s factory and some of the shoes were made by the Bata firm, owned by the Nuroks. These two families employed dozens of managers, subagents, craftsmen, and machinists, and many of Russia’s railroad administrators settled in Shavli, filling its elegant three-story buildings. But none was larger or more elegant than Frankel’s palace, wood paneled throughout, with plaster ceiling ornaments and furnishings in the latest Deco styles.

  Farms ringed Shavli, as they still do, and in t
he town center the Jews multiplied and prospered. They called their synagogue the “White Swan.”

  Their children danced in rings around the broad lip of the town fountain.

  Such was the general nature of the place, this Shavli, this Siauliai, whose name was carved under Jacob’s name on his cane. A civilized place.

  And such the world into which my great-grandfather was born in 1867, a world holding out hopes to Jews of comfortable or even handsome prospects. Born in the days of the liberal Czar Alexander II on Smallprison Street in Shavli, Lithuania, Jacob was indeed well placed to hear the whistle of modernity coming straight his way.

  “A shrewd location.” Vilius nodded admiringly, drawing his finger along a map of Shavli in 1877 to show me the house ’s excellent situation—on a hill above the Frankel works but close to the lake. So picturesque. “These were, I think, people who used their heads, your relatives.”

  Which was more or less what Vitalija Gircyte had said to me and Yael two years earlier when she plucked a document of 1873—Max Levy’s petition to His Excellency the Czar—from the file lying before her on the wooden table. Chief archivist of the still extant records of the Jews of the administrative district of Kaunas Guberniya, Vitalija tapped the folder with one crimson fingernail and beamed at me a librarian’s smile.

  Yes, these relatives of mine had had their chances and made the most of them. They were Jews on the move! These files—and she flipped the manila folder open with that red nail—were clear on this; for instance, here is the petition of one Meyer (Max) Levy to the czar regarding a house at the end of Smallprison Street.

  What one did not immediately see—and Vitalija had smiled—is just why a young man so well situated as Jacob Levy would leave at all. Perhaps, just as the basis for the file, one might venture a guess? Perhaps it was pressure to compete?