by Elisa New
He lost the companionship of his wife when he moved her to a mental institution, the best he could afford, a few miles down the road, where her sisters could visit; he also traveled every week from Philadelphia to see her, taking two or three of the children each time, never all at once. What marriage he had left was limited to Sunday afternoons.
In order to pay for her care and support his children, he abandoned the city where he’d lived for thirty years, closed up the stately house, now let to others, and gave the keys to the Baltimore plant of Levy’s International Shrinking Company to Bob, his second son. He would legally deed the whole works to Bob just as soon as the Philadelphia plant could support the rest of the family.
That he’d lost his firstborn son, Edward, to another man was the worst thing. That Edward had been invited by Jacob’s onetime friend, Bernhard Baron, to “complete his musical education” in London, but was by 1914 Louis Baron’s adjutant at the Carreras tobacco company and by 1915 had “completely and utterly renounced the name of Levy” made Jacob ill.
Often Paul would endeavor to distract his brother from the greater losses by engaging his attentions on the topic of the lesser. Seeing Jacob’s face settled in its scowl, Paul would remind Jacob that neither of them had ever really believed he’d win a seat in Congress. And even if he had, he was not rich enough to drop everything for politics. Even with Bob running the Baltimore plant, Levy’s Shrinking in Philadelphia still needed Jacob. When up to the game of mutual support, Jacob played along, gently chaffing his brother on his new cooperative venture, reminding him that the small transactions of the agricultural collective, the Grange, made scarcely a dent in Reisterstown commerce, since the Negroes of Bond Avenue did a brisker trade at their church sales than the Grangers did with their day-old butter.
Sometimes Paul succeeded in leading Jacob along other paths, reminding him of the excellent job Bob was doing with the Baltimore works, how well suited he was, with his steady ways, to taking over the business. Neither brother was blind to the fact that Bob’s success was helped by war contracts. Demand was strong for shrunk woolens to be turned into coats and puttees that could withstand the sleet and mud of Belgium, of Verdun. Bob was running the Baltimore plant as well or better than Jacob might have done and was contributing to the family’s support as Jacob tried to get things off the ground in Philadelphia.
Jacob hoped to build the Philadelphia business slowly until he could buy houses of some elegance for all his young American offspring. He told them about this, helping them get used to the Philadelphia move by letting them spend summers in Baltimore. They could, if they chose, stay in town with their grandmother Elfant or even with Bob. They could spend their weeks as they pleased as long as they unfailingly showed up in Glyndon on Friday at suppertime.
Pictures of that summer, gray and grainy and fused to the crumbling vellum on which Aunt Fanny mounted them years ago, suggest that Jacob’s saddest summer was—for his teenage children, my aunts, at least—a rather free and golden time.
A number of pictures capture the farm. Various photos of Jacob show him at ease, squinting into the sunlight but looking relaxed, coat off. There are several views of the chicken coops and at least one that shows corn grown to twice a small child’s height, while on a facing page young Fanny, dressed in knee pants, hair under rustic straw, is labeled “Fanny the Farmer.” Jean appears in only one photo, already with a baby on her hip; she is chic in a summer suit. Her sisters must have sympathized with her, for she had a husband at the European war front plus a squalling infant, their father, and their brother Emil to care for in Philadelphia, while they were still in the last summer of their freedom. There are five or six sets of photos capturing the sisters at various pleasure spots.
There are photos of them at Emory Grove, the old Negro camp meeting ground converted to a pleasure park for the Glyndon young. Or on the Severn River, Myrtle and Fanny being rowed by Fanny’s beau. But most photos show the famed Tolchester Beach, a favorite resort in those days, an Eastern Shore area reached by pleasure steamer directly from Locust Point in downtown Baltimore.
Tolchester, twenty-seven miles across the bay from Baltimore, was apparently my aunts’ destination on many days that summer. There are photos of them in front of the great Tolchester bathhouse with various friends. One shot shows Fanny and Myrtle and three other girls from the knees down, their shapely legs in wet bathing stockings, and another shows a group of girls in which Myrtle, slim and demure, has let her hair go wild like Lillian Gish’s. Their beaux, dark, thin boys, grinning, pile in pyramids and drape their arms around the girls’ shoulders.
Taking the midmorning steamer, carrying picnics and money for cool drinks, during Tolchester’s best summers young people did not return till late, when the steamer, lit up like a lantern and swaying alluringly on strains of singing and laughter, pulled into the Lloyd Street dock about 9:00 PM. Off the boat, new couples strolled arm and arm. Swinging bags with damp sandy bathing costumes in them, the girls let the boys walk them home and bestowed kisses on them. Day after day that summer, apparently, the Levy girls amused themselves, only on Friday making their way to Paul’s farm to meet their father and younger brothers who, after jouncing in the cars from Philadelphia, transferred at Baltimore and napped during the last leg of the trip to the depot at St. Georges. At the farm, Jacob would walk up the hill, using his hands against his weary knees to make the grade. He would muster a smile for
Brother Paul Levy, Pomona Grange.
those he loved, for Paul, waiting on the porch, and Sarah, coming from inside, wet hands brushing her apron, and for the girls, Myrtle and Fanny, whose affection he knew he could trust. Emil would be with them, but as Jacob noticed the screen door shut behind Myrtle, there was nothing but quiet behind her. And where is my son Paul? he would ask, trying to keep his voice level, the anger and the hurt contending.
What could Uncle Paul and Aunt Sarah say? Jacob surely knew in advance that his third son, a teenager, handsome, easygoing, popular with cronies, would not be there. His grandparents would not have insisted he leave their fold and would, as all knew, be coddling him at Hanover Street. Smiling brightly, Jacob’s brother Paul took his bag. Just smell that country air, Jacob, Paul might say. Does it not do a body good to be close to Mother Earth?
As the local train out of Baltimore chugged toward Glyndon, Jacob had time to reflect on the funny place Paul had chosen for his utopia. The townsmen who followed Baltimore’s health commissioner out to Glyndon in the 1890s came from the Baltimore burgher class. Leaving Baltimore’s summer stink seven hundred feet below, the town of Glyndon was a cool summer retreat for the families of well-to-do professionals and industrialists.
They loved the jitney that picked them up at the station and the large clapboard houses on deep rolling lawns where the jitney stopped. Those escaping the city’s heat stepped off the train to church picnics, fresh milk, lawn sports, musicals, and the easy availability of servants. Down in the valley the Worthingtons had once owned, descendants of Worthington slaves supplied ample domestic help, chauffeuring and hauling the summer staples of ice, local corn and tomatoes, fresh chickens, and bay crabs to the summering families. The grounds of the former Negro camp meeting, Emory Grove, were now converted to a pleasant place for strolling, courting white couples. Snatches of hearty singing from the Bond Street Church were heard ringing over the valley on Sunday mornings.
After arriving in Baltimore in 1881 or 1882, Paul had seemed likely to become a captain of industry. He had taken out patents—one for unremovable buttons, one for individually wrapped shirts—and he had joined the hordes in East Baltimore making pants for the big menswear merchants. Ingenious and descended from a family skilled in metal devices, Paul had set up his own shop in Baltimore, establishing a clientele large enough to accommodate his brother Jacob too, when he came. Bernhard Baron used to visit every evening, and they hammered and welded together. But Paul eventually came to hate pants and hate the closeness of rooms full of snippin
g and loud machinery, the darkness and stink of the toilets, the noise of the city. At first he thought he’d be satisfied with just a bit of green.
So he hied himself and his beloved Sarah north, first to the edge of Bolton Hill and then, a few years later, to the new section where Johns Hopkins intellectuals and the German Jewish manufacturing elite were settling; they called it Eutaw Place.
Round the edge of green Druid Hill Park, where great oaks bent down their canopies, the richest German Jews had built a grand arrondissement—a Ringstrasse or Tiergartenstrasse.
Towering townhouses, narrow but deep and richly furnished, were set behind serpentine lawns, tasteful sculptures, and glittering fountains, their musical plash mingling with the sound of the streetcar that braked gently to let off commuters and shoppers with their bundles. Returning home, the professionals and their smart-looking wives would hail the children, who might, at twilight, be exiting the new synagogue schools, raucous after extra hours cooped up in school. The synagogues, which towered over the street, had fancy facades complicated with stonework and lettering. Lofty Moorish-looking houses of prayer, modeled on the great shuls of Frankfurt and Berlin, these were not places of piety, strictly speaking, but guarantors of the worthy values, philanthropic openness, and solid citizenship of those who lived in the townhouses with their sumptuous lobbies, gold elevators, and in-house restaurants. It was all in the best middle European style: sociable but not crowded, civilized but not dour. The soaring lines of the synagogues elevated the spirit. As in Prague and Riga, so in Baltimore, one could stop into a synagogue and drift out easily, stroll up the great green hills of the park before the Sabbath meal, read the paper on a bench.
Eutaw Place was no mere ghetto of nouveau riche, but an incubator that cultivated enlightenment. Recruited from German universities, the new faculty of Johns Hopkins University naturally made themselves at home in this quarter out of Heine’s Frankfurt. If the Jews who filled the townhouses of Eutaw Place had some of their German Kultur rubbed off them in the jostle or forgot some of their erstwhile civilization, the new faculty members at Hopkins provided examples.
The faculty members of a university deliberately shaping its curriculum to European models were not hostile to commercial people or the issues of municipal and transatlantic commerce that concerned them. Economists and sociologists, they made their way from Eutaw Place to their seminars, where they addressed themselves to problems of taxation, labor, and mechanization that were of vital interest to their Jewish manufacturing neighbors. The intellectual fields they were to develop at Hopkins had emerged in Germany precisely as the growth of cities seemed to necessitate a more organized mode of looking at exchange. Serving with their neighbors on the taxation commissions, charity societies, and public health commissions, the intellectuals of Eutaw Place invigorated the air with their practical but also idealistic commitment to the city’s progress.
It was a milieu not unlike what Paul had seen in Riga, an environment that might have gladdened him, had he not so missed the smell of cows and grass.
Week after week, he took the train farther and farther out into the country, picking up Reisterstown Road above the lake and following it out to Reisterstown itself. There were no Jews there, mostly Methodists, and this was land where tobacco had been picked by slaves, the children of whom still lived in little cottages on Bond Avenue. Many of the Negroes, working year after year in the kitchens and jitneys of Glyndon, had been there since slave days.
In this area Paul bought land that once was part of the large holdings that Noah Worthington had held on to until the claims to his “stolen” slaves were refused and he had to retreat down into the valley. Nevertheless, Negro neighbors farther down Bond Avenue could remember the Worthingtons, and others could relate that the street where they lived had, three generations back, taken its name from bondsmen who had been held there in pens.
It was a fitting refuge for a former Jew of the Pale, where his people were not allowed to own land and were restricted to growing small kitchen gardens.
The plat showing Paul’s holdings from 1911 to his death reveals he was one of the largest landowners in greater Reisterstown, and thus a man who had realized his fondest dreams. The idea of remaking Jews into men of the soil, as well as the discovery of Jewish community and fraternity based on laboring with the hands, was in the ascendant in Europe in the years before Paul left for America. Every kindergarten had its garden plot, where the little ones were let loose with watering cans and spades. As they got older, some were sent to agricultural schools to gain knowledge of agronomy, farm management, and machine tools to ready themselves for the next stage in Jewish history.
In the mid-1870s in Shavli, with his father recently dead and his older brother Max dispatched to Tartu and then Riga to capture such exemptions from the general rule as a Jew might secure, Paul had been free to cultivate his own interests. Now in Glyndon Paul still had an old photograph, a souvenir of weekends when he had gone to agricultural camps where Jewish socialists, Bundists (labor advocates), and Zionists devoted their adolescent energies to agricultural progress; they sought the renewal of Jewish spirit through contact with the land.
Paul’s hopes, though, would have been snuffed out utterly by the Czar’s May Laws of 1882, which began, “As a temporary measure, and until a general revision is made of their legal status, it is declared that Jews be forbidden to settle anew outside of towns and boroughs exceptions being admitted only in the case of existing agricultural communities.” For a “temporary” period, such hopeful youths as Paul would have read: “Forbidden are the issuing of mortgage and other deeds to Jews, as well as the registration of Jews as lessees of real property situated outside towns and boroughs.” The edicts of May 3, 1882, contributed, as the authors of the Jewish Encyclopaedia of 1901 dryly put it, only “indirectly to the Agricultural Colonies of Russia.”
After buying his own large house with nine rich acres in Glyndon in 1911, Paul, the only Jew in town, proceeded to live out the dream of agricultural self-sufficiency and cooperative community he had absorbed so long ago in Riga.
By 1914 Paul had organized some of his neighbors to establish a branch of the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, a service organization for farmers that promoted translating the beauty and goodness of rural life into social betterment. Paul eventually held every office of his local Grange; he journeyed to the state Grange meetings and once to the national meeting in California, proud as anything of his badge. But he started modestly as treasurer, master, speaker, and parliamentarian.
“Down with monopolies and up with cooperation!” This was the rallying cry of those early farm organizers on whose ideas the Pomona Grange relied. The farmer, as Paul knew, was an agent of progress and civilization, steward of the most valuable commodity there is—land—and on whom all industry depended. The farmer the Grangers organized was a worthy citizen, a man whose hard work in the clean air instilled a natural cultivation.
“Human happiness,” read the heady credo of the Maryland Grange, “is the acme of earthly ambition. Individual happiness depends upon general prosperity.” Paul was glad to explain this to any who expressed interest. His bible was a volume by Solon Justice Buck, The Granger Movement, 1870-1880, which, published in 1913, came out just in time to assist Paul in establishing the organization and ritual of his local Grange.
I have the minutes of Paul’s active years. They show that Paul was the most disinterested and particular of the Grangers. Other members might underestimate the value to civilization of the short dairy course offered at the University of Maryland, or of serving on the local fertilizer committee, or might let their minds wander during the report of the Mid-Atlantic state lecturers conference. Not Paul. He gave his passion for Mother Earth free rein, even sometimes exhibiting pugnacity ill befitting a Granger, growing hot in insisting that the Grange stood for a “square deal for everyone.”
Brother Levy insisted that voting for officers be carried out by written ballot,
that minority reports on the qualifications of candidates be given the same attention as majority reports, and that the minutes of all Grange meetings be faithfully typewritten and entered in the Grange annals and then approved by all members.
It was naturally Brother Levy who raised his voice for farmers as the Consolidated Gas and Electric strung wires and laid pipe up Reisterstown Road, and he agitated successfully for the same rates for country as city service. It was Paul Levy who urged more research on rural mail delivery, it was he who went to the state Grange meetings at Salisbury, and it was he who took the train all the way to California for the national meeting.
Brother Levy’s mind never wandered. He never indulged in low resentment, and when any office needed filling, he was there. As president, he installed new officers “with all due ritual and . . . without once [as the minutes of the meeting marveled] using the Grange manual during the entire installation.”
Uncle Paul, as Jacob sometimes reminded his children, was not to be made a laughing stock. But admittedly mouths twitched in town, and Jacob’s children sometimes laughed aloud at Paul’s letters urging that “when school closes you ought to come here with the boys. It will do you good to be close to mother earth; besides, boys should get an idea how to make a living direct from mother earth when conditions require.”
Was it his unworldliness or an absurd recklessness that explained the story everyone in town knew: Mr. Levy had lost a diamond cuff link while plowing. The children in town called it buried treasure.
If his family and neighbors found him kooky, Paul seemed not to notice. Photos show a knob-kneed, big-eared, pointy-shouldered man sitting next to Sarah’s solid fat, as much in love with her after twenty years as ever. He offered his half-furnished rambling old hall, late a boarding house, as a family dacha. Boys could be sent there to work off misdemeanors, girls to learn the value of housework. Daughters like Jean suspected of overly long walks might be spirited off for weeks of diary writing under the close supervision of her mother’s sisters. Had Jean been so supervised, these sisters let Jacob know, perhaps she would have waited for her swain to return from the war and married him properly, instead of (and no one said this) marrying him in a hurry before little Earle started to show. And she would not now be pregnant and alone in Philadelphia had she been looked to. All these, and Jacob too, Paul urged to use the farm for rejuvenation.