by Elisa New
On the factory’s opening day, with film crews, journalists, Rothschilds, Samuels, Belishas, and other eminent personages in attendance, thousands cheered the seventy-year-old Bernhard Baron, who stood modestly on the podium, handing out sterling silver medals to three thousand of his workers.
Such a numismatic hymn to labor ideals probably struck many as odd, but it was Baron’s way of signaling the end of tobacco’s oppression of the working man. Carreras, this medal proclaimed, would exceed even Sidney Webb’s predictions. It would be a place where a world-class product was manufactured profitably and efficiently in an atmosphere of complete worker satisfaction.
And once the factory was up and running, efficiency, the catch-word of progressives on both sides of the ocean, received nearly as much promotion as the cigarettes themselves, the beauty and humane benefits of efficiency eventually becoming the theme of the popular Black Cat factory tour. Carreras workers wore color-coded buttons indexed to the floor on which they worked, and a corps of time management experts had their own department. Cosmetics, which affected the taste of the tobacco, were strictly forbidden, and any worker coming ten minutes late would find the door to the factory from the heated tunnel under the Hampton Road to the tube station locked. Directors were to be addressed as Mr. Eddie, Mr. Paul, Mr. Theo, and Mr. Baron, and a crew of workers was employed simply to keep the machines clean and shiny. Baron ran a tight ship, yes, but he had no doubt that worker happiness was efficiency’s best safeguard.
To ensure continuity of production and low worker turnover, he liked to employ whole families, and those transferred from one factory to another received help with moving expenses and resettlement near the factory. Carreras employees got subsidized meals, with special vouchers issued to supplement the subsidy for those without other well-paid family members in the company ranks. They got medical care, including dental, at an on-site clinic, staffed with a doctor and nurse. Underage workers had work-study release plans that enabled them to finish school and collect their diplomas. Married workers finding it hard to conceive found adoption help; retirees were settled in the country; and long-term workers, of which by 1928 there were hundreds, were given paid holidays for years of service earned. The year was punctuated with various celebrations, as on Christmas when workers received their tins of salmon and maple from the Canadian affiliate, and of course free cigarettes; the party started at noon when the company band began tuning up and it blared on till midnight.
Bernhard Baron might have reflected that if his old friend Jacob would not praise him for any of these accomplishments, perhaps he’d approve of the brilliant match he arranged between Eddie and Baron’s granddaughter Bertha.
Years ago Bernhard had provided the funds to send Bertha to Baltimore for a bit of finishing at the St. Agnes Academy for Girls, which was loose enough about weekend visits to allow Bertha to mingle with the Levys and their older son, Eddie. It would have seemed equally prescient to invite Bertha to visit London when, shortly after Eddie arrived, he so needed the support of a confident American girl to keep his chin up. True, Bernhard had his own urgent reasons. His own line was thin. His only son Louis, kindly but not imaginative, lacked his father’s business sense and ultimately outlived his father by only two years. The restocking of Baron’s managerial ranks would have been the only prudent move for the head of a company that in the 1920s was just tapping into its greatest markets. It was Bernhard’s intention that Eddie and Bertha, plucked from humbler settings, would use their privilege to advance the cause of social justice.
Still, the young people had their own way. Bright, hard, and vivacious, they humored him, calling him Old Man and Guv’ner. Bernhard spent his own cash to coin sterling silver medals for his workers, but how many thousands per year his protégé Eddie put on his As-prey’s tab he did not want to know. Eddie was energetic all right, tirelessly dreaming up new ad schemes—illustrated cards for the cigarette packs featuring film stars, queens and kings, roadsters and fashion models, and racehorses. And he and Bertha were just as energetic at spending—she on Worth and Balenciaga; he on racehorses, stable fittings, weekends in Monaco.
Bernhard did not live to see the worst of his granddaughter’s antics as Mrs. Baron or, after Eddie was knighted during World War II, as Lady Baron. Such as the time Bertha, visiting America, held out her closed hands to Jean, Myrtle, and Fanny, bidding them pick their gift. Looking a bit threadbare, with Levy’s Shrinking barely making enough money to keep up their house payments, what could they do but play along? What delight Bertha professed as each sister chose the present selected especially for her—each sister tapping one arm or the other and receiving a magnificent jewel—a diamond for one, a great ruby for the second, an emerald for the third.
The woman who ran the Bernhard Baron boys home, an orphanage, told me about a package that arrived for her on the day that her husband, the home’s beloved warden, died. What would a woman want who’d spent her life in East London ministering to the poor? A mink coat, surely! To wear to Basil’s funeral.
Bertha would have her portrait painted the way others posed for photographs. Sir Orpen would be called in for a sitting, and she’d pose in a newer gown. If she didn’t like the portrait’s look—say, how he caught her head but not her gown—well then, off with her head, she’d say whimsically. Put it in an oval frame and do what you like with the rest.
While Baron gave full rein to social welfare programs, Uncle Eddie worked hard to lighten the tone and modernize the Old Man’s progressive zeal. In the early years, Baron had pioneered stamp albums for cats and coupon schemes, and had even given his blessing to the Daily Mail’s National Black Cat Day of 1913, when the nation’s smokers were encouraged to walk the streets with their packs, hoping to meet the Black Cat Man with his sack of gold sovereigns. But as the medal with its hygienic sentiments illustrated, the Old Man, as Eddie knew, could grow pious and lugubrious where workers were concerned.
So it was Eddie who cooked up the dottier advertising schemes, and Eddie who established the factory’s theater groups (two shows a year, variety and drama; a stage hired out in Bloomsbury for performances), the many sports leagues, and the book club. How to be sure the hum of the machinery found accompaniment in the humming of workers? Music while you work! How to make sure Carreras girls dressed suitably for work: the annual Miss Carreras contest (frocks and corsages; no swim suits, please). How to sell cigarettes? Richly colored collector’s cards for everyone—the obligatory kings and queens of England, golf clubs, great houses, great horses, great gardens, but also great escapes of history, the stars of Paramount, the automobiles of 1929. There was the great Black Cat football competition, providing a safe, harmless outlet for a bit of a wager, and discount coupons redeemable for shoes and razors and toasters, with the distribution station right in the factory.
While the Old Man focused on the working family, closeting himself with his lawyer to set aside trust funds for the Bernhard Baron Cottages for retired workers and the Bernhard Baron Fund for obstetric medicine, Eddie made sure the gift to the tennis courts in Regents Park was sufficiently handsome to bear Baron’s name, and that there was plenty to drink at the annual picnic at Honeypot. The workers who streamed out of the Tooten Camden underground and into the Carreras tunnel were no longer the Old Man’s immigrant Germans in suspenders, mustached intellectuals applying Marx and Engels to cigar molds. They were twenty-one-year-old English girls from St. Pancras and Holborn, some of whom had moved out of mum and dad’s house to live together in bed-sits, cooking on coils and obeying rules to stagger the visits of gentlemen. So long as there was time left for the cinema, they were eager to work long hours, for they spent money at a rate that alarmed their parents. They knew their parents felt safe with them at work, especially because the subterranean tunnel took them right from the basement, piled with tobacco, and into the tube. These workers read fashion magazines and bought stockings, and after hours they painted their mouths and their nails and danced in cheap halls.
Eddie allowed that workers in modern industry did not fall dead of heatstroke or cough into a handkerchief. But modern industry did not lecture itself hoarse either.
Modernity said, Ain’t we got fun!
TWELVE
Jacob’s Cane
Late in the summer of 2007, I was riding a train bound north from Berlin to Sassnitz and the overnight Baltic ferry that would take me once again to Lithuania. As the glitter of Berlin gave way to the deep green of rural towns, I tried to imagine the thoughts of my great-grandfather Jacob Levy in 1928, when he was traveling in a train clicking over these rails, on his way to visit the brothers he had left behind forty-four years ago.
I couldn’t be sure of his precise route. The stamps on Jacob’s passport—Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Lithuania, London—revealed that he’d taken an ocean liner from Baltimore to Germany (Bremen or Hamburg) and then a train to one of the Baltic ports. But who knew which one or if it still existed? In 2007, since air travel had long ago replaced the many passenger vessels once departing from a score of western Baltic ports, I’d chosen Sassnitz, making it easy to visit Berlin first. Jacob’s train journey, like mine, probably was not long. When he boarded his train for the coast the reckoning he would present to his brothers—the tally of his accomplishments during the years away—drew closer.
I had some of the same feelings. Years had passed since I’d first visited the Baltics with Yael. By tomorrow morning the ship Vilnius would have crossed the Baltic and set down in Klaipeda on Lithuania’s amber coast. A few hours later, I’d be back in one of the towns on Jacob’s cane, ready this time to follow Jacob’s route of 1928 and not one dictated by a tour guide or too much reading. I, like Jacob, had some accounting to do, some mental mustering of what I had to show for all my research and journeys. While it was absorbing to imagine Jacob’s struggle, I was not thinking only about him but also about myself and the book I’d been writing about him.
People who knew me thought it only natural that I hadn’t finished my big book yet, noting all the changes in my life since I’d first set out to understand the inscriptions on Jacob’s elegant cane and the Jewish civilization from which he and Bernhard Baron had hailed. Shortly after Yael and I arrived home I had started working on this book in earnest. But in the same year I’d also left the University of Pennsylvania, started teaching at Harvard, and finished most of a book on the literature of New England. I’d gotten divorced, become a single mother of three, and then, just a few months later, met and fallen in love with Harvard’s brilliant, funny, bighearted president, Larry Summers, who had also been lately divorced and was also the parent of three. My friends were right that life with Larry meant big changes in my life.
Larry was a larger public figure than I’d ever known, and life with him brought limelight, public attention, and stress, as his controversial struggle to reform the oldest, most complacent institution in America began to win him enemies.
And so, four years after Larry and I met and a few weeks before a faculty uproar forced his resignation, we got married in the dining room of the Harvard president’s house. It crossed my mind that wedging a wedding canopy into this bastion of WASP gentility might turn out to be my greatest contribution to Jewish civilization. What with, my relatives and friends assured me, two divorces, six teenagers (all smiling with us under the huppah), and the role of helpmeet to Cambridge’s most notorious Jew, not to mention my own scholarly accomplishments, I had much to be proud of.
And I was. But I still felt it was high time I finish this book that had me in its grip. There was the aging of the generations in my family. The children of my great-aunts Jean, Myrtle, and Fanny, who had told me so many stories that I wished to preserve, were now the age my great-aunts had been when I’d first started to ask about great-grandfather Jacob. I needed to get their stories into print.
As the train pulled into Sassnitz and then as I stood on the platform waiting for a cab to the ferry terminal, I realized that the awkwardness I felt was linked to my need to explain the writing on Jacob’s cane and the life journey of its owner, which had become a crucial part of my life’s work and meaning. Without reaching an end to the story of Jacob Levy, Bernhard Baron, and their families—the buried horrors as well as the brilliant successes—I would feel some important work of my own left undone. I had obligated myself to imagining, and so honoring, the lives of my forebears, as well as teaching my children to honor them; writing this story had become for me a discipline and a form of Jewish observance, a strict practice in whose ways I walked and had taught my daughters, each in her way, to walk.
The evidence of this was that I was not, anymore than Jacob had been, traveling alone. Traveling with me, as before, was Yael.
A few weeks shy of twenty-one, the same age my grandfather Emil had been when his father, Jacob, took him on the journey of 1928, Yael was again my companion on a trip to the Baltics, the intervening time having delivered her from junior high to college, as well as from naïveté to wisdom beyond her age. Years before, she had stumbled along the route with me, interested but also nonplussed at the strangeness of the places I took her to, the smoky compartments, the nasty bathrooms, the grim sights to which I’d exposed her so far from her life in Philadelphia. She’d trusted me, as children trust their mothers, to protect her, and I’d tried not only to reassure her we’d be safe but to teach her my traveling philosophy: With a pile of maps, a tank of gas, and a debit card, one could get lost but not in too much trouble.
A few years earlier, Yael had accompanied me on another book-related trip, a journey along the Rhine to see where Aunt Myrtle’s son Jack had fought and died in 1945. The three months Jack spent fighting Hitler, first in the frozen, hilly terrain of Belgium and then in Alsace, represented to me the American Levy family’s fight against the Nazis. I like to believe that it may have prevented the very last of our European relatives from perishing. As we drove into Belgium and then along the Rhine, Yael’s high school French had supplemented my college French. On that trip I had been very much in charge, but now I planned the itinerary to make the trip convenient for her busy life, and I was feeling too the shift in—what, authority? —that comes to parents as their children find their stride.
Since Yael had learned Russian and her historical and literary expertise now outstripped mine, I hadn’t hired a translator but would rely on her. I hoped that a second journey with my now grown child would produce something in the way of interesting incident. As we dragged luggage into our cabin on the ferry and she cocked her head, listening to the purser’s announcements on the public address system and smiling, I thought that it had been years now since I’d had the memory that allowed her to integrate so much vocabulary into so many grammatical forms.
At that moment she asked me for about the fifteenth time if I’d managed to come up with the list of questions in Russian I’d be wanting her to ask. She’d brought her dictionary and could work on readying the sentences after dinner.
On deck alone, leaning over the rail, I watched the red Baltic sun descend slowly into an expanse of pinkish ripples. For years I’d thought about the actual Baltic, the sea, as I’d flipped through books of maps and traced trade routes across the ocean. I’d developed a passion for maps with trade goods marked, for the little symbols for timber and tar, dried fish and turpentine, and I liked to imagine the different vessels and conditions of passage. It was, I thought, a beautiful journey for those who had eyes for the beauty. Had Jacob? I doubted it. With my daughter napping snugly in our cabin, I was free to lose myself in the seascape, but I thought about how much more anxious Jacob must have been, how apprehensive as he turned over in his mind what he’d made of his life, what he had to show for his years away from Shavli.
Jacob would have the happy story of Levy’s International Shrinking Company. The story would begin with how he arrived in Baltimore at sixteen and toiled at making pants with his older brother Paul. How he endured the airless immigrant rooming houses, the anti-Semitism of labor unions
that were, he might explain, just as jealous of the Jews’ progress in America as they were the world over. How five years after his arrival, he was in a position to start a family and then to buy not one but two houses in a desirable area. By the end of the Great War, he’d established another factory in another city, with his name on the letterhead as inventor, manufacturer, businessman. He would have to explain that he had not won his campaign for a seat in the U.S. Congress, but he had represented his party proudly. This took place while his son Bob—a boy who had the family knack with a wrench—ran the Baltimore plant and his daughter Jean pitched in to help with the children, since his dear wife Amelia was . . . ill. His daughters were his mainstay, as he was their provider.
Now came the place in his narrative where the story began to break down, where he feared his brothers Max and Isaac would lack, if not sympathy, understanding. The problem of course: his sons. The prodigals. Jacob could hardly solicit much compassion from his brothers, since he himself had left them and his loving mother at the age of sixteen. Did he deserve pity because his sons Eddie, Paul, and Theo had abandoned him, joined their uncle Bernard Baron in London, and changed their names from Levy to Baron?
Nor did he want pity from these brothers whose own sons were loyal to them and stayed close by. So much of his trouble was due, Jacob thought, to what had befallen or maybe had always been wrong with Amelia. But how unburden himself of this, how share the slow unraveling of hope and then the boys’ peeling off one by one, gone from his life? Better perhaps to try the other tack, brazen it out, chalk the dissolution of his family up to the opportunities now beckoning young men.