by Rich Cohen
Friends and family gathered at 2 Audubon Place afterward. It was the start of the shiva, the seven-day mourning period that follows a death.
Rabbi Feibelman chronicled these events in his autobiography, The Making of a Rabbi, starting with a description of “the banana king,” an “innately modest and retiring [man who] wore no conspicuous prominence on his sleeve.”
“His son Samuel Jr. was the first casualty in the Second World War among our members,” Rabbi Feibelman wrote. “I offered to have a memorial for the family on the Friday evening following the announcement of his death. Mr. Zemurray came, together with his wife and closest friends. After services I went to his home, the imposing, white columned house on the avenue … I was told he had gone for a walk in Audubon Park, across the avenue. When he returned, we shook hands and spoke solemnly. He still spoke with an accent, but I was always impressed with his well-chosen words and his unfailing manner of projecting his expressions with precise meaning. ‘Rabbi, I never believed my son was dead. I toyed with the idea that he was still alive in spite of contrary reports. But when I listened to you recite the Kaddish … then I knew he was dead.’” Zemurray paused, wiped away his tears, then said, “Well, you’ve opened the wound all over again. But now it can heal.”
It was the blackest period in his life. Historic events transpired—the invasion at Normandy, the dropping of the atomic bombs—but he did not notice. All these things (soldiers on the march, men returning from war) were seen as if from a great distance. The war ended on August 14, 1945. V-J Day. In New Orleans, the squares filled with sailors. The men got drunk. The mothers wept with joy. Sam did not know what they were celebrating. The first peacetime shipment of bananas arrived soon after. He did not care. Everyone I spoke to who knew Zemurray—there are fewer each year—told me the death of Sam Jr. was the great tragedy of the old man’s life. He came out of it and got back to work, but he was never the same.
17
Israel Is Real
Sam Zemurray needed a project to take him out of his trance, a cause bigger than his own. He would find it in the nascent state of Israel.
Here’s how it started:
In 1922, Zemurray was contacted by Chaim Weizmann, who would become the founding president of the Jewish nation. Weizmann had been traveling the United States when he heard his first Banana Man story. “I made an unusual ‘find’ in New Orleans, where lived a very remarkable personality in American Jewry—Samuel Zemurray, the banana king,” Weizmann wrote in his autobiography. “I paid my first visit to New Orleans specially to meet him. He had been told of my arrival and postponed his own planned departure from the city for several days—days which I found not only extremely interesting, but also profitable for the Funds.”
The men met several times that year. Their conversations lasted for hours, drifting from English to Russian to Yiddish, whatever language best expressed the thought of the moment: English for money, Russian for struggle, Yiddish for the heartaches faced by a Jew in the world. Weizmann talked about his hometown in Poland, his disappointments and anger, his realization that the Jew will be free only when settled in his own land. Zemurray talked about life on the isthmus, his career in ripes and greens. “Throughout all [his] success Zemurray retained his simplicity, his transparent honesty, his lively interest in people and things, and his desire to serve,” Weizmann wrote. “His chosen studies in leisure hours were mathematics and music, and he got a great deal of satisfaction out of them.”
In his memoirs, Weizmann took time to chronicle the career of Zemurray. Few Jews of that generation could resist the story, which unfolds like the legend of the Hebrew giant, gloriously free from the constraints of stereotypical Jewish life. For men like Weizmann, Zemurray was the shtarker, the tough Jew called on in dark times, the archetype of Willy Loman’s Uncle Ben in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, who laughs as he says, “Why, boys, when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by god I was rich!”
Zemurray did not have a strong sense of Jewish identity. It was never how he described himself, his religion being just another detail in his biography: a citizen of New Orleans, a foe of Huey Long, a resident of the isthmus, a trader of bananas, a man of the Hebrew persuasion. The fact that neither of his children married Jews, raised Jewish children, or much cared about Jewish causes tells you that Sam did not dwell on the subject at home, obsess, or fill his children with fear of the goyim. When offered the freedom of America, which is not only freedom here and now, but also freedom from the past, freedom to choose what to remember, he grabbed it.
And yet, like more than a few such men—European-born Jews who shrugged off ethnic identity as soon as they touched American soil—Zemurray became, in late middle age, a champion of Zionism. In part because of the personal connection with Weizmann; in part because of his sympathy for the early Zionists, Eastern European Jews who, like Zemurray himself, seized control of their own destiny. He gave them as much support as he could. “Zemurray was one of the highlights of my visit to the States,” Weizmann wrote. “I never missed an opportunity of seeing him on later visits. He did not take a public part in our work; but his interest has been continuous and generous.” Zemurray donated half a million dollars to the Jewish Agency in the 1920s, money used to buy land for settlers, build houses, buy farm equipment and seed. He served as director of the Palestine Economic Corporation, which put him in league with Louis Marshall, Felix Warburg, Samuel Untermyer, and Herbert Lehman, among the most powerful Jews in America. In 1926, he gave $700,000 to build a power station in Palestine, a gift reported in The New York Times. He met Weizmann again in 1939, soon after the British issued the hated White Paper, which banned immigration to Palestine, closing a last path of escape just as Hitler moved into the most murderous phase of his war on the Jews. Weizmann found Zemurray “depressed, yet hopeful of the ultimate outcome.” In the early 1940s, Sam used his influence in the Caribbean to help convince Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic to accept several hundred Jewish refugees from Europe, a harried contingent that settled in Sosúa on the country’s northern coast.
Although Zionism was important to him, it was never a primary concern in Zemurray’s life. This changed in the last days of the Second World War for two reasons: the death of Sam Jr., which left Sam bereft and in need of a cause; and the death of everything and everyone in the old country. It’s hard to explain the effect of the Holocaust on men like Sam Zemurray. Self-made Americans who had always felt secure in their adopted country, they were suddenly reminded, in the middle of life, of the true nature of their condition. No matter his wealth or power, the Hebrew would always be a stranger in a strange land, vulnerable to the slightest shift in the popular mood. If it could happen in Germany, it could happen anywhere.
What’s more, as the details emerged—six million—men like Zemurray came to regard themselves as all that remained of a lost world. The Jews of Europe had been a remnant of an ancient kingdom. The Jews of America were thus a remnant of a remnant, invested with special responsibility. It’s up to us to see it never happens again was the sentiment of the moment. For many, the only solution was the creation of a Jewish state. Not only would it protect the living, providing shelter and a place of refuge, it would redeem the millions who had died.
Shortly after V-J Day, Zemurray received a call from a Zionist operative who had been charged with procuring ships for the Bricha, the secret effort to smuggle Holocaust survivors out of Europe and into Palestine, then under British blockade. His name was Ze’ev Schind. There was a joke going around Tel Aviv: David Ben-Gurion said, “Find me a man who knows everything about ships.” But because of his Polish accent, this was written down as “Find me a man who knows everything about sheep.” Which is why they recruited Schind, a twenty-five-year-old shepherd from a kibbutz in Palestine.
Of course, Schind was not just a shepherd, he was also a member of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. (He would take command of the Mossad i
n 1947.) Weizmann advised Schind to contact Zemurray as soon as he reached the United States. When Schind explained what he needed, Zemurray said, in essence, Not on the phone. Come down to Louisiana. Let’s talk.
One morning in 1946, Schind, who worked out of the Jewish Agency at 342 Madison Avenue in New York, caught a plane from Idlewild Airport to New Orleans, then hired a car that took him north to the plantation near Hammond. Twice a year, the grounds bloomed with azaleas. Zemurray opened the door. His back was stooped, his hair was turning white, there was a tremor in his voice, but he was still imposing. His entire life was expressed in each gesture: his handshake, his smile, the flick of his eyes that said, “Follow me.” He led Schind to a kind of lodge in back of the house. The men sat by the windows. The country was swampy and green. Beautifully moody. The strip where Sam Jr. used to land his plane had already disappeared beneath chokeberry and sumac.
“What do you need?” asked Zemurray.
Schind explained the situation: There were a million Jews in displaced persons camps in Europe, many of them in Poland, in what had been concentration camps, now being run by American soldiers. These people, who had emerged from the fires of hell, were all that remained of Jewish Europe. America would not take them, France would not have them, the Russians jailed or deported them. The White Paper was still in effect, barring their entry into Palestine. When some tried to return to Poland, they found their houses occupied by people who chased them away, beat them, or killed them. There was a pogrom in Kielce, Poland, in 1946, a town I once saw from the window of a car, its streets ominous and mean. I’ve mentioned this pogrom in previous books because I find it unbelievable: to kill Jews after the Holocaust, or to survive the death camps only to be murdered when you have finally made it home.
On May 22, 1945, two weeks after Germany surrendered, Weizmann wrote to Prime Minister Winston Churchill and asked him to revoke the White Paper. Churchill told Weizmann such matters would be attended to when “the victorious Allies are definitely seated at the Peace table.” This angered Weizmann, who, on June 5, sent a second letter: “I had always understood from our various conversations that our problem would be considered as soon as the German war was over: but the phrase ‘until the victorious Allies are definitely seated at the Peace table’ substitutes some indefinite date in the future. I am sure that it cannot have been your intention to postpone the matter indefinitely, because I believe you realize that this would involve very grave hardship to thousands of people at present still lingering in the camps of Buchenwald, Belsen-Bergen etc.”
Schind told Zemurray these people could not be left in the camps.
Zemurray agreed, saying something like, Yes, yes, but what do you want from me?
Everything, said Schind. Money, ships, documents, expertise.
Zemurray raised his hand, summoning a servant. He asked for whiskey.
The man returned with a bottle and glasses. Zemurray poured shots, one for himself, one for Schind, drank his, poured another, drank that, then started to talk. Sam did not tell his story often. When asked about his past, he might shrug. “I was there. It happened. What’s there to say?” This occasion was different. It was as if, in response to the picture painted by Schind—it spoke to Sam on frequencies the average person might not detect—the story of his life was all he had to offer.
He talked about Selma and Mobile, the strangeness of the delta towns, the first banana, the first ripes. He talked about Puerto Cortés, the vaqueros, the soldiers for hire. He cried when he talked about his son, then chased away his tears with another whiskey. Told this way, the incidents of Zemurray’s life, which might otherwise seem disconnected, reveal themselves as a cohesive narrative, an epic, an adventure, the story of a generation and the story of a people. Only at the very end did he speak about Russia, and the fields, green in summer, black in spring, and his father, and the death of his father, and his last view of his first home, a house swallowed in the immensity of the steppe. Everyone has an Eden, a perfect world lost when they were small. For Sam, it was that wheat farm in Russia, and his father was alive. When Sam was finished talking, he sat quietly, the bottle drained, the sun gone, the room dark, then turned to Schind and said, in essence, I cannot help you. Not openly. Nearly half of United Fruit’s ships fly British flags and much of our business is done there. A British company cannot run the British blockade. But I will send you to a man who will help. He’ll tell you what to do, and give you what you need. If you get stuck, come back.
The Bricha was soon under way. Contacts established, money raised, ships purchased, papers issued—documents that caused the harbormaster to sign the manifest and open the gates. Zionist agents spirited refugees out of the DP camps, leading them over mountain trails to ports in Romania, France, Italy, where ships waited at anchor. Some of these tubs, jammed with poor lost souls, made it through the blockade. Others were stopped by the Royal Navy, boarded, turned back. Every few months, Zemurray received an update, sometimes followed by a meeting at 2 Audubon Place in New Orleans, the Ritz in Boston, the Roosevelt in New York, or the plantation near Hammond. Schind might turn up alone, or he might bring a colleague such as Meyer Weisgal, the executive director of the Jewish Agency. According to Weisgal, Zemurray helped the Bricha in several ways, crucially in the procuring of ships and getting those ships out to sea. He did it by putting Schind together with the men who ran the docks—“[Schind] was always making trips to Boston or New Orleans to see people to whom Zemurray directed him for papers of registry and visas for crews,” Gottlieb Hammer, the head of the United Jewish Appeal, wrote—and by pressuring Central American officials to flag Bricha ships as their own. In one case, three ships, refused exit papers from the port of Philadelphia, were released after Zemurray made a few calls. One of them, purchased with money partly donated by Zemurray, was the Exodus, the refugee-packed steamer that, in its pitiful, homeless wandering, personified the Jewish people, demonstrating the need for a Jewish state. “Zemurray helped raise the purchase price and pushed through the registration of the Exodus, which carried emigrants through the British blockade into the Promised Land,” Thomas McCann wrote. The most famous vessel of the Bricha, the Exodus is one of the storied ships of Jewish history, right up there with the fishing boat that carried Jonah away from Tarshish.
The British Mandate of Palestine was terminated in May 1948. According to The Jews’ Secret Fleet by Joseph Hochstein and Murray Greenfield, the Bricha had by then carried thirty-seven thousand Jewish refugees to Palestine—many of them on American ships procured or sped along by Sam Zemurray.
Well, that’s the story people tell you in Israel, where the name Zemurray is better known than it is here. The historical record consists of a mere scattering of letters, diary entries, documents. The fact is, Zemurray, always wary of drawing the wrong kind of attention, was, for the most part, able to disassociate his name from the cause. Gottlieb Hammer described him as “an international mystery man” who “made and overturned governments at will according to business needs. He was one of the richest and most powerful men in the United States, yet Zemurray was able to avoid publicity and keep his name out of the newspapers. The only condition he put on his aid to [the Bricha] was that he never be publicly identified and that the entire relationship be treated with the utmost discretion.”
* * *
For reasons never fully disclosed, Zemurray resigned as president of United Fruit in 1948, turning the office over to his colleague Thomas Cabot. Sam remained the largest stockholder and retained ultimate control, but he relinquished daily operation. Perhaps he did it with his mortality in mind (he was seventy-one). He must have been exhausted. Or perhaps he did it for the Jewish cause in Palestine. With the coming end of the British occupation, the fate of such a state had been turned over to the United Nations, where it would be decided by a vote in the General Assembly. The resolution to divide Palestine into two nations—one Arab, one Jew—needed a two-thirds majority to pass. A season of politicking would begin as soon a
s that vote was scheduled, a game Zemurray was uniquely positioned to play.
His involvement began in October 1947, when he was approached by Weizmann, who, according to his own writings, told Zemurray, “The situation is such that your help is very much required at this critical stage. Believe me, it’s urgent.”
Early tallies showed the partition vote lining up this way: the European states, members of the Western Alliance as well as the Soviet bloc, each with its own history in mind, would approve; the countries of the Muslim world, for reasons I don’t have to explain, would oppose. This would leave the issue to be settled by unaligned countries that seemingly had no direct interest at stake, several of them, it just so happened, in the Torrid Zone of America where the banana flourished. According to Ignacio Klich, in his article “Latin America, the United States, and the Birth of Israel,” the Zionist leadership had neglected the region, believing “Central American support might be won through UFCO’s president and largest shareholder Samuel Zemurray.” But the politics were complicated by the large Arab populations in several of the Latin American nations.
There were two votes for partition. The first, on November 25, 1947, resulted in a deadlock, the nays and abstentions leaving Resolution 181 just short of passage. A second was scheduled for November 29, four days after the first vote. It was in these days, a crack of light between dispossession and statehood, that Sam Zemurray went to work, calling key players in banana land, wheedling, cajoling, strong-arming. It was the culmination of his career, the hour when Zemurray could finally use everything he had learned to play a secretly decisive role on the world stage. He asked each leader in the region two questions: How do you intend to vote on partition? and Can your vote be changed? Zemurray told Weizmann that every vote from Mexico to Colombia was for sale, but the price was often prohibitively high. Zemurray apparently suggested they focus on just those nations where he carried great influence. The ensuing bribing and lobbying became so intense that President Harry Truman complained to Weizmann of the hardball tactics: Truman found it “unbecoming.”