Shalom Tvi’s youngest daughter, Sonia, was eighteen years old when she introduced herself to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the fiery right-wing Zionist leader who advocated aggressive, maximal Zionist expansion in Palestine. Jabotinsky was speaking at a conference in Warsaw, and, after much badgering, Sonia persuaded her parents to let her attend. Though she was still a girl, black haired, slender waisted, moody, she was a girl who had made up her mind. Jabotinsky was her man. Betar, the militant youth movement that rallied round Jabotinsky, was her party. “You can’t buy a country—you have to pay in blood!” Jabotinsky declaimed when he toured Poland to drum up support for his Revisionist Party. Sonia believed it was the truth. She didn’t care that Jabotinsky was known as the Jewish Mussolini because he favored solemn parades and armed, uniformed foot soldiers. Sonia liked the swagger. She wore the brown shirt, she learned the drills, she supported the fastest possible expansion of Jewish territory, with violence if need be. In Warsaw, when she saw the great man in the crowd at the convention, Sonia went up and introduced herself. She stood before the comrade of Joseph Trumpeldor and proudly informed him that she was a Kohen from Rakov, a Zionist and a loyal member of Betar. One day soon she would make aliyah and fight the good fight in Eretz Israel.
Sonia never said what Jabotinsky replied to her—but he must have been impressed. Strong willed and beautiful, warm, confident, single-minded, Sonia was the female soul of Zionism. Who wouldn’t want her marching in their army? Though she was the baby of the family—seven years younger than her married sister, Doba, forever quarreling with the skinny, brittle middle sister Etl—Sonia was no baby. She knew exactly what she wanted. Like her cousin Chaim, she had attended the Tarbut school in Vilna. She had no desire, however, for Doba’s comfortable life in Vilna with a husband and baby. If she stayed in Rakov she knew she would get sucked into the never-ending fuss over finding a match for Etl and the never-ending worry over the leather business. She had no stomach for such things. Sonia was a good daughter to Beyle and Shalom Tvi. She tried to be an observant Jew like her parents, but it would kill her to spend her days selling belts and harnesses to Belarusian peasants and her Shabbats gossiping in the women’s section at shul. She endured life in exile only because she knew it would end. The economic crash of 1929 blew past her—Rakov was hit especially hard since the Soviets had sealed the border to Minsk and put an end to the lucrative smuggling operations. Sonia, however, was not thinking about the economy. The only news that mattered to her was about the unrest in the Land. Lots of other pretty young girls in Rakov called themselves Zionists—they sang “Hatikva” and danced the hora in the parlor of the haberdasher’s house on Zaslavi Street and flirted with the Zionist boys. Sonia was not flirting. She spoke perfect Hebrew. She had met Jabotinsky and gotten his blessing. She devoured the letters that Chaim sent the family from Herzliya. Where one cousin led, the other would follow.
But first she had to convince her parents to let her go.
For all the fine Zionist rhetoric about absolute equality between men and women, a daughter was still a daughter. Chaim had departed for Palestine to a chorus of Hebrew folk songs and a flourish of handkerchiefs. When Sonia’s time came there would be tears.
Sonia turned twenty-two the spring of 1932—old enough to decide her own fate. Maybe too old to be a fresh wife, the yentas whispered behind her back—though in truth she had never been more beautiful. Her step was light, her body supple, her skin clear and glowing, her smile, on the rare occasions she allowed herself to smile, warm and inviting. She was a graduate of the Tarbut Gymnasium in Vilna. She spoke Hebrew with her Zionist friends, Yiddish at home, Polish in the shops. She read Tolstoy, Chekov, and Turgenev in Russian. But now she was through with Yiddish and Russian. She was through with Poland. She was through with servants, coffeehouses, forests, rivers, mushrooms, snow, cemeteries shrouded in pine shadow, forbidden churches with their icons and stained glass. Sonia had made up her mind to go to Palestine. But she couldn’t leave without her family’s blessing.
Shalom Tvi and Beyle had no problem with their daughter’s Zionist views, at least in theory. Shalom Tvi shared her enthusiasm for Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Party and often spoke of making aliyah himself one day. But it was one thing to let her go to meetings, sing the folk songs, dance the hora, wear the shirt—and another to let her risk her life alone and unprotected in the wilds of Palestine. They were a family of worriers. How could they take this calmly? Shalom Tvi worried about how a girl with no skills or experience could support herself over there. Etl, competitive and envious, worried that she’d end up an old maid in dreary Rakov while her younger sister played under the palm trees. Soft-hearted teary Doba worried that she’d never see her again. Her mother worried about everything else—what she would wear, what she would eat, whether she would be happy so far from home, how she would survive the malaria, the cholera, the heat, the Arabs. Their life was comfortable in Rakov. Did Sonia have any idea how much she would suffer in Palestine?
Sonia knew the path she had chosen was the right one; she had perfect faith in herself; there was nothing else she wanted out of life. Wasn’t that enough? When a son made aliyah, he packed his bags, promised to write, and set off. For a daughter it was a never-ending opera of hand-wringing and second-guessing.
Toward the end there were raised voices and slammed doors. A terrible row blew up between Etl and Sonia that would haunt them both forever. The parents withdrew into sighs and tears. There was endless bureaucratic delay and confusion about securing a visa. In the wake of the 1929 riots, the British had begun to backpedal on their liberal policy toward Jewish immigration to Palestine and by 1932 the visa process had become a nightmare. But the family was worse than any bureaucrat. Every time Sonia raised the subject, they came up with another reason to delay—or cancel. Guilt flowed in a torrent. How could she leave her aging mother? How would Etl find a husband when she had to spend all her time looking after the house and tending to the business? And what about Doba? Had Sonia forgotten that her sister was pregnant with her second child? Why not put off the trip until the next year so she could attend the bris of her new nephew? Her mother would die of grief. Her father would bankrupt himself sending her money. She’d have to turn right around and run home. She was being irrational. She’d regret it forever. She had no idea what she was letting herself in for.
“I was twenty one and a half when I left home in Rakov,” Sonia told her children many years later (in fact, she was a year older). “I behaved like a grown-up and did not take a cent from my parents. I did not want to, saying that I would work hard, that I would do laundry for money. I did many loads of laundry in Herzliya as well as Kfar Vitkin—I did not mind.”
And so with her own money and her own fierce will, Sonia finally made it happen. Since the entry visa proved to be impossible to obtain, Sonia figured out a way to duck under the red tape by pretending to travel as a tourist. She and four friends bought round-trip tickets with a tour company called Totzeret HaAretz (Produce in the Land) for 500 zlotys (the Polish currency) each (a considerable sum at a time when the average Polish worker earned 125z a month). Their plan was to use the tour company to get into the Middle East and then, in effect, jump ship. Sonia went to Vilna in the first days of August 1932 to spend a few days with Doba before setting out. “Difficult mood,” Etl wrote of the departure from home. Doba’s husband, Shepseleh, had agreed to accompany Sonia to Warsaw and put her and her companions on a train bound for the Romanian port of Constanta (the same port that Chaim had sailed from). But Sonia was sulky and tense the whole time and Shepseleh’s feelings were hurt. He could not understand the foul humor. At the Warsaw train station, Sonia shrugged him off, boarded the Romanian-bound train with her friends, stowed her luggage, and tried to ignore her racing heart. Her brother-in-law’s long, pale, mournful face appeared at the window before slipping away behind her. After Warsaw petered out, the green Polish countryside swallowed them up. The girls made a point of conversing in Hebrew.
At Constanta one of the fathers was on hand to see them from the train station to the port and get them settled on a steamer bound for Lebanon. Sonia’s spirits lifted as soon as she boarded. It was August 9, high summer on the Black Sea, and the ship’s deck was full of ruddy sailors and dashing young fellows in fedoras. The girls posed for snapshots clutching armfuls of exotic fruit—bananas, grapes, lemons, something spherical that might be a melon. A first taste of the Mediterranean. When the ship docked in Beirut, the captain reminded the tour-group passengers of the standard terms: they had been required to prepay for the round-trip, but not a single groszy of the five-hundred-zloty fare would be refunded for unused return tickets. So they had a choice: go back to Poland after their visit to Palestine or lose their money. It was not the first time nor would it be the last that a Jew was bilked for the privilege of immigrating to the Promised Land. The girls disembarked on the Beirut pier and disappeared into the crowd.
Somehow they found a driver who agreed to take them down the coast to Haifa. The tourist visas sufficed to get them into the British Protectorate at Rosh HaNikra, a settlement in the extreme northwest corner of Palestine—and once they were across the border, no one bothered about their status. As soon as they were safely past the checkpoint, the driver pulled over and told the girls to get out of the car. They must have a look at the most spectacular view in the world. White chalk cliffs tumbled into the sea below; before them, the land relaxed in a wide fertile plain that paralleled the coast on one side and rose on the other side into low hazy mountains that veiled the mysterious east; to the south, where their journey led, beckoned the long blue arc of Haifa Bay. When they had stood long enough to gaze their fill and shed tears and embrace each other and murmur about the homeland, the friends returned to the taxi and continued on to Haifa. The road was appalling, the houses and people and animals outside the car windows unbelievably strange and alarming, the air blowing in intolerably hot. Finally the driver stopped in the center of Haifa and the five of them and a small mountain of their luggage tumbled out. A taxi was maybe not the most glorious way to make aliyah—but they had done it.
Sonia’s cousin Ruth, one of the girls in the group, had a relative in Haifa named Hinda, who would put them up, but Ruth had no idea where Hinda lived. She and Sonia wandered around in the heat and glare hoping to bump into her. Palm trees, whitewashed houses, strands of riotous bougainvillea, Jews in shorts and sandals, Arabs driving mule carts and camels, British soldiers hanging from their jeeps—all the clamorous life of the port revolved around them in a dizzying montage. Finally they screwed up their courage and approached a woman pushing a baby carriage; Ruth asked her in Yiddish if she happened to know her cousin Hinda—a recent arrival from Poland with six children. Haifa’s Jewish community was not so large in those days. The woman not only knew Hinda but also offered to bring them to her house. Sonia thanked God that she would not be spending her first night in the Land sleeping on a park bench. Hinda welcomed them, gave them tea, and found them a room in a seaside hotel, since there was not an inch to spare in her own house. Sonia filled a few days with sightseeing, sunbathing, and writing letters to Rakov and Vilna. She had ascended to the Land; now she had to find a way to live there.
Rakov, September 4, 1932
Dear Sonia,
Yesterday we received your letter and we were very disappointed. We did not expect such a letter from you. You traveled the world, you saw various towns and many new things. You have been in Eretz Israel a week already, and yet you still were not in the mood to write and describe anything to us. Not a hair of joy in your letter. In every one else who arrives in the Eretz, one detects a spark of joy, but in your letters one does not see any eagerness or happiness and we regret that we had let you go. I understand that you feel depressed. I saw on the page of the letter that you tried to write to me in Polish but changed your mind. Next time write to me separately. Write about everything, good or bad.
Your letter has saddened us a great deal. How did you spend the time on Shabbat? Write about your impressions. Travel to meet with your acquaintances and take care of yourself. Father is also writing.
Your sister, Etl
My dear daughter Sonia!
According to your letter, nothing interesting is happening to you, while others who have come to the Land write with awe and elation. Don’t worry. Look at everything and see where you want to settle, whether a village or a town. If it does not work, don’t worry about expenses. You can spend a month there and then come back home. We will be glad to take you back.
You have not written to us how you felt being alone and where you were on Shabbat.
Do not lose your spirit.
Your loving father