Etl, as the middle sister, five years younger than Doba, three years older than Sonia, had spent her life in the shadows. Doba was the acknowledged family beauty and her marriage had brought her all the pleasures and diversions of Vilna. Sonia, the family rebel, was a pioneer in the Land, the mother of sabras! Etl was the sister who had never left home. Pinched, irritable, sharp-tongued, she had married late after a score of failed matches; she was pushing thirty by the time her first child was born; she was thin and sickly and prone to digestive trouble. While Doba browsed the fashionable shops of Vilna and Sonia made the desert bloom, Etl toiled away through the years in Rakov at the family leather business, kept house for her elderly mother, nursed sick nephews, bent over a sewing machine in the failing light of dusk, and harbored grudges against spoiled relatives.
But Etl came into her own during the war. Although Khost had been pressed into the Polish army soon after the German invasion, his service was brief and relatively painless. Other fellows from Rakov had disappeared without a trace—killed, captured by the Germans, imprisoned in Soviet labor camps, never to be heard from again. But Khost had come home unscathed after a few weeks and resumed his teaching post in the Rakov school. When the Red Army marched into Rakov at the end of September 1939, the local Communists welcomed them as liberators, and all others held their breath to see what would happen. Teachers like Khost soon exhaled. Factories, banks, and large estates were nationalized or confiscated; in the market, shops and stalls were quickly depleted of their merchandise and then closed down as government-controlled shops took over; anyone branded a capitalist, industrialist, or speculator was arrested and sent to Siberia. But the schools remained open; Jewish teachers were welcomed, even promoted; Jewish students who showed promise had a chance of winning a place in a Soviet university, with no ghetto bench.
Young Jews and the Jewish “working intelligentsia” were “really happy,” wrote one contemporary, “as if awakened to a new life. New and unheard-of opportunities for work were opened up before them.” The Russians were no angels and they wasted no time in outlawing Rakov’s Jewish institutions—the Zionist youth groups, the Bund, the Jewish community council (kehilla), even the mikveh (ritual bath). The faithful trembled when word came that the revered Volozhin yeshiva had been converted into a cheap restaurant where gentiles gathered to wash down greasy pork with shots of vodka (supposedly the ghosts of yeshiva boys could be heard singing and praying within the walls at night). This was a tragedy. But at least pious Jews could still go to shul to pray and hope, even if, under the Big Ones, their prayers “had lost their Jewish essence and flavor.” As long as a Jew wasn’t too rich, too loud, too critical of Stalin, too religious, too inquisitive, too flashy, too stubborn, or too fastidious to grease the palms of Soviet officials, he could live and be well under the new regime. Khost qualified on all counts. Every month he brought home a good paycheck, and whatever Beyle needed for the household expenses, he gave. The Rakov family had enough left over to send money to Doba and Shepseleh. Despite the devaluation of the zloty and the disastrous sale of the family leather business in Rakov, they were fine. More than fine. They still had their garden of summer vegetables. They could still get milk and eggs and every now and then a chicken. No one went hungry. They listened to the stories of the refugees who had fled the Germans and felt blessed. “For most people, life appeared normal and safe,” a shtetl Jew said of the Soviet period. “Nobody thought about war.”
Etl felt blessed with her daughter too. Nearly four years old, Mireleh had turned from a pink-cheeked, ringleted cherub into a funny, chatty, lanky little girl. Her grandmother swooned whenever the child opened her mouth. “My only comfort is Mireleh,” Beyle wrote to Shalom Tvi. “She will be a wonder girl, with her brains and the excellent way she speaks. I love how she sings and dances. She is tall and beautiful and it is a pleasure to talk to her.” Etl risked the evil eye by singing her own child’s praises. She wrote Sonia proudly that Mireleh was now old enough to wear trousers and run around all day on her long legs. Mireleh still remembered her cousin Leahleh in Palestine, or said she did, even though nearly two years had passed since Sonia’s visit. Like Doba, Etl spoke of moving to the Land one day, but for her it was a vague, rosy dream born of longing, not desperation. Never shy about complaining, Etl evidently had nothing to complain about in the spring of 1940. Her family had the proper flour to make matzo for Passover. Thanks to Khost, they had cash to pay for food in the market, and thanks to Shalom Tvi they had a few leather hides left over from the sale of the business to barter for vegetables and chickens with the peasants. It pained Etl that her parents were separated by the war and that another visit from Sonia was out of the question, but otherwise life was good—better in some ways than before the war, because now she and her husband were the family anchor. “We need nothing,” she wrote in every letter to her father and Sonia.
Whatever marital trouble there had been between Etl and Khost was long past. They were thinking about having another child.
At the start of June, Shalom Tvi went to talk to a man in New York about the logistics of traveling from the United States to Palestine. The man evidently had an official role with a Jewish immigration agency. After the meeting, Shalom Tvi went back to the Bronx apartment and wrote in great exhilaration to Sonia. All he needed was proof that he had a thousand pounds (Palestinian pounds, which had a slightly different value from British pounds) to be issued an immigration certificate as a “capitalist,” thus bypassing the 1939 white paper quota. “It is so easy after all,” he wrote. “I don’t understand why I had been afraid before. I felt great happiness in my heart, that it will be easy to come to you.” The only blot on his joy was that the family in Rakov and Vilna could not come too—“the times do not allow this. The situation is bad with mother and it will be difficult to bring them [to Palestine] from there. They say that they do not let people leave.”
He mentioned the certificate and the thousand pounds in a subsequent letter, but with less excitement and more uncertainty, and then he lost his nerve. “You ask me in your own name and in the names of mother and Doba why I am not arranging a certificate to come to you,” he wrote Sonia later in June. “The reason is that we cannot anticipate what will happen there, so I have decided that I should not move anywhere until there is peace in the world, until God has mercy on us and on all of Israel.” Apparently, the New York relatives had talked him out of it: the crossing would be too perilous, they said, the situation in Palestine was uncertain, better to play it safe and stay put in a nation at peace. Shalom Tvi remained in the Bronx, mourning his brother and packing boxes at his brother’s business. Sonia toiled on the farm at Kfar Vitkin with Chaim and their two children. Doba tore her hair out in Vilna. Shepseleh found a bit of merchandise to trade (or sell on the black market), while gratefully accepting gifts of twenty-five, fifty, sometimes one hundred dollars from the family. Etl and Khost looked forward to the end of the school year and the long lingering days of summer.
The Big Ones make plans that are impossible for our heads to grasp. God knows how this will end.
In the same month, the Big Ones made plans for the Baltic states. Alarmed by the Nazi conquest of most of Western Europe, the Soviet Union decided to raise its geopolitical profile by absorbing Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The pace of regime change was particularly dizzying for Vilna: since September 1939, the city had been Polish, Soviet, Lithuanian, and now, as of June 1940, Soviet once more. The Big Ones lost no time in dismantling Vilna’s institutions and economy and recasting them in the Soviet mold: large companies, banks, and factories were nationalized; capitalists were arrested and deported; “class enemies” were hounded out; and the leadership of any organization considered a threat to the Soviet Union was eliminated. Jews were tolerated as individuals, but because the Soviets aimed to erase Jewish identity and assimilate Jews into the Stalinist masses, every pillar of Jewish cultural and political life was toppled. The city’s once thriving Zionist groups, religious societies, the Bund, and the Yiddish newspapers were immediately banned. Centuries of Jewish culture, consciousness, and nationalism disappeared or went underground. Overnight, the Jerusalem of Lithuania was stripped of its aura of holiness.
For Doba and Shepseleh the Soviet takeover was a crisis, not a catastrophe. Shalom Tvi quit sending money from America for fear that the Bolsheviks would appropriate it—but under the new regime, there was less need for handouts. Since Shepseleh was out of work anyway, the economic shake-up hardly made a difference. Neither he nor Doba was especially religious or politically involved, so the shutdown of Jewish institutions didn’t affect them much. A Yiddish newspaper soon began to appear again, though it adhered to a strict Communist line. A Jewish labor leader became the city’s vice mayor. The Joint was permitted to continue distributing charity to refugees. The city’s synagogues remained open, though attendance fell off dramatically. Doba, perhaps fearing that her letters would be read by the authorities, was careful not to criticize the new regime. But in fact, the change of government had its advantages. Anyone who had been a resident in Vilna on September 1, 1939, automatically became a Soviet citizen, which meant that Doba and Shepseleh were now citizens of the same nation as Beyle, Etl, and Khost. For the first time since the war broke out, the two branches of the family could visit each other. “I miss everyone like a little girl,” Doba wrote Sonia. “Imagine my joy when I can finally see them again. Etl writes that mother has aged and weakened from yearning.”
It was hot and eerily tranquil that summer in Rakov. When school let out, Etl and Khost took Mireleh for walks in the woods and they bathed in the lake. At the end of June, Etl discovered that she was pregnant, though she kept it a secret for the time being. Beyle, suffering in the heat, pined over her scorched garden. Ready-made bread had disappeared from the stores, so Beyle had to send grain to the mill to be ground and baked in an oven fueled by wood that she carried herself. Though milk and meat were scarce, no one went hungry. Etl refused all of her father’s offers of money, insisting they needed nothing. “What a wonderful country,” Shalom Tvi wrote sarcastically of Sovietized Poland. “They have nothing but they need nothing.”
As summer wore on, the pace of political arrests by the NKVD (the Soviet security police) accelerated. Bundists and Trotskyites were purged. Zionist leaders were given an eight-year jail sentence. “Nonproductive elements” disappeared from the shtetlach and the cities. Had the family held on to the leather business, they might have been at risk, but NKVD agents were not interested in an old woman and a young mother supported by a schoolteacher. Most of the family’s money had evaporated when the Zloty was abolished on January 1, 1940, a fate they shared with many. As one journalist wrote, “Within an hour, in one stroke everybody became poor: he who owned a million Zloty and he whose entire property did not exceed a few Zloty.” Still, most found a way to get by with a side job, a bit of foreign currency, some dabbling in the black market, and bartering with local peasants. The Rakov family was lucky compared with their cousins in Volozhin. Chaim’s brother Yishayahu and his brother-in-law, Meir Finger, lost their imported fruit business after the Soviet takeover and both of them remained out of work for months. Yishayahu, down to his last coins, still hoped to move to Palestine. Chaim’s sister Chana fared no better. The Soviets appropriated her house in Volozhin and subdivided it: Chana and her family were left with one small room and the kitchen, and were forced to pay rent for the privilege. Grumbling about it was ill-advised—NKVD agents were only too happy to round up malcontents and ship them off to Siberia.
The Volozhin relatives also kept their mouths shut when the town’s new chief Soviet administrator ordered that the central marketplace be made over into a “people’s park.” This was part of an official Soviet policy of razing the old commercial hearts of the shtetlach and moving businesses into large state-owned buildings. Workmen got busy demolishing the shops, pulling up the paving stones, planting trees and flower beds, and installing benches. One day an enormous crate arrived from the Soviet Union containing the pieces of a statue. A local Jew named Mendl Goldshmid described what happened:
We assembled the pieces, and a tall statue grew up. Stalin wearing a military dress dominated the square, extending his hand westward. But a grave problem yet arose. Close to the statue stood a huge Catholic cast iron cross. The communist secular authorities considered the presence of a cross beside the “Sun of the Nations” as an unbelievable sacrilege. They decided to demolish the cross. On a Saturday evening a unit of soldiers encircled the site. A demolition charge was set, and the cross was blown up. I was ordered to take away the broken fragments.
The Gentiles accused me of being responsible for the destruction of the holy cross. They waited for the revenge time.
Under the Soviets, everything was political. When the new school year began in September, Khost was appointed principal. With the promotion, however, came constant scrutiny by NKVD agents for “ideological fidelity.” Schools were the ideal environment for political indoctrination, and the pressure on Khost to enforce the party line was enormous. If any teacher deviated, Khost would be held accountable. Hebrew was banned and Yiddish took its place; classics of (politically acceptable) Yiddish literature could be taught, but anything that promoted religion or the religious impulse had to be rigorously excluded from the curriculum. Jewish history, any mention of the Bible, and anything that smacked of Jewish nationalism were banned. (In Volozhin, a friend of Yishayahu quit teaching in protest when Yiddish was substituted for Hebrew at the Tarbut school.) The Jewish library was emptied of objectionable books—that is, most of its contents. Khost was ordered to introduce special classes on Marxism and Leninism into the curriculum; he traded his tailored suits for coarse open-necked shirts and high boots (de rigueur under the Soviets); he had to work on Shabbat. His mother-in-law still attended shul, but it would have been politically risky for the school principal to be seen wearing a yarmulke. Khost was aware that Mireleh would grow up with little or no Jewish education, and perhaps only the vestige of a Jewish identity. But that was a price he and Etl were willing to pay. The alternative was the Nazis.
Vilna was still crowded with refugees, but otherwise life had improved so much under the Soviets that Doba quit raging about escape and shifted the lens of her anxiety to her parents. “Father is suffering,” she wrote Sonia in October. “He is alone, broken and has to live in the same house with good Gishe Sore. He sounds sad and worried. He always asks: When will I see you children? I cry and wonder when mother and father will be together again. She wrote to me that she misses father with every step she takes.” Doba let drop in the same letter that Shepseleh was finally working and bringing home four hundred litai (the Lithuanian currency) a month.
By the start of the new year, Chaim’s brother and brother-in-law had found work in Volozhin as well. It didn’t hurt that Kestlikh, the chief administrator who had ordered the marketplace cleared for the people’s park, was himself a Jew. There was no question that Jews were rising under the new regime. Jewish school principals, Jewish mayors, Jewish officers commanding squads in the Red Army, Jews getting jobs while Poles were being packed off to Siberia. Where would it end? the local gentiles muttered through gritted teeth.
—
Vilna, January 20, 1941
Dear Sonia,
I have good news for you. A dear guest has arrived here—Mother!—may she stay well. I have not dared to imagine that this would happen. They kept promising to come but only now have the authorities allowed them. At long last we see each other. Mother has aged since we had last seen her. Soninka, I cannot tell you how glad I was to see her.
Mother has already been with us for two weeks, and I want her to stay a few more weeks, until after the Bar Mitzvah of Shimonkeh on February 11. But Mother does not want to stay that long because Etl is due to give birth. She suggests that she would stay if Etl and Mireleh could be persuaded to come here to Vilna and Etl could give birth here. I would be so happy finally to see them all.
Love, Doba
Beyle remained with Doba and Shepseleh and the boys for a month—long enough to celebrate Shimonkeh’s bar mitzvah on February 11, 1941. “It was a fabulous visit and I enjoyed it very much,” she wrote her husband. “Doba came with Shimonkeh to meet me at the train station, and we both cried from happiness.” She couldn’t stop marveling over her grandsons. Velveleh was a model child, sensitive, artistic; he played the violin, he drew beautifully, his teacher praised him as the best student in class. Shimonkeh, thin, pale, and serious, was growing up to be a true Jewish scholar. He chanted his haftarah portion perfectly at his bar mitzvah service; he dutifully laid tefillin and prayed every day. Doba was proud to see her firstborn become a man, but she couldn’t help worrying about what kind of future he would have under the godless new regime. When the talk turned to politics, they spoke in code and euphemisms. Hitler was referred to as Haman, the evil Persian councilor in the Book of Esther who plotted to kill the Jews, or “your stepfather.” Do you think your stepfather will try to invade Palestine? they asked when discussing the news of Rommel’s German Afrika Korps massing against the British in North Africa. They hoped the boys did not understand. Doba and Beyle shed many tears over the interminable separation from Shalom Tvi. As always they talked about moving to Palestine or New York, or joining the families together in Rakov. But it was just talk and they knew it. The Big Ones weren’t letting people out, and the English and the Americans weren’t letting people in. After the war, after the war, they said again and again. God willing Haman would be defeated, his bones broken and scattered.
Beyle returned to Rakov in the middle of February. Etl had her baby two weeks later—another girl, born at home on March 1, 1941. The birth was easy, the baby was healthy, Etl was up and around in a couple of weeks. They agonized over the name and finally chose Doba Beyle, honoring sister, mother, and grandmother.
Their letters moved (slowly) around a three-noded circuit through winter and into the spring. It took weeks, sometimes months, for a letter to arrive, but that didn’t deter them from pouring out their hearts to each other. They were a close, anxious, communicative family. The same letter sometimes made the complete circuit so that those in Vilna, Rakov, Kfar Vitkin, and New York could all enjoy it.
Etl chastised Sonia for failing to send any greetings to Khost in her last letter: “I wonder about it and am angry. Absolutely unpleasant to receive such a letter. Possibly you wrote without thinking. Next time think about it. Khost has said nothing, but it was very strange.”
But by the next letter, Etl had forgotten all about it. Five days before Passover, she snatched a few minutes to write to Sonia about the children and their preparations for the holiday: “Doba’leh [five weeks old] develops well and it seems that she will be a pretty girl. She already knows how to scream. Mireleh is very happy with her sister, and watches that no one will take her. On Monday night it will be Pessach Eve. We have already baked matzot and we have good chickens. The weather is poor, cold and wet.”
Beyle added her own brief message at the end. She was suffering from a heart condition and was unable to get the fresh fruit that her doctor had prescribed. Her spirits were low; the weather depressed her; she could barely summon the strength to write even a few lines: “Sonikah, be careful about your health. I did not have enough wisdom to guard my health, and now I am sorry. I sit at home and can do nothing and the situation is difficult. When father was with me, he watched over me but those were different times. That is how it is. Everything is from God and from providence. I am asking God to make the weather warmer and then I will feel better. I want to unite with father and come to you, as we had planned. Yours, Mother.”
That letter was dated April 7, 1941.
On May 30, 1941, Doba sent Sonia a postcard from Vilna:
I want to go home for a few days and bring mother.
Have you heard from father? Mercy on him.
So alone in his old age. May there be peace and then
we could see each other.
And then the circuit was broken.
The Nazis entered Vilna on June 24, Volozhin on June 25, and Rakov on June 26. There were no more letters from Europe after that.