Itel had entered her queenly phase. She was fifty-five years old in 1941, rich, polished, tireless, infallible. Her business had never been more successful, her appearance more striking, her manner more imposing. She dressed and groomed with exquisite taste. Her pearls were large and numerous. Her life was full. Her happiness apparently secure. Maiden Form, now one of the largest family businesses in the world, employed 1,450 people; yearly sales of bras and girdles topped 4.5 million. The Bayonne plant produced more bras than any other manufacturing facility anywhere on the globe. Bea, a graduate of Barnard College, had married a tall manly doctor two years earlier and was working her way up in the company. It pleased Itel no end that Maiden Form would remain under family control, a female dynasty, passed from mother to daughter. In regal fashion, Itel kept strict guard over her privacy while tossing the press glamorous tidbits about her tastes and temperament. She was a voracious reader; she and William were regulars at the theater and the opera. She loved to dance—at corporate bashes, the tuxedoed young execs jockeyed to partner her. Her travels, of course, had been trimmed back because of the war, but she still made the most of every hour on the road. “She could romance a customer out of his shoes and socks,” remarked one of the company’s rising young men. “In market week, she would float around the showrooms very gracefully. . . . She made it her business to say hello to every single person who came in.” Itel herself was a little more blunt about it: “I warm up sales. Then I let the salesman take the order.”
With a kingdom so large and prosperous, it was time to move to a palace. Itel and William bought an eighteen-room mansion on a private beach in a swanky enclave on Long Island’s North Shore. The previous owner, a wealthy Broadway impresario, had been terrified of a house fire, so there was lots of bright shiny tile everywhere. Salvatore, the Italian gardener, kept the grounds immaculate, tended the flower beds, and rolled the clay tennis court. A Norwegian cook named Anna prepared their meals. There was a ballroom, a library, a studio where William could sculpt, servants’ quarters, a boathouse. Every workday Vincent, the chauffeur, drove Itel and William into Manhattan. In the summer, William fished from his own jetty. The Rosenthals were not invited to the parties of their rich WASP neighbors, but they had plenty of society of their own. Though Itel had never been especially family minded, except with her own immediate family, she saw that every relative got at least one invitation to Bayville. The mansion on the Sound hosted many a sweet sixteen, wedding, birthday bash, boating weekend, and bridge evening.
Had she cared to, Itel could have stepped in as head of the family after Abraham’s death the previous year. She was the oldest, the richest, the most worldly, the most respected of the siblings. But the role of matriarch was not in her repertoire. She once told an interviewer who asked about her background that her father was “a wonderful man, intellectually gifted, wrapped up in his dogma. My mother was very short, a good business- woman.” So much for family heritage. Without a leader, without strong ties to the past, without Judaism to bind them together (only Sam and Ethel among the six siblings had an appetite for the faith of their father), the American family splintered. Itel and Harry grew closer, and Harry and William spent a lot of time together as well. Both were members of the Jewish Club—an uptown venue for chess, cards, cigar smoking, and high-minded lectures founded by well-heeled Eastern European Jewish men who had been excluded from the echt German Jewish Harmonie Club (Hyman joined later in the decade). Ethel and Sam, still upstairs-downstairs neighbors in the same tight little house in the Bronx, held the fort and kept the faith. They attended their father’s shul every Shabbat, their kitchens were kosher, they celebrated all the major holidays, but under their breath they both muttered about being second-class citizens. Ethel still shared the upstairs apartment with her mother and Shalom Tvi, who still slept on the foldout bed in the living room.
Two years had passed since Shalom Tvi had come to the United States to visit his brother. Now the brother was dead, Shalom Tvi’s country no longer existed, his family was in the hands of mass murderers, and he was a lost soul sojourning in a strange land.
Itel and William had never been frequent visitors to the Bronx, and with Abraham gone the treks to Andrews Avenue tapered off. Shalom Tvi couldn’t drive and wouldn’t travel on Shabbat so he rarely made it out to Bayville. Still, there was some contact between uncle and niece during these years. William had spent time with Shalom Tvi and his family during his visit to Rakov in 1937, and William’s name—and wealth—were invoked frequently in the letters Doba and Shalom Tvi exchanged during the early months of the war. Much hope was pinned on the Rosenthals’ money and power. They did in fact give generously and at one point consulted with an attorney about helping family members emigrate. But once the Nazis took Rakov and Vilna, what more could they do? What could anyone do? Itel and William kept abreast of the news in both English and Yiddish, so they saw the first accounts of the atrocities and mass murders that appeared in the Yiddish dailies that summer. They were regular New York Times readers as well, but what little the Times saw fit to publish about the Nazi killings was buried, downplayed, or treated with skepticism. Itel knew that her uncle’s family was in peril—they all knew—but they all kept silent about it. What was there to say? After the death of Lewis, Itel had locked the door on her inner life: anyone who dared even to knock was dismissed with silent rage. She and the rest of the family accorded Shalom Tvi the same severe respect. His situation was unbearable—why make it worse by intruding? “We never talked about the Nazis,” recalled one of Sam’s sons. “We never talked about the plight of Uncle’s family.” They might have imagined but they didn’t discuss the anguish he was pouring out in his letters to Sonia—the sleepless nights, the numbed bewilderment, the hollow prayers, the ray of hope he refused to extinguish. Shalom Tvi lived among them like the shadow of death. They loved him and they took care of him and they honored him and treated him with dignity, but they could not bear to look him in the eyes and ask him what was in his heart. They drove him to and from work. They took him to the shore in the summer so he could swim in the ocean. They gave him clothes and cast-off toys to send to Sonia. They read the news. But like the editors of the American papers, they couldn’t or wouldn’t face or believe the enormity of what was happening to his loved ones.
In Vilna, a few souls survived the hail of bullets and the cascade of corpses at Ponar and dragged themselves, bloody and wild eyed, back to the ghetto. When they told what had happened, no one believed. In New York in September of 1941, no one had even heard of Ponar.
At 8:50 in the morning on September 30, William’s brother Moe stopped what he was doing at the Maiden Form plant in Bayonne and bent his ears to a strange sound. Instead of the soothing motorized hum of needles punching thread through satin and lace, Moe heard the ceiling groan with the scrape of chairs and the clatter of shoes—thousands of shoes pounding on the floor above and thundering down the stairwell. He immediately switched on the public-address system in his office and began bellowing at the top of his voice: “I’M NOT GOING TO TELL YOU WHAT TO DO. MY PLEA IS FOR INFORMATION. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT.” But it was already too late. The factory’s 1,100 workers—nearly all of them female—were piling into the street, blocking traffic, laughing, shouting slogans, and singing for all they were worth: “Moe, Moe, a thousand times no.” “Gaiety and abandon rare in labor circles” filled the air outside the factory. The police were summoned to open a lane for traffic. But the women didn’t care. They were giddy, irrepressible. The fact that it was the eve of Yom Kippur made no difference. Most of them were Polish or Italian anyway. They had had enough—enough of management from Moe Rosenthal down, enough of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union that had ceased to represent their interests. They were going out on strike, 1,100 strong, against the Rosenthals, against ILGWU president David Dubinsky, against union dues that they paid in but never saw any benefit from, against the spiraling cost of living that chipped away at their wages, against the chintzy piecework pay scale and the long hours and piddling vacations. The strikers decided to sever ties with the ILGWU and start their own breakaway union, the Brassiere Workers Union. “[Ours] is a fight by 1,100 average Americans of Bayonne, against oppressive, out-of-town dictators,” declared Michael Vatalaro, president of the new ad hoc union.
“The strike is not authorized and is absolutely an outlaw strike, started by some Communists,” shot back ILGWU representative Israel Horowitz.
Outlaw or not, the strike shut down the Bayonne factory and spread to the Maiden Form plants at Jersey City and Perth Amboy. Five weeks passed before the two sides came together—a fiscal eternity that gouged a chasm into the company balance sheet, not to mention the household budgets of struggling workers. There had been strikes before at Maiden Form but never one so rancorous, so prolonged and difficult to settle. In the end, after the usual rounds of threats, bluffs, offers, huffy refusals, and a stormy meeting in Bayonne’s Knights of Columbus hall, at which seven hundred indignant Maiden Form employees booed Dubinsky off the stage, an agreement was reached. Clippers and operators working on the piecework scale received a guaranteed minimum increase of one dollar and fifty cents a week; those being paid by the hour got a raise of two dollars a week, with a third dollar dangled after four months “subject to negotiations and arbitration.”
Neither Itel’s nor William’s name appeared in any of the newspaper stories about the strike, but of course they were intimately involved in everything. Strikes always flummoxed them—as old Bundists they felt they should be immune from labor unrest, but somehow the clippers and operators didn’t see it that way. The breakaway Brassiere Workers Union issued a broadside laying out the sins of management in enraged uppercase type: “NO WAGE INCREASE AT MAIDEN FORM WAS EVER WON WITHOUT THE THREAT OF A STRIKE! AND FOR FOUR YEARS A GREAT MANY OF THE WORKERS HAVE HAD NO INCREASE AT ALL.” The Rosenthals may have voted for Eugene Debs, but when it came to their own company it was business as usual.
Itel and William had long since ceased to practice Judaism, but the fact that this agonizing five-week strike had started on the eve of Yom Kippur was not lost on them. No Jew, no matter how lapsed, passes the Day of Atonement without a twinge. Itel and William had both grown up in Orthodox households. As children they had attended services in the Rakov synagogue with their parents and many siblings. On Kol Nidre night, the eve of Yom Kippur, they had seen their fathers stand before the ark when the Torah scrolls were removed and raised before the congregation. They had listened to the cantor chant the ancient Aramaic text of the Kol Nidre that sounds like a sobbing, heartbreaking aria but is in fact a declaration of legal obligations.
And all the congregation of the children of Israel shall be forgiven, and the stranger that sojourneth among them; for all the people were in error. . . . O pardon the iniquities of this people, according to Thy abundant mercy, just as Thou forgave this people ever since they left Egypt.
That was how Yom Kippur began every year of Itel and William’s childhoods in Rakov, and that was how it began every year since the two of them had fled Rakov for America, one after the other, in 1905. But Yom Kippur of 1941 was different. There was no prayer or chanting on the last Day of Atonement in Rakov that year. There was iniquity but no mercy. Whether there was pardon for what happened in Rakov on October 1, 1941, only God knows.
In a family of visionaries, rebels, pioneers, paranoids, sages, sighers, egotists, and dreamers, Etl was a pragmatist. Before the match with Khost, her health had been poor, her tongue sharp, her temper short—but marriage and motherhood sweetened her disposition and strengthened her constitution. She had never moved away from the place where she was born, but she felt no urge to leave. After Shalom Tvi went to New York, she took charge of the house, the family’s money, and her ailing mother without a whisper of complaint. Even the war did not faze her. They still had their house, their bit of land. Revolution had toppled the hated tsar; the Kaiser’s army had come and gone during the last war; the Poles had come and gone after the war; the Soviets had come and gone during the present war. One day this war would end and the Nazis would go too. And when that day came, Etl and her family would still be in Rakov to observe the Sabbath, to bake matzo at Passover, to welcome the New Year joyously and atone for their sins on Yom Kippur.
Yom Kippur of 1941 put an end to such hopes. That Yom Kippur, Etl and her mother and daughters did not go to shul to murmur Hebrew prayers through the drowsy hungry afternoon and gossip with the other women. Instead they were hounded from their home and herded to the Rakov marketplace. A survivor named Uri Finkel left an account of what they were forced to endure that day:
On Yom Kippur of 1941 the fascist murderers drove the entire Jewish population of Rakov to the marketplace. They made them bring all the books, Jewish, Hebrew, religious and worldly, along with the sefer-toyres [Torah scrolls], and burned them. For an entire day the Jewish cultural treasures of the shtetl burned. The Jews had to stand over the bonfire, dance, jump and sing; those who could not do this were shot on the spot.
The fire and smoke from the burning were visible far from the shtetl. In one day no fewer than 16,000 books burned and a couple of hundred sefer-toyres, among them neviim [writings of the prophets] and megilles [scrolls with the Purim story]. . . . In the auto-da-fe of Jewish books were also burned two Jewish men and a Jewish woman, whom the fascists and the police threw into the fire.
Another survivor named Moshe Pogolensky wrote that “the Germans caught the son-in-law of Puchinsky and threw him in the flames, where he was burned alive before the eyes of the entire community. . . . The Jewish victims stood shaking as they watched. . . . The SS men ordered everyone to dance around the pyre and sing ‘Hatikva’ [“the hope”—the song became the Israeli national anthem]. This torture did not satisfy the Germans. As soon as the fire was extinguished they ordered everyone to give them their hidden money.”
After the burning and the stealing came the killing in earnest. The SS selected thirty-one sturdy-looking Jews from those assembled in the market and marched them to the Jewish cemetery—a five-minute walk past wooden houses and garden plots brimming with autumn’s bounty. Inside the cemetery walls they handed out shovels and ordered the thirty-one to dig a “huge, deep hole.” Meanwhile, those who remained in the marketplace were divided by gender into two groups. When word came that the hole was ready, 112 men were culled from the market and sent to the cemetery. The Germans and their Lithuanian accomplices were ready for them. The thirty-one diggers were ordered to lie flat and motionless on the ground: with their faces in the earth, they couldn’t see what was happening, but they heard the shots and the moans and the thud of bodies falling into the bottom of the pit and then falling on top of other bodies. When all 112 men were dead and piled in the pit, the thirty-one grave diggers were ordered to get up and take their shovels and cover the dead—their relatives, their neighbors, their friends, their enemies, their fellow Jews.
Sonia had been prophetic when she walked through this cemetery as a child and shuddered at its aura of “total destruction, poverty and the feeling of exile.”
At some point during that Yom Kippur, Beyle got sucked into the vortex of violence and disappeared forever. Accounts of what happened to her are cloudy, their provenance unknown. Years later, Sonia wrote that her mother was “murdered on Yom Kippur eve in 1941 in Rakov at the hands of her Christian neighbors,” but Sonia’s children think that Beyle may have died on Yom Kippur itself. The grandchildren speculate that some Rakov gentiles, under cover of the carnival of killing, targeted Jews they believed had money or merchandise to steal. It was common knowledge that Beyle had operated a leather shop and factory for years, so the neighbors must have assumed she had a cache of money or hides. Very likely they broke into the house and demanded all of her money and shot her or clubbed her or beat her to death when she was slow or unwilling to hand it over. Beyle was sixty-six years old, thin, frail, and suffering from a weak heart. It wouldn’t have taken much to kill her. Her body was never found. She has no grave. Her beloved husband in New York, her beloved daughter in Kfar Vitkin, her other beloved daughter in the Vilna ghetto had no idea she was dead. But Etl knew—very likely Etl watched and screamed with a screaming baby in her arms and a screaming toddler by her side while her mother was killed before her.
“It is very hard for me to describe the fear and the depression that spread within the remnants of the Jewish population that survived,” wrote Pogolensky. “Most of the men at that point were annihilated and the few who survived tried to hide. Almost every home suffered a victim and each and every family was in mourning. The words, ‘today it was them, tomorrow it will be the rest of us,’ were heard in every conversation. It was as if this sentence was constantly hovering over the community and the ambiance was bleaker than a most grave depression. No hope for survival or renewal spread to every home.”
At dawn the following day the survivors of the Yom Kippur massacre were ordered to leave their homes and move into a cluster of houses and batei-medroshim (prayer houses) around the synagogue compound: 950 Jews, most of them women and children and the elderly, crammed into nine homes and four prayer houses. This was the Rakov ghetto. Etl, holding seven-month-old Dobeleh in one arm and clutching the hand of five-year-old Mireleh with the other, took her place in the procession of prisoners. SS and Polish police lined the route and clubbed them along with batons. The walk from the Kaganovich family home to shul took ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Etl had come this way a thousand times before on Shabbat, on holidays, for bar mitzvahs and funerals. But on that day terror made the familiar strange. Etl walked with every nerve ending flayed, every instinct alert, offended, primed for action. Yet action was out of the question. She was a sensitive reed of a woman, thirty-four years old. She endured what she had to in silence so she could live for her daughters. Etl was devout so she may have prayed to God, silently, under her breath. Or maybe instead of praying she cursed God for taking her husband and her mother, for separating her from her father and sisters, for burdening her with two doomed helpless children.
—
October 26, 1941
Dear Sonia,
You write about sending letters through the Red Cross but this is in vain because where our family members are the Red Cross doesn’t serve them. We ask at the post office but they know nothing about it. They said to ask in another place. I asked them [the American relatives] to ask about it since this is New York and everything is so far and you have to drive and you need time to get to places. They promised me that they would ask about it.
I read here in the papers that they count all the refugees from Poland but there is nobody from our area. From Vilna there are three [refugees]. I am always looking in the papers to see what they write about it.
Your father,
Shalom Tvi Kaganovich
Sonia and Chaim had both made aliyah by ship, sailing from Constanta to Istanbul, around the blue-gray mountains that rim the spectacular Turkish coast and across the eastern basin of the Mediterranean to Palestine. Once the war began, these storied waters became a Jewish death pit like Ponar. Jews without papers were forbidden to cross from Europe to Palestine, and many who tried died in the attempt. The British adopted a strict policy of turning back, hunting down, and firing “at or into” ships carrying illegal immigrants, a policy they enforced with obsessive viciousness. Hundreds died on board unsanitary, unseaworthy, or sabotaged ships. Those who tried to disembark without proper documents were deported to the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, where they rotted in packed detention camps for the duration of the war.
In November 1940, the Patria, carrying 1,700 illegal Jewish immigrants, was blown up in Haifa harbor in a Haganah plot gone awry (the bomb that was intended to cripple the ship, and thus keep it in port, accidentally sank it). Two hundred fifty people were killed. The Sea of Marmara swallowed the 230 refugees on board the Salvator in December 1940. Some 770 Romanian Jews went down with the Sturma in the Black Sea in February 1942: the ship was in dire condition and dangerously overcrowded, but when it docked in Istanbul for two months, the Turks refused to permit entry to any of the passengers and the British would not bend to the pleas of the Jewish Agency to grant them Palestine visas. Finally, the Turks ordered the ship to be off and it sank in the Black Sea a mile off the Turkish coast. Seventy children died; 250 women drowned; one passenger survived. In the aftermath of the Sturma disaster, posters branded with the word MURDER and the photograph of the British high commissioner fluttered on the walls of Palestine’s cities: “Sir Harold MacMichael . . . wanted for the murder by drowning of 800 refugees on board the Sturma.”
British intransigence inflamed Jewish resistance. The first round of terrorist bombings and assassinations in Mandate Palestine were a direct result of the brutality and inhumanity that the British displayed toward Jewish refugees during the war.
Sonia read the newspaper, read her father’s letters, exchanged news with her fellow moshavniks, and went slowly out of her mind. The words hope and God and future appeared in nearly every letter her father wrote, but after the Patria and the Salvator and the Sturma, Sonia could hope no longer. Even if by some miracle Etl and Doba and their children could be extracted from the ghettos of Rakov and Vilna, the British would never let them set foot in Palestine. The war had snapped shut a perfect trap. The Jews of Palestine despised their British governors, but they were utterly dependent on British power. Without the British military, Rommel’s Panzer divisions would sweep in from the west and they would be prisoners of the Reich just like their relatives in Europe (an Einsatzgruppe unit was stationed in Greece, ready to descend on Palestine and begin liquidating the Jewish population when the time came). With the British in control, though, they were powerless to help their brethren trapped in Europe. Sonia and Chaim could do nothing but work their land, raise their children, and wait.
With every passing month of war, Sonia set her heart more fiercely on bringing her father to Palestine. But this too was maddeningly impossible.
The Nazi-appointed Judenrate—literally, “Jewish councils”—were not councils at all but instruments of more efficient oppression and murder. When the masters wanted to enumerate, rob, transport, or kill the slaves, the Judenrat was charged with making the numbers come out right—enough money, enough bodies. If they failed, they died first. If they succeeded, they died anyway—maybe a few hours later, a few weeks, a month, but they died nonetheless. So it was no honor and no guarantee of safety that Chaim’s brother Yishayahu was forced to serve on Volozhin’s Judenrat. The local SS probably tapped him because he had been a teacher.
The holy city of Volozhin was cursed with an especially sadistic bunch of Nazi occupiers. Their greatest pleasure was torturing little girls to death. When one Jewish girl was caught taking a bottle of milk from a Christian woman, the Nazis made her crawl up a hill on her hands and knees gathering potatoes until she was bloody and exhausted. “The tortures lasted for hours until her powers ceased, then they killed her,” recounted one witness. The Nazis grabbed two Jewish girls and marched them to the top of Priest’s Mountain along with two dogs. “On the mountain they shot the girls and beheaded the dogs to mix Jewish with animal blood. Those who passed away naturally were considered lucky.”
On October 28, 1941, Yishayahu and the other members of the Volozhin Judenrat were summoned by the local head of the Gestapo—a thug by the name of Moka. Moka told them to come up with a heap of boot soles—why or for what he did not specify. The Judenrat, figuring it was just another random act of Nazi madness, complied, but the madness did not end there. Moka returned to the Judenrat later that day with a couple of SS officers. This time he ordered the council members to assemble the entire population of the ghetto for “an interesting lecture” on work ethics. Again, Yishayahu and his fellow councilors spread the word through the ghetto. A survivor described what ensued: “When a large number had assembled, Moka sent most of them back to the ghetto. He imprisoned the rest in the cinema hall. From there he took groups of ten people at one time, conducted them to the neighboring sports ground and killed them.” Two hundred Volozhin residents died in this action, including Jacob Garber, the Judenrat head. After the shootings, Belarusian police were called in to despoil the bodies: “[They] stripped the clothes off the corpses, took away any rings and jewelry and pulled their gold teeth out of their mouths. Then a group of Jews was brought and ordered to bury the dead.” Yishayahu may have been among the victims—able-bodied men were targeted first and he was not yet forty. Like Beyle, like Shepseleh, like Khost, Yishayahu Kaganovich had no grave. His name appeared just once in the records of Volozhin as a member of the Judenrat, then vanished. He left a wife, a daughter, and a two-year-old son.
“Life in the Ghetto grew harder and harder,” wrote a survivor. “One day several SS men entered the house which served as a House of Prayer. They took a Torah Scroll, spread it out on the ground, made several dozen Jews lie down on the sheets and killed them.” Perhaps this was one of the scrolls inked by the soft skilled hand of the patriarch Shimon Dov HaKohen—grandfather of Yishayahu and Chaim; Doba, Etl, and Sonia; Itel, Harry, Sam, and Hyman.
Sam’s oldest daughter, Dorothy, had always been strange—shrill, irrational, obsessive, hypersensitive, suspicious of others. Today she would probably be diagnosed as borderline schizophrenic or bipolar, but in 1941 she was written off as peculiar. Her siblings joked that Dorothy had a radio with its own unique frequency, which explained why she knew about news events and weather conditions that no one else had ever heard of. When Dorothy emerged from her bedroom on the afternoon of Sunday, December 7, 1941, shouting that Japanese planes had bombed the U.S. battleship fleet in Pearl Harbor, no one in the family believed her. Where the hell was Pearl Harbor, anyway?
But for once, Dorothy’s radio had gotten it right. In the course of the surprise attack, four U.S. naval battleships were sunk, four others were damaged, 2,402 Americans died, and 1,282 were wounded. The following day Congress declared war on Japan, and the declaration of war on Germany came three days later.
Chance, fate, and ambition had divided the family of the scribe. War reunited them.