Neighbors in Camp Klooga often ask me
Why do you write in such hard times?—
Why and for whom? . . .
. . . For we won’t live to see it anyway.
I know I am condemned and awaiting my turn,
Although deep inside me burrows a hope for a miracle.
Drunk on the pen trembling in my hand,
I record everything for future generations:
A day will come when someone will find
The leaves of horror I write and record.
People will tear their hair in anguish,
Eyes will plunge into the sky
Unwilling to believe the horror of our times.
—HERMAN KRUK
The truth came slowly and in fragments.
One of the relatives in New York remembers a group from Rakov coming to the house on Andrews Avenue with a list of names of landsmen who had been killed and asking Shalom Tvi whether he could identify any of them. But there is no mention of this visit in the letters Shalom Tvi wrote faithfully, fanatically to Sonia every week in 1944 and 1945. From these letters it is clear that he never received definitive confirmation of the deaths, the synagogue fire, the actions at Volozhin, the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto, the pyres at Klooga in which his grandson perished. In the absence of news, he was left alone to conclude the worst.
A relative in the Bronx, when asked many years later how Shalom Tvi dealt with his gaping loss and uncertainty, replied, “He took it with a grain of salt.”
This was a façade. He did not take any of it with a grain of salt.
On July 6, 1945, two months after Hitler committed suicide (April 30, 1945) and the Germans surrendered to the Allies (May 8, 1945), Shalom Tvi wrote Sonia and Chaim begging them to secure a certificate that would allow him to immigrate to Palestine:
Dear Children, try any way with those who manage the certificate affairs, don’t leave them in peace. Apply every day and tell them about my tragedy and about what has happened to our family. Here in America I have also lost everyone [Gishe Sore, his sister-in-law, had died on February 16, 1945; his sister Leah Golda, Rose’s mother, died on June 19]. My dear sister had been my only consolation. I had spent all the Shabbats and holidays with her, and now I am left by myself. I don’t even have a person to whom I can open my heart and cry. Dear children, make an effort for me and knock on all the doors in every possible place and maybe you will succeed in stirring some feelings of pity. I am sitting here on embers.
It had been four years since Sonia received a letter postmarked Rakov. The envelope trembled in her hand. The handwriting was unfamiliar. The name of the sender—Hillel Eidelman—rang a faint bell. The letter was dated June 23, 1945—and given how erratic the mail was in those days, it probably arrived at Kfar Vitkin at around the same time as her father’s letter of July 6.
Our fate is very bad.
None of us survived, no one from your family or from ours. I’m as alone as a solitary stone. . . . I am writing to tell you that the entire village was burned with everyone burned alive. . . . [They] were pushed into the synagogue, kerosene poured in there, then hand grenades thrown in and burned them. Mercy on them! There were mothers with their children there. May God preserve the martyrs of Rakov. They didn’t stop until everyone was burned up. Now we see nothing more than little pieces here and there.
Write to me. I would continue my letter but I’m sitting here, crying, with trembling hands. It is very difficult to write you such news.
So now Sonia—and Shalom Tvi—knew the truth, at least about the Rakov family.
On July 31, 1945, ten months after her nephew Shimon was shot and burned at Klooga, Sonia gave birth to her third child—another son. She and Chaim named the child Shimon.
On August 23, Shalom Tvi wrote Sonia to congratulate her on the birth of the son. “I think that [the new baby] will truly be fortunate, because right after his birth I received the certificate [for entry to Palestine]. The child has brought you luck, and with the help of God our good luck will also begin and I shall deserve to see you.” He promised to bring many beautiful presents with him when he came, though the date of his departure could not be fixed until he received a new Polish passport, which could not happen until Poland’s new government opened its consulate in New York. More red tape. More waiting.
At the end of the letter he mentioned in passing that a big parade had filled the streets of Manhattan after the news of the Japanese surrender was broadcast on August 14.
Shalom Tvi never forgot the old man with the cane who had blessed him when he was a little child in Volozhin. “May you have light your entire life,” the old man had said after Shalom Tvi led him home by the light of his lantern one autumn night. “May you have light throughout your journey.” Shalom Tvi told Sonia that he always believed that this blessing spared his life.
The Polish passport was finally issued on October 28, 1946. Shalom Tvi booked the first available passage on board the SS Marine Carp and sailed out of New York. On the Application for Reentry Permit filed with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, he indicated that his reason for going abroad was to visit family, that he intended to be absent from the States for “less than one year,” and that his temporary address overseas would be Kfar Vitkin, Palestine. Only the last of these assertions was strictly true.
Shalom Tvi arrived at Haifa harbor on February 2, 1947, a tumultuous time in the Land. The Jews in Palestine, enraged by Britain’s continued adherence to a strict immigration quota and their punitive treatment of illegal Jewish immigrants, were embarked on a terrorist campaign aimed at forcing the British out. When the Zionist paramilitary group Irgun blew up a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946, the British acknowledged that their continued presence was untenable. The newly formed United Nations was enlisted to resolve the matter. On the night of November 29, 1947, Sonia, Chaim, Shalom Tvi, and the children gathered around the radio that Shalom Tvi had brought with him from New York. They were listening to the broadcast of the United Nations General Assembly vote on Resolution 181, which called for the end of the British Mandate and the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. Shimon was only two years old, but he heard the story repeated so many times that it became a memory of his own. When the last vote was cast and the numbers were tallied—thirty-three nations in favor, thirteen opposed, ten abstentions (including the British)—Kfar Vitkin went crazy. “We ran in our pajamas to the moshav center,” recalls Shimon, “and we all danced together. Everyone was banging pot lids together. They opened the market and gave sweets to the children. It was a night of joy.” Shimon also remembers that the moshavniks went to the British army base near Kfar Vitkin and shouted to the illegal immigrants detained there that they were now free.
The joy ended in violence. On the official termination of the British Mandate, on May 15, 1948, the Arab states mounted a full-scale war aimed at driving the Jews from the region. The fighting was particularly bitter around Jerusalem. Arab forces overran the Jewish quarter in the Old City in the first days of the war. On May 28, the Old City’s Jewish community surrendered and some 1,500 Jewish residents were evacuated. Jewish West Jerusalem was surrounded and virtually cut off. In desperation Israeli forces opened a bypass route, dubbed Burma Road, to supply the besieged residents. Chaim, an experienced truck driver, was pressed into service to drive an armored supply truck stocked with food and medicine. When the fighting was intense, he spent the night—or several nights—in West Jerusalem. Eight Israelis died on Burma Road in a Jordanian attack on June 8. Sonia was frantic whenever Chaim stayed over. Shimon remembers that one time after an agonizing absence, his father drove the truck back to Kfar Vitkin with ice cream for the children, but it had all melted by the time he arrived.
In the course of the war, hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled their villages in Israeli territory, settling in miserable refugee camps that still exist today. The Arabs who had remained at Wadi al-Hawarith, the Bedouin farmlands from which Kfar Vitkin had been carved in 1929, abandoned their homes—the village was “ethnically cleansed,” as the Palestinians put it—after May 15, 1948. In 1998, an estimated 15,672 refugees traced their ancestry to Wadi al-Hawarith—and the figure is certainly far larger now. In six months of fighting, the Israelis repulsed attacks from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq and then pushed into territory beyond the boundaries drawn by the UN partition plan of 1947. A broad swath in the center of the country, from the Galilee south to Beersheba, along with a chunk of the western Negev was now part of the State of Israel. On January 7, 1949, a cease-fire went into effect that both sides, finally, observed. A state of “neither war nor peace” ensued. Sixty years later this remains more or less the status quo in the region. Within a year of the cease-fire, the Jewish population of Israel almost doubled, from six hundred thousand to 1 million.
For Sonia and Chaim, 1949 was memorable as the year when Shimon, then four, was kicked in the head by a horse. The injuries to his face and nose were serious enough to keep him in the hospital for six months. When word reached the family in the States, they put together a huge box of toys and art supplies. “We were very poor in those days,” recalls Shimon. “Everyone at Kfar Vitkin was struggling. When that box arrived, we were the only kids in Kfar Vitkin with toys. All the kids of the moshav came to see the miracle of the toys! I was King Creole.”
Maiden Form launched its famous Dream Campaign that same year. Itel had always been aggressive and adventurous about advertising, but even she hesitated before signing off on this new and risqué series of print ads crafted by Mary Fillius at the Weintraub ad agency. The ads depicted beautiful young women doing fun, zany, strenuous, absurd, or ordinary things out in public places while clad from the waist up in nothing but their Maidenform (as the company now styled itself) bras. The kickoff ad featured a glamorous beauty in biceps-length black gloves, a chic black hat, billowing white satiny skirt, lace-up sandals, and, slung between her willowy bare midriff and her delicate bare shoulders, a very pointy satin Allo-Ette bra. She leans on a table of gewgaws in some elegant boutique and gazes at herself rapturously in a hand mirror. The copy line reads simply: “I dreamed I went shopping in my Maidenform bra.” Subsequent Maidenform dreamers included a female Tarzan (“I dreamed I had a swinging time . . .”), gunslinger (“I dreamed I was WANTED . . .”), firefighter (“I dreamed I went to blazes . . .”), political candidate (“I dreamed I won the election . . .”), and housepainter (“I dreamed I painted the town red . . .”).
It was one of the most celebrated, successful, and (briefly) scandalous ad campaigns in marketing history. The likes of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon were brought in to do the photography. The tagline was so catchy that Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong referenced it in their song “Dardanella” (“She looks so dreamy in her Maidenform bra”). Prudes tutted that the ads were obscene, but American women—amused, flattered, defiant, newly assertive, flush with cash, and hip to the Freudian suggestiveness—voted with their pocketbooks. Fortune reported in 1950 that Maidenform sales now stood at 14 million dollars a year, accounting for a tenth of all bras sold in the United States.
Itel and William could afford to be generous. In December 1949, they brought over a relative named Zelig Kost, who had been living at the Foehrenwald displaced-persons camp near Munich since the end of the war. Foehrenwald, one of the largest and longest-lasting DP camps in Europe, housed between three and five thousand Jewish survivors from 1945 to 1957. Zelig Kost, a relative on Sarah’s side, had a particularly moving story. A strapping, good-looking man—“movie-star handsome,” according to females in the family—Zelig had run a dairy shop in Ivenets (a shtetl near Rakov) before the war. He was married and the father of a daughter named Esther. When the Nazis seized eastern Poland in 1941, Zelig’s family was imprisoned in the Nowogrod ghetto but he managed to escape. He went to look for some kind of hiding place for the family, but when he returned, he discovered that in his absence the ghetto had been liquidated, his wife and baby daughter shot and burned. Zelig fled into the woods and joined a group of partisans. For the duration of the war, he took part in sabotage attacks on Nazi convoys and rail shipments. Zelig and his comrades stayed alive by making raids on local villages: they demanded food at gunpoint; peasants who refused were shot.
Zelig went to Rakov after it was liberated in the summer of 1944. He left this account of what remained:
The edge of Vilna Street stayed intact. There I found Hillel Eidelman [who had written to Sonia describing Rakov’s destruction] with a few other wretched, miserable fellows who had reached the shtetl ahead of me. Their appearance, and the sight of the destruction, filled my heart with depressing sadness. A few minutes passed, and none of us uttered a word. We just sat on the ground mourning silently and let our tears flow uninterrupted.
We walked together to the market square. Here was the town’s center and its commercial hub. Generations upon generations had made their livelihood here. We stood in the middle of the market square. For a second we forgot everything and wondered why was it dead silent here? For a short moment we imagined that the stores and the shops would be opened soon, that the Gentiles would jam the place with their wagons and then it would be filled with the hustle-bustle of a market place. . . . And as much as the years in the forests had hardened us we could not hold back our tears.
We reached the “Shul-Hoif” and were jolted. Here stood the synagogues—the “Old” and the “New.” Their walls absorbed the prayers of generations of Jews and their pleas to God in Heaven. Within their walls Jews poured their tears during Fast Days and during the Days of Awe. . . . Now—a mountain of ashes. We were standing among the ruins of this sacred place where there was no sign of all those who filled it with their prayers and with their studies of God’s Torah. This was the site of the slaughter! Its air still carried the horrifying screams and moaning of those who had been led to their death. Here was the valley of manslaughter. Here was the last act of the bloody tragedy of the Jews of Rakov. Some charred bones could still be seen over here, and over there—the remains of a child’s shoe, which, for some reason, was not consumed by the fire and which did not rot during the two years that had passed since that day. We stood silently, remembering the souls of our saintly dear ones. I turned and faced East, and said “Kaddish” in memory of my sister and her family, who died here with the rest of the martyrs of our town.
Homeless and despairing, Zelig made his way to Foehrenwald. There he met and married a fellow partisan named Shoshanna Buckerman, a dressmaker from the Belarusian shtetl of Horod’k.
In December 1949, Zelig and Shoshanna set sail for New York on board the General Stuart. On the ship’s manifest, they listed their destination in the United States as Quanacut Drive, Bayville, New York—Itel and William’s Long Island mansion. Itel got them both hired at Maidenform and the couple moved to Bayonne, New Jersey, and had a daughter named Estelle.
“They were not happy people,” Estelle said recently. “Dad was a bright and caring man, but he did not have much left after the war. He suffered from depression all his life and had numerous electric shock treatments. He worked as a mechanic on the sewing machines at Maidenform—it was just a job, not what he wanted to do with his life. There were many days when he could not get out of bed. The culture of my household was very secretive. My mother did not talk at all about the war—she was very jealous of dad’s first wife and child whom he loved a great deal. He was a broken man.”
Captain Leonard E. Cohn returned from the war with a Bronze Star Medal awarded for “meritorious achievement” in North Africa. Len and all of his American cousins in uniform survived the war unharmed. They had fought and won the good war; they had brought down Hitler; their comrades had liberated the death camps—but none of them thought or talked much about the connection between their military service and the fate of their cousins in Vilna, Rakov, and Volozhin. “I never knew they were killed,” said Sol Rubenstein, Leah Golda’s son and Doba and Etl’s first cousin, who was stationed in the Aleutian Islands with the navy. “We had no idea.”
In the memoir he self-published in the 1960s, Hyman includes one paragraph about Shalom Tvi and one sentence about the death of his family: “His family perished when the town Synagogue, in which they were herded was sealed, and set afire.” The use of the passive voice is telling. We never talked about. We never knew. It never came up. No one mentioned it. Every American cousin said more or less the same thing when asked about the fate of their relatives. “I never knew we had relatives who died in concentration camps,” one cousin remarked—but of the seventeen family members who perished in the Shoah, only two likely died in a gas chamber. The others were shot over pits, lined up and machine-gunned, murdered by gentile neighbors, burned alive, worked almost to death, and then shot and incinerated. “Auschwitz,” writes Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killings, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning of the past still to come.”
But the two surviving branches of the family grew closer. Thanks to the many modern appliances that the American family had given Shalom Tvi to take to Kfar Vitkin, Sonia and Chaim were doing better. Benny, their fourth child, was born in February 1951. Leah turned sixteen that year; Areleh—now called Arik—was eleven. Shimon, who was six, shared a room with his grandfather. “He was always very good with his hands,” Shimon recalls of Shalom Tvi. “Always fixing things. He didn’t talk much and he didn’t eat much. He loved to go to the beach—he carried a black umbrella when he walked there. He was always trying to find ways to help Sonia around the house.” Shalom Tvi prayed daily at the synagogue across the street from their house. Sonia was also devout. “It was her way of honoring her father and her dead mother and the relatives killed in the Holocaust,” says Shimon.
In 1952, Itel and William bought a Ferguson twenty-eight-horsepower kerosene-fueled tractor and had it sent to Kfar Vitkin. Shimon recalls proudly, “It was something very special. We had the second tractor in the moshav—everyone else was still using horses.” Chaim built a shed to house it next to the poultry incubator. Itel and William also contributed generously to a clinic, named in honor of William, in the Israeli city of Ashkelon.
A. Cohen & Sons prospered during the postwar years, though not as spectacularly as Maidenform. As promised, all war veterans were able to resume their jobs. Though the three brothers were still nominally in charge of the business—Harry as chairman of the board, Sam as vice president, Hyman as president and CEO—their sons and sons-in-law were shouldering more responsibility. Harry’s older son, Melvin, appointed secretary in 1949, was being groomed to take over after his father retired. The company added new product lines—Corning Ware, Rado watches—and opened offices in Atlanta and Los Angeles. The younger generation got married, moved to the suburbs, filled their big comfortable homes with children, squabbled and griped about each other as their fathers had done.
In 1958, William died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-six in the Bayville mansion. Itel sold the house and moved into a small, elegant apartment on lower Fifth Avenue, near Washington Square Park. Harry died the following year, at the age of seventy, after a series of heart attacks. At the next A. Cohen & Sons board of directors meeting, the slate of officers was reshuffled: Hyman took over as chairman and Harry’s son Melvin became president. Sam’s youngest son, Marvin, was named vice president and Sam’s son-in-law Meyer Laskin (married to Sam’s younger daughter, Leona) secretary.
In 1959, Chaim suffered a serious stroke at Kfar Vitkin. Chaim had always embodied the spirit of the halutz. He was a singer and a dancer; he loved to hike through the mountains and valleys of Israel; every vacation, he piled the children of Kfar Vitkin into his delivery truck and drove them to remote corners of the country for camping trips. Nothing made him happier than hanging out with friends, drinking, and smoking Eden brand cigarettes into the night. Every year he returned to his beloved Kinneret to take the waters at the Tiberias hot springs. He had friends in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, and he took pleasure in sharing the bounty of Kfar Vitkin with them. “Chaim was a professional class salad-maker,” wrote his youngest son Benny, “and every Shabbat morning he would prepare a super finely diced green salad. His favorite songs were ‘Ein Gedi’ and ‘Evening Has Come.’ Many times he danced all night until his shirt was in shreds.”
The singing and dancing stopped after the stroke. Chaim was only fifty-three but he was a “broken man” in Benny’s words. It rankled Chaim that Shalom Tvi—his father-in-law and uncle—was still spry and active in his eighties while he was partially paralyzed in what should have been the prime of his life. The children remember tension between their father and grandfather. Sonia was caught in the middle. She and Chaim and Shalom Tvi lived together in a small house with four children. It was impossible for Sonia to honor her father without angering her husband. With Chaim disabled, more of the farmwork fell to the others. Shalom Tvi’s contributions only made Chaim more bitter. All of them suffered. Chaim eventually found a small apartment in Jerusalem and spent much of his time away from the family.
In the spring of 1963, Itel and Hyman and Hyman’s wife, Anna, came to visit the family at Kfar Vitkin. The farm was actually the last stop on their Israeli trip. First they got the grand tour of the young nation’s major sights and institutions, with special guides befitting a visitor of Itel’s stature and generosity. In Jerusalem they had an audience with Zalman Shazar, Israel’s third president, a native of Belarus who had made aliyah the same year as Sonia.
Shimon, eighteen at the time of the visit, remembers that Sonia told Chaim to put on his “fancy pants” to receive his famous cousin from New York, but Chaim refused. “I’ll go as usual,” he told his wife. The cousins sat together on the covered verandah at the back of the house overlooking the tractor shed and the chicken house and an azure strip of the Mediterranean. They spoke Yiddish. Hyman was stunned to see Shalom Tvi, now ninety-one years old, feeding the chickens. “He was happy to be in Israel,” Hyman wrote of his uncle, “but not too pleased with the life. The illness of his son-in-law who had suffered a stroke made life rather unpleasant. He saw his daughter working very hard, taking care of the farm.”
Shalom Tvi died at Kfar Vitkin on September 18, 1964, a month shy of his ninety-second birthday. Chaim died the following year, at the age of fifty-nine. Chaim had always dreamed of being buried at the tiny beautiful cemetery by the Sea of Galilee where he had lived and worked as a youth. The poet Ra’hel is buried there along with many early Labor Zionist leaders. But it was not to be. The officers in charge of the cemetery denied the family’s request. Chaim is buried instead in the Kfar Vitkin cemetery in a rustling grove of ficus, grevillea, and casuarina trees on a hill overlooking the moshav.
Itel turned eighty in January of 1966, but she refused to retire. She always said she didn’t have time to stop working. “First, I can’t afford it,” she once told an interviewer. “Second, I like it here. And the second reason is the truth.” She still spent about half her time on the road. “Quality we give them,” she told the Time magazine reporter who profiled her in 1960. “Delivery we give them. I add personality.” Her company was now taking in upward of 35 million dollars a year.
Itel was on a business trip in Milwaukee in 1966 when she suffered a stroke that left her seriously impaired. She was conscious and mobile afterward, but much of her mind was gone and she rarely left her chair. Relatives recall seeing her sit for hours on end stroking a small dog in her lap—the only thing that brought her comfort. She died in New York on March 29, 1973, at the age of eighty-seven.
The Maidenform dynasty Itel founded endured for only three generations. The company declared bankruptcy in 1997, and the trademark and management of the business passed from the family. People lost their pensions. There was—and is—bad blood.
“With God’s will may the new born bring luck, blessing and peace to the world,” Shalom Tvi had written to Sonia when she gave birth to her first son, Arie, in November 1939. “May you raise him easily and may he merit a long life.” None of these wishes came to pass.
Arie—Areleh—Arik—had always been a golden boy—taller, more athletic, more handsome than anyone else in the family. Sonia fretted to her father that the boy was rough and rambunctious, but Shalom Tvi countered that rowdiness was a sign of intelligence and spirit. This grandson, he assured Sonia, was destined to be another Bar Kochba—the hero of a Jewish uprising against the Romans. As a youth Arik played basketball and broke girls’ hearts. He had a square jaw, tousled brown hair, his mother’s brown eyes, a fine mind, and an intense work ethic. Arik won a place at the Technion in Haifa, Israel’s MIT, and did well in his studies. He married and fathered two daughters, all the while serving as an officer in the tank corps of the Israeli Defense Forces.
When a coalition of Arab states mounted a surprise attack on Israeli positions in the Sinai and the Golan Heights on October 6, 1973—the Yom Kippur War—Arik, now a major, was hastily called up in the general mobilization. His tank corps unit was deployed to the Golan. On October 12, a Syrian missile scored a direct hit on the tank Arik was operating and he was instantly killed. His death came a month before his thirty-fourth birthday. Arik is buried in the Kfar Vitkin cemetery in a section set aside for those who have fallen in Israel’s many wars.
Benny said that after Arik’s death his mother shut herself in the house at Kfar Vitkin to be “alone with the tragedy.” War had already killed her mother, her sisters, her brothers-in-law, all of her nieces and nephews. Now, like her cousin Itel, she had lost her oldest son as well. “Arik’s death cut flesh wounds that never healed,” said Benny.
In the 1960s, Sam and Gladys began making yearly trips to Israel. Sam had always been the most observant of the Cohen brothers, and in Israel he felt a deep sense of connection to his roots, his faith, his heritage, and most of all his family. Sam and Gladys and Sonia, though virtually strangers, forged an immediate bond when they gathered in Israel. Their shared affinities ran deep. After Sam retired, the Israel trips grew to several months in duration.
Sam was ailing when he and Gladys departed for Israel in February of 1974, but he decided to go ahead with the trip. Gary Cohen, a grandson who was at the airport to see them off, remembers Sam saying he was going to Israel to die. “He didn’t say it in a sad way, more a factual way.”
Sam and Gladys spent a few weeks at a beachside hotel in Netanya, a short drive from Kfar Vitkin, and then moved to Tiberias, the ancient city overlooking the Sea of Galilee where Chaim had come for yearly spa treatments. In Tiberias, Sam suffered a massive heart attack and was rushed to the Poriya Medical Center. He died in Israel at the age of eighty-four.
Hyman, the last of the Cohen brothers, died in his sleep of a heart attack in 1980 at the age of eighty-eight. Thirteen years before his death, Hyman wrote and self-published a memoir called As I Recall about “the three-quarters of a century of my life.” Since “I never kept diaries,” as he stated in the preface, the book was based on “recollections from memory.” Despite some errors of fact and a bit of self-serving spin, the book is the best—in fact the only—account of the Cohen brothers’ childhood in Rakov, their early struggles on the Lower East Side, the founding and decades-long flourishing of A. Cohen & Sons. That chapter of family history came to an end in 1978, when financier Ronald Perelman took control of Cohen-Hatfield Industries (as the company was called after its 1968 merger with Hatfield Enterprises) with a 1.9-million-dollar loan guaranteed by his wife. Perelman proceeded to liquidate the company’s holdings and fire nearly all of its employees, including family members. With proceeds from the liquidation of Cohen-Hatfield, Perelman trained his sights on McAndrews & Forbes Company, a licorice extract importer and producer. Perelman tapped Sam’s son-in-law Meyer Laskin, one of the few family members he had retained, to run McAndrews & Forbes. It was some consolation to out-of-work Cohens that the share price of the company stock, which had been limping along for years in the single digits, was valued at $58.50 when Perelman bought up the outstanding shares in order to take the company private. The sons and daughters of the three founding brothers—at least those who had held on to their stock—made out handsomely. And Sam’s son-in-law Meyer embarked on a new career in the international licorice trade.
Sonia secluded herself for a year after Arik’s death, but her family drew her back into the world. “Despite her tragedies, Sonia regained her peace of mind,” says Benny. “All the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were always happy to come to see her. Our mother had great patience, which she probably received from her father. Her face was always bright and happy.” Sonia also found consolation in memorializing her family’s history. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum and archive in Jerusalem, had launched a massive project to assemble the names and stories of victims of the Shoah, and Sonia filled in cards with what she knew about the deaths of her mother, sisters, brothers-in-law, cousins, nieces, and nephews and sent them in. Each year, she observed Holocaust Remembrance Day—the twenty-seventh day of Nisan in the Jewish calendar, the day the Warsaw ghetto uprising began—with families from Rakov and Volozhin.
On Holocaust Remembrance Day of 1992, Sonia sat down with Benny and Benny’s oldest son, Rotem, to tell the story of her life—her girlhood in Rakov with Doba and Etl, the death of their sister Feigele during the Great War, her decision to make aliyah and the trip to Palestine in 1932, her romance and marriage with Chaim, their struggles together during the early years at Kfar Vitkin. Benny recorded the interview, edited it, and printed it up for the family. Sonia barely touched on her feelings; she said little about the agony she endured during the Shoah and nothing about Arik’s death. But her voice comes through clearly: the voice of a woman who has lived courageously, suffered unbearably, and who has made peace with her tragedies. The confidence and conviction of the pioneer never left her. “She did not count her difficulties,” says Benny. “She never looked for a comfortable life. Bringing children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren into life in the Land made her happy. She taught us to know, to forgive, not to be angry or carry a grudge.” Sonia was truly one of the mothers of a nation.
Among the descendants of Shimon Dov, Sonia had lost more than anyone, yet she lived her final years in tranquility. Family brought her not only warmth but also peace. In the interview with Benny and Rotem, Sonia called her mother, Beyle, “a tzadeke—a very charitable God-fearing woman”—and in her own way, Sonia was a tzadeke too. She was religious, she honored the ways of her ancestors, she loved her parents and sisters deeply, and yet she was willing to break all her past ties for the cause she believed in.
Sonia and Chaim realized their dream. They brought the line of the scribe to Palestine and played a part in the violent metamorphosis of Palestine into Israel. After the Shoah, Sonia felt it was her obligation to have more children so that her family would have a stake in Israel’s future.
Early in 1996, Sonia traveled to Jerusalem to visit the grave of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli statesman and Labor prime minister who had signed the Oslo Accords with PLO leader Yasser Arafat and was assassinated in November 1995. It was her last trip. Sonia fell and broke her hip at the family Passover seder in the first week of April 1996. The doctors refused to operate because of Sonia’s weak heart. She spent her last weeks immobile but clear in mind and memory and surrounded by her entire family. Her three surviving children were with her the day before she died at the age of eighty-six. Sonia had outlived her son Arik by twenty-three years, her husband, Chaim, by thirty-one years, her sister, Doba, by fifty-three years, and her sister, Etl, by fifty-four years. Her gravestone in Kfar Vitkin’s cemetery bears the names and dates of the mother and sisters who perished without graves or prayers to mark their passing.