Family stories are the primary source for this book. I started with the stories that I grew up hearing from my mother, Leona Cohen Laskin, and her parents, Sam and Gladys Cohen, and went on from there in wider and wider circles. Once I committed to writing this book, I set about trying to gather as many stories as I could from the entire extended family, including lots of relatives I never knew I had. I can’t claim to have interviewed all one hundred–odd living descendants of my great-grandfather or the thirty-two descendants of Shalom Tvi—but I did speak with everyone who knew anything about the “old days.”
Among any family’s stories there are bound to be a fair number of what Huck Finn called “stretchers”—and my challenge throughout has been to try to separate truth from things that got, well, stretched a bit. Sometimes this has been relatively easy: my great- uncle Hyman Cohen writes on the second page of his self-published memoir, As I Recall (1967), that Avram Akiva’s grandfather was Chaim the Volozhiner, the founder and head of the Volozhin yeshiva. Two minutes of research online revealed that this was a stretcher. But many other bits of information and conflicting accounts, both large and small, have been more difficult to resolve. For the sake of the narrative, I have written in the body of the text what I believe is the most likely version—and I use the notes that follow to present alternate versions and explain the basis of my choice.
As I indicated in the Epilogue, my Israeli cousins provided two essential sources of material without which I could not have written this book: the memoirs of Chaim and Sonia’s early years that Benny wrote based on his 1992 interview with his mother; and the nearly three hundred letters written primarily by Doba, Etl, Beyle, Shepseleh, and Shalom Tvi between 1932 and 1946. In most cases the letters were incompletely dated: the correspondents usually omitted the year and sometimes the month, heading the letter simply “14 June” or “Rosh Hashanah Eve.” Benny has performed the invaluable service of dating all the letters based on internal evidence or by correlating events described in the letters to the history of the time. In a very few cases I have contested the dates Benny assigned. I have not footnoted the letters or the family memoirs.
This is a work of history but I have taken some liberties. In order to make the narrative more vivid, I often put myself inside the minds of family members at crucial points in their lives. Examples of this include Gishe Sore’s arrival at her Lower East Side tenement; Shimon Dov’s experience of the first winter of the Great War; Chaim’s adventures in the Kinneret during his first months in Palestine. Though I imagine these and other experiences, I do not invent. I based Gisha Sore’s reaction to the cold-water flat on Madison Street on the account that Hyman recorded in his memoir; Chaim’s experiences are built on what his son Benny wrote and told me, and so on. I have bolstered and deepened these scenes by researching the accounts left by others—and in the notes that follow I indicate which memoirs, letters, articles, and works of fiction have been most useful. None of the dialogue quoted in the book has been invented: all dialogue in quotation marks comes from accounts either written or recounted by family members. I use italics for dialogue or thoughts for which I have no source: I don’t put words in my characters’ mouths, but I do give them italicized reactions or expressions that strike me as likely or logical.
In the notes that follow, I indicate the major secondary sources that I have relied on in each chapter. I footnote only long quotations, controversial issues, and incidents or historic events for which I have found conflicting accounts or claims. These are not intended to be strict academic footnotes—but readers who need to know where I came by a crucial fact or assertion or who want to delve deeper into a particular issue will have the citations they need to do so.
INTRODUCTION
“the Wolf of the Kremlin”: In 1987, American journalist Stuart Kahan published a book called The Wolf of the Kremlin: The First Biography of L. M. Kaganovich, the Soviet Union’s Architect of Fear (New York: Morrow, 1989). Kahan, claiming to be a relative of Lazar Kaganovich, wrote a highly colored account of “the Wolf’s” relationship with Stalin and his role in the Ukraine famine as well as pogroms. Kahan’s claim that he was a nephew of Lazar, as well as many other assertions in the book, were debunked by Kaganovich’s family in the Soviet Union.
“beguiled . . . rifling around in the past”: Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock (New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 347.
“We (I speak of Jews now and not merely of writers)”: Letter from Saul Bellow to Cynthia Ozick, July 19, 1987, in The New Yorker, April 26, 2010, pp. 59–60.
My description of Volozhin and the Volozhin yeshiva is based on the following sources: Wolozyn: Sefer shel ha-ir-shel yeshivat “Ets Hayim”; Wolozin: The Book of the City and of the Etz Hayyim Yeshiva, edited by Eliezer Leoni and written by former residents of Volozhin living in Israel and the United States (Tel Aviv: 1970). This is the so-called Yizkor book of Volozhin: after the Shoah, survivors of many shtetlach and towns assembled “memory books” describing the life and institutions of their communities before the war, recounting their destruction under the Nazis, and listing the names of the dead. Many of these books are available online through Jewish Gen, the first stop for anyone doing Jewish family research. Some of the Volozhin Yizkor book is available online at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/volozhin/volozhin.html. Henceforth I will cite this source as Volozhin Yizkor book.
I relied on these books for background on shtetl life in the nineteenth century: There Once Was a World, by Yaffa Eliach (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1998); These We Remember: Yizkor Book of Ivenets, Kamin, and Surroundings, translated by Florette Lynn (Emerson, NJ: Shoah Literature Press, 2008); The Jews in Poland and Russia, vol. 1 and 2, by Antony Polonsky (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010–2012); From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry, edited by Jack Kugelmass and J. Boyarin (New York: Schocken Books, 1983); The World of Sholom Aleichem, by Maurice Samuel (New York: Knopf, 1943); Twenty-one Stories, by S. Y. Agnon (New York: Schocken Books, 1970); Shtetl, by Eva Hoffman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); and Life Is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl, by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog (New York: International Universities Press, 1952).
For the history of the Volozhin yeshiva and its place in the revival of yeshivot in Lithuania I used the following: Reb Chaim of Volozhin, by Rabbi Dov Eliach (Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications, 1993); Torah Lishmah: Torah for Torah’s Sake, by Norman Lamm (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1989); and My Uncle the Netziv, by Rabbi Baruch HaLevi Epstein (Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications, 1988).
For background on the work of the Torah scribe: Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures, by Philip R. Davies (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998); A Torah Is Written, by Paul and Rachel Cowan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1986); and Sofer: The Story of a Torah Scroll, by Eric Ray (Los Angeles: Torah Aura Productions, 1986). I gleaned additional information from an interview with working Torah scribe Jen Taylor Friedman at her home in New York City, on August 4, 2011.
since science and scripture eerily concur: Sharon Begley, “The DNA of Abraham’s Children,” Newsweek, June 3, 2010, online version, p. 3, www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/06/03/the-dna-of-abraham-s-children.html.
“All day he sat . . .”: “The Tale of the Scribe” in Agnon, Twenty-one Stories, pp. 9, 18.
“You must never, ever touch anything”: This quote and other details of Shimon Dov in Volozhin come from the unpublished manuscript “History of Louis Rubenstein, Recorded by Rose Einziger,” shared by their family. Louis Rubenstein and Rose Einziger are two of the children of Shimon Dov’s only daughter, Leah Golda.
Precisely 304,805 letters: www.torahscience.org/newsletter7.html; other sources put the number of words in the Torah at 79,976.
In 1803, a yeshiva: Gershon David Hundert, ed., The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), entry on Volozhin yeshiva, by Shaul Stampfer, pp. 1984–1985. Other sources date the founding of the yeshiva to 1801 or 1802.
the most renowned and revered: Lamm, Torah Lishmah, p. 26.
to live beside the Volozhin yeshiva during its golden age: To understand Shimon Dov and the religious atmosphere of Volozhin, it helps to have some background on the conflict between Hasidim and mitnagdim—opponents of Hasidism—that emerged in the late eighteenth century and shaped the religious atmosphere and pedagogy of the Volozhin yeshiva.
Around the same time that the Gaon of Vilna became prominent, another great spirit arose to beckon the Jews down a different path. Israel ben Eliezer—the charismatic seer known as the Ba’al Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name), who is credited with the founding of Hasidism—is a figure cloaked in reverent mystery. Popular tradition has it that the Besht (an acronym for Ba’al Shem Tov) was a poor, orphaned, barely educated youth who received the call from God to bring ecstatic worship to the Jewish masses—but the rags-to-radiance story may have been fabricated or embellished later to lend a populist aura to the emergence of Hasidism. What is clear is that the Besht opened the way for a more joyous, more immediate, more inclusive, more intimately mystical form of Judaism that inspired the soul of Eastern Europe from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. Followers of the Besht believed that the way to approach God was not to shut yourself in a darkened room with your feet in ice water but to sing and dance and shout and pray with such heart-lifting fervor that the very words on the page dissolved into shimmering spirit. God is present everywhere in His creation, the Besht told his followers—pray and study joyously, live a life full of honesty and love, make worship a “joyous service of the heart,” and you will find Him. Jews who felt excluded by the pedantry and snobbishness of the Pale’s scholarly aristocracy embraced the Besht as a tzaddik—a seer who had the power to deliver man’s messages directly to God. When the Besht prayed, “everyone saw that the water was rippling,” wrote one of his followers. “The Shekinah [the divine presence of God] hovered over him and as a result the earth trembled.” (Dov Ber ben Samuel, Shivhei Ha-Besht, trans. and ed. by Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome Mintz, Bloomington, IN: 1970, pp. 50–51; quoted in Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 37). The Besht traveled through the Pale performing miracle healings and purging the possessed of evil spirits; he foretold the future through his dreams; he dazzled the downtrodden with his radiant sweetness. Hasidism—Hebrew for “piety” or “loving kindness”—burst forth from the teaching and examples of this holy man and quickly gained popularity among poor, humble, yearning Ashkenazi Jews. By the 1750s, the Hasidic fire was spreading into Poland and from Poland throughout the Russian Pale.
But the flames flickered and died when they reached the icy footbath of the Gaon. “When a man studies or prays,” the Hasidim rhapsodized, “the word should be uttered with full strength, like the ejaculation of a drop of semen from his whole body” (quoted in Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, New York: Harper & Row, 1987, p. 297). To the Gaon and his followers, such passion was an abomination. Abominators of Hasidism began calling themselves mitnagdim—opponents, no need to specify what or whom they opposed—and the Gaon of Vilna stepped, or was dragged, forward as their leader. To the mitnagdim, Hasidic ecstasy was an insult to the Almighty, Hasidic visions were delusions, Hasidic reverence for tzaddiks a form of idolatry. In 1781, the Vilna Gaon issued a cherem (ban) condemning the Hasidim (Eliach, Reb Chaim of Volozhin, p. 158). He ordered their books to be burned in public, he forbade pious Jews from intermarrying or doing business with them, he made formal pronouncements excommunicating them from Jewish communities. “It is the duty of every believing Jew to repudiate and pursue them with all manner of afflictions and subdue them,” the Gaon declared, “because they have sin in their hearts and are a sore on the body of Israel” (quoted in Johnson, A History of the Jews, p. 298).
According to many accounts, the Volozhin yeshiva, founded by the prime disciple of the Vilna Gaon, was a bastion of mitnagdim sentiment, though in recent years scholars have noted that Chaim the Volozhiner tolerated and may even have welcomed Hasidic students in his yeshiva. So, like a lot of scholarly and religious disputes, it’s complicated.
“It was the Torah center of the great Russian Jewry”: Volozhin Yizkor book, p. 7.
mixed their essence with gum arabic: My description of the scribal process is based on the books cited above as well as my interview with Jen Taylor Friedman, a working Torah scribe, in her apartment in New York City on August 4, 2011.
Avram Akiva duly enrolled in the yeshiva: There is a faint shadow of doubt in my mind as to whether Shimon Dov and Avram Akiva actually attended the yeshiva. My great-uncle Hyman Cohen in his memoir As I Recall claims that his father Avram Akiva studied there—but he also said that Chaim the Volozhiner was Shimon Dov’s father, which was most definitely not the case. Shimon Dov’s and Avram Akiva’s names do not appear on the lists of yeshiva students from the nineteenth century that have come down—but these lists are fragmentary and incomplete. There is, however, strong circumstantial evidence and a bit of documentary evidence to support the idea that Avram Akiva and at least some of his brothers were enrolled in the yeshiva. While he was in the United States, Avram Akiva’s brother Shalom Tvi indicated on a U.S. immigration form that he had attended the Volozhin yeshiva: if a younger brother went, it’s very likely that the oldest brother went as well. There is also the fact that Avram Akiva became a renowned Talmudic scholar in later life and that the synagogue he helped found, the Hebrew Institute of University Heights, named its religious school after him. It seems likely that so distinguished a scholar would have received his training at the most revered yeshiva in Europe, especially because that yeshiva was located in his hometown.
Under the Netziv: Lamm, Torah Lishmah, p. 28.
Without the work of the scribe . . . the linguistic historian: Johnson, A History of the Jews, pp. 82, 90.
“Hashem, His will, and His word . . .”: Quoted in Eliach, Reb Chaim of Volozhin, p. 170.
CHAPTER TWO: THE MOVE TO RAKOV
“I have no desire for any understanding . . .”: Quoted in Eliach, Reb Chaim of Volozhin, p. 75.
marched to the house of the Netziv . . .: Details on celebrations in Volozhin from Eliach, Reb Chaim of Volozhin, p. 103.
“Jewish kingdom of strength”: Volozhin Yizkor book, p. 114.
one third will die: Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 12.
the family went by the name Kagan: According to records in the Minsk National Historical archive in Belarus, Sarah’s father’s name was Zelick-Movsha Kagan. However, on Sarah’s Certificate of Death provided by the Bureau of Records, Department of Health, New York City, her father’s name is given as Selig Moses Shapiro.
choice of four synagogues: I have based my supposition that Rakov had four synagogues on evidence provided in Rakov Community Memorial Book by former residents of Rakow in Israel and the United States, edited by Haim Abramson, translated by Ruth Wilnai (Tel Aviv, Israel: 1959)—hereafter the Rakov Yizkor book. I am guessing that the Old Shul was the Great Shul, though I have not been able to confirm this.
A barrel of herring and a barrel of kerosene: Details on a typical shtetl shop from Lynn, These We Remember, p. 6.
The students had organized: Eliach, There Once Was a World, p. 183.
in the holy city of Tzvat: The Volozhin Yizkor book says the community was in Jerusalem.
Even the Netziv: Rabbi Dr. Jacob J. Schacter “Haskalah, Secular Studies and the Closing of the Yeshiva in Volozhin in 1892” in Torah U-Madda Journal, January 1, 1990, p. 104.
“Don’t manage me”: New York Post, September 6, 1964, clipping on file with the Maidenform Collection, 1922–1997, the Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC. Hereafter, Maidenform Collection.
Gishe Sore was a famously bad cook: The story of Gishe Sore’s lousy cooking comes from my mother, Leona Cohen Laskin, who lived in the flat below Gishe Sore as a child. The story of Itel taking charge of the younger children and forcing them to eat their mother’s bread comes from an unpublished biographical essay on Itel called “Ida Rosenthal: A Remembrance,” undated and unattributed, but apparently written in 1977 by Hy Lieberman. Hereafter, Itel’s Story.
Kaganovich and Rubilnik: My cousins in Israel speculate that Rubilnik may have been Beyle’s mother’s maiden name.
CHAPTER THREE: THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY
Itel took it for granted: From Itel’s Story.
the number of Jewish students capped: In Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), Benjamin Nathans says that when quotas were first instituted, “Jewish female students were not regarded as warranting such drastic action,” though quotas for them started in the 1890s; pp. 266–267.
published in underground Jewish newspapers: See The Jewish Bund in Russia from Its Origins to 1905, by Henry J. Tobias (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972), p. 251, for a discussion of the Jewish press at the turn of the last century.
Nails were driven into the heads: Nora Levin, While Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements, 1871–1917 (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), p. 305.
“The riot was now at its height”: www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/Kishinev.html. Korolenko describes the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, from “Kishineff: The Medieval Outbreak Against the Jews” in The Great Events by Famous Historians, vol. 20 (n.p.: National Alumni, 1914), pp. 35–49.
the citizens of Kishinev killed forty-nine Jews: Statistics, facts, and background on the pogrom come from http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/kishinev/kishinev-pogrom.html.
It was “the last pogrom . . .”: www.forward.com/articles/8544/. “Kishinev 1903: The Birth of a Century,” by J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Daily Forward, April 4, 2003. This article also provides text for some of Bialik’s poem, “In the City of Slaughter.”
She was twelve years old: I have made an educated guess of Itel’s age here. The Bund was founded in 1897; so assuming the push for membership happened in 1898, Itel would have been twelve.
One Friday evening: The account of the young Bundist with the mole is from the Rakov Yizkor book.
“organize armed resistance”: Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia, p. 226.
Bundists were being arrested: Ibid., p. 229.
“the halo of heroism”: “Memories of the Zionist movement and the Bund,” in the Rakov Yizkor book.
Students took to the streets: Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: A Short History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 19–20.
the Rakov Bundists held secret meetings: Rakov Yizkor book and Itel’s Story (which has details about weapons and target practice in the forest).
Jews taken up arms: Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia, p. 343.
Wolf was drafted: From Itel’s Story.
to agitate from within: Levin, While Messiah Tarried, p. 306.
happened to be Itel’s nineteenth birthday: Correlating Itel’s birth with Bloody Sunday raises a rather sticky chronological question. Before the Communist Revolution of 1917, Russia did not use the Gregorian (also known as new style—NS) calendar that had long been standard in the West and in the United States but rather the slightly different Julian, or old style (OS), calendar. Itel always gave her birthday as January 9, 1886—but it’s unclear whether this was OS or NS. Bloody Sunday fell on January 9, 1905, OS—but the NS date was January 22. So if Itel was born on January 9, NS, then her birthday was not on Bloody Sunday after all. Specialists in Russian-Jewish genealogy consulted on this matter have pointed out that birth dates were notoriously imprecise for our immigrant ancestors. Many Russian Jews used the Hebrew calendar to mark their children’s birthdays—and then rough correlations were made to the Julian and/or Gregorian calendar. Some simply invented or changed their birthdays. There was no official agency in the United States that translated OS birth dates to NS birth dates. Given Itel’s character and politics, it’s possible that she recorded her birthday as January 9 precisely because it coincided with Bloody Sunday—but the exact date is impossible to ascertain.
the official government count: David Floyd, Russia in Revolt (London: Macdonald & Co, 1969), p. 64.
“Attack the stores . . .”: Quoted in Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia, p. 295.
“It could achieve everything”: Quoted in Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia, p. 309.
In the first years of their marriage: I have guessed at the year of Shula’s birth. In the memoir that Sonia’s son Benny wrote, Sonia states: “Shula, the oldest, died of an illness when she was 4 or 5 years old.” She had to have been born before 1902, since Doba was born in 1903.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE BOYS
“The root of all evil . . .”: Quoted in Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia, p. 312.
“A young muzhik was smashing . . .”: Isaac Babel, “The Story of My Dovecote” in The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 610. Khariton Efrussi is surely a reference to the Ephrussi family that Edmund de Waal belongs to and wrote about in his recent family history, The Hare with Amber Eyes. Though there is no Khariton on de Waal’s family tree, the Ephrussi family did make their fortune in Odessa and had a prominent house there.
“torrent of Jewish blood”: Quoted in Levin, While Messiah Tarried, p. 328.
“brazen, insolent way”: Quoted in Floyd, Russia in Revolt, p. 93.
“Repairing watches or clocks is fascinating . . .”: Hyman Cohen, As I Recall (self-published, 1967), p. 5.
CHAPTER FIVE: LOWER EAST SIDE
East River, smelling of fish: All-of-a-Kind Family, by Sydney Taylor, quoted in Tenement, by Raymond Bial (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), n.p.
Half a million Jews: Johnson, A History of the Jews, p. 372.
350 square feet between them: Lawrence J. Epstein, At the Edge of a Dream: The Story of Jewish Immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side, 1880–1920 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), p. 46.
Even on Kol Nidre night: Albert Waldinger, ed., Shining and Shadow: An Anthology of Early Yiddish Stories from the Lower East Side (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006), pp. 67–68.
On a special occasion: Epstein, At the Edge of a Dream, p. 177.
barely 12 percent of Jews: Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 13.
“Success, American style . . .”: Harry Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then: The Lower East Side, 1900–1914, An Intimate Chronicle (New York, Dial Press, 1971), p. 33.
Zionism remained strong: Rakov Yizkor book, pp. 14–15.
it should have been Samuel: There is some confusion over my grandfather’s name in Yiddish. In a letter to Sonia, Shalom Tvi refers to him as Shalom—and in fact the names Shalom and Solomon are closely related. My mother had always told me that her father’s name was Shmuel in the Old Country—which became Samuel or Sam in America—but it’s possible that his Yiddish name was Shalom or Solomon, not Shmuel, and he chose to Americanize it as Sam.
CHAPTER SIX: THE BIRTH OF A BUSINESS
Many of the details on the founding or A. Cohen & Sons and its early years come from Hyman Cohen’s As I Recall.
“Machines, needles, thread, pressing cloths . . .”: Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then, p. 69. Other details on sweatshop and pay, from Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then, chap. 3.
I have over a thousand dollars: The exact sum and how much various relatives chipped in is much debated in the family.
“the sentimental heart and the battling mind . . .”: Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then, p. 120.
“the capital of capitalism . . .”: Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, p. 10.
CHAPTER SEVEN: SOCIALIST IN A BLACK SATIN DRESS
I relied on Itel’s Story for many details in this chapter.
“The Jewish needle . . .”: Quoted in Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then, p. 63.
“I am a socialist because . . .”: Quoted in How We Lived: A Documentary History of Immigrant Jews in America, by Irving Howe and Kenneth Libo (New York: Richard Marek, 1979), p. 190.
“A man either had God or socialism: . . .”: Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then, p. 111.
CHAPTER EIGHT: FIRST WORLD WAR
When the news reached Volozhin: Volozhin Yizkor book, p. 343.
When Russia mobilized: S. Ansky, The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), p. ix.
“swaying back and forth . . .”: Quoted in The Long Way Home, by David Laskin (New York: Harper, 2010), p. 92.
Some 600,000 Jews were sent packing: Ansky, The Enemy at His Pleasure, p. ix.
Cossacks were desecrating: Ibid., p. 281.
Again and again, a story was repeated: Ibid., cited in Laskin, The Long Way Home, p. 92.
In a neighboring shtetl: Krasnoe Yizkor book.
A letter appealing for emergency aid: On Foreign Soil: An Autobiographical Novel, by Falk Zolf at www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/rakov//rkv_pages/rakov_stories_onfor.html.
In March of 1916: Details from The Eastern Front, 1914–1917, by Norman Stone (New York: Scribner, 1975), pp. 228–229, 231.
Shalom Tvi managed to secure: No papers or photos exist to document Shimon Dov’s move to Rakov, but there is one compelling piece of physical evidence. It is the Jewish custom to bury the dead within twenty-four hours of their passing, and even in fine weather it would have been difficult to transport a body from Volozhin to Rakov that quickly in the days of horse-drawn carts. In February 1917, with the roads drifted over in snow, Volozhin sealed off on the front line, and the Pale crippled by war, such a move would have been next to impossible. Since Shimon Dov was buried in Rakov, he must have been living there at the time of his death. Aside from this evidence, family customs and habits also support the idea that Shimon Dov moved to Rakov during the war. His son Avram Akiva lived with his children in New York, so it seems logical that Shimon Dov, a widower in time of war, would have moved in with his last son remaining in Europe.
It was International Women’s Day: Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. 308.
Police and Cossacks were called in: Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 44.
no one had thought to issue whips: Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 308.
February 23 in the old-style Julian: Dates in the old-style Julian calendar are thirteen days earlier than dates in the new-style Gregorian calendar (see footnote above); hence in Russia, which was still using the Julian calendar, it was known as the February Revolution—even though in the West the date fell in March.
The Petrograd chief of police: Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 310.
As of March 15, 1917: Geoffrey Jukes, The First World War: The Eastern Front, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2002), p. 60.
“There is nothing more to discuss . . .”: Quoted in Laskin, The Long Way Home, p. 119.
Russia must withdraw immediately: Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 51.
In the first week of July: Ibid., p. 57.
“the worst possible material . . .”: Quoted in Laskin, The Long Way Home, p. 135.
“it will be a shameful peace”: Quoted in Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 544.
Russia lost not only all of its western territories: Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 548.
The regime change came as a huge relief: Some of the details here were supplied by my maternal grandmother, Gisri Sore Galpierjn. Gisri Sore was the daughter of a prominent family in the shtetl of Krasniki—fifty-five miles north-northeast of Minsk. During the Great War a gentlemanly German officer was billeted in their house. The officer told the family that he would help them in any way he could after the war and he made good on his promise. When Gisri Sore decided to immigrate to America in 1921 at the age of eighteen, she contacted the German officer and he helped her arrange passage. In America she Americanized her name to Gladys Helperin. Gladys married Sam Cohen shortly after the death of his first wife Celia, raised his four children, and bore him a daughter, my mother, Leona Pauline Cohen, in 1926.
When Passover came: The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume III: 1914 to 2008, by Antony Polonsky (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010), p. 19.
“On the earth this is the last part . . .”: Arnold Zweig, quoted in War Land on the Eastern Front, by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 191.
There were stories: Liulevicius, War Land, p. 120.
“Jews are living here in considerable numbers . . .”: Ibid., p. 120.
“The shelling did not come in bursts . . .”: Captain Ben H. Chastaine, History of the 18th U.S. Infantry, First Division 1812–1919 (New York: Hymans Publishing), p. 47.
For a week they lived on: Jeremiah M. Evarts, Cantigny: A Corner of the War (Privately printed, 1938), p. 2.
The shriek was directly overhead: Details on shell explosion from Evarts, Cantigny, p. 73.
A soldier with Company K: Testimony of Corporal Fidelis H. Elder, on file in National Archives and Record Administration, College Park, Maryland.
But Hyman gave a different account: Hyman’s account in As I Recall, pp. 32–41, has a number of errors: he puts the date of Quesenberry’s wounding and death a month later than it actually occurred; the part about Quesenberry’s refusing aid in the church basement seems unlikely since Corporal Fidelis H. Elder, in sworn testimony, describes him being removed in an ambulance in which he died on the way to the hospital. Hyman states at the start of the book that he was writing “from memory” and the events of the Great War had occurred a half century earlier.
The hard part would be fending off: History of the First Division During the World War, 1917–1919, compiled by the Society of the First Division (Philadelphia: Winston, 1922), p. 83.
“No more glorious task . . .”: Chastaine, History of the 18th, p. 59.
“Blinding flashes of lightning . . .”: Ibid., p. 61.
the serene neoclassical façade: Evarts, Cantigny, p. 86.
“No man is fearless in battle . . .”: Charles H. Abels, The Last of the Fighting Four (New York: Vantage Press, 1968), p. 77.
Casualties mounted: Chastaine, History of the 18th, p. 63.
“like insects fleeing to the rear”: quoted in Laskin, The Long Way Home, p. 220.
Captain Robert S. Gill: Hyman mistakenly identified him as Captain Gilbert in As I Recall.
horrific flanking fire: Chastaine, History of the 18th, p. 64.
“so exhausted . . . that it was often necessary”: Douglas V. Johnson II and Rolfe L. Hillman, Jr., Soissons 1918 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999), p. 126.
only seventy-nine returned: Chastaine, History of the 18th, p. 66.
The First Division Infantry as a whole: American Armies and Battlefields in Europe (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1992), p. 87.
For the first time since September 1914: Johnson and Hillman, Soissons, p. 125.
The blisters raised by the mustard gas: In As I Recall, p. 39, Hyman mentions the permanent scar on the lower part of his chin; his daughter Barbara Weisenfeld remembers scars on his neck behind his left ear.
CHAPTER NINE: PIONEERS
For background on Maidenform’s founding and early years, I relied on Itel’s Story, the Maidenform Collection: They Made America, by Harold Evans (New York: Little, Brown, 2004), pp. 308–315; Past and Promise: Lives of New Jersey Women, edited by Joan N. Burstyn, Women’s Project of New Jersey (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990); Uplift: The Bra in America, by Jane Farrell-Beck and Colleen Gau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); “At the Curve Exchange,” by Vicki Howard in Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender and Culture in Modern America, edited by Philip Scranton (New York: Routledge, 2001); and “Her Half-Billion Dollar Shape,” by Pete Martin, Saturday Evening Post, October 15, 1949.
For background on Zionism, HeHalutz, and the early collective Jewish colonies in Palestine, I relied on the following: My Country: The Story of Modern Israel, by Abba Eban (New York: Random House, 1975); A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel, by Gudrun Kramer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); The Return to the Soil: A History of Jewish Settlement in Israel, by Alex Bein (Jerusalem: Youth and Hechalutz, Department of the Zionist Organisation, 1952); Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, by Gershon Shafir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Berl: The Biography of a Socialist Zionist, Berl Katznelson, 1887–1944, by Anita Shapira (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Arrow in the Blue, by Arthur Koestler (New York: Macmillan, 1952–1954); Palestinian Identity, by Rashid Khalidi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine 1880–1948, by Mark Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); A History of Zionism, by Walter Laqueur (New York: Schocken Books, 2003); Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement, by S. Ilan Troen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); A Tale of Love and Darkness, by Amos Oz (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004); The Blue Mountain, by Meir Shalev (New York: Asher Books, 1991); Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel, edited by Deborah S. Bernstein (Albany: State University of New York, 1992); Pioneers in Israel, by Shmuel Dayan (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1961); The Promised Land: Memoirs of Shmuel Dayan, by Yael Dayan (London: Routledge, 1961); The Plough Woman: Records of the Pioneer Women of Palestine, by Rachel Katznelson-Shazar (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002); Pioneer Youth in Palestine, by Shlomo Bardin (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1932); The Israelis: Founders and Sons, by Amos Elon (New York: Penguin, 1983); Moshava, Kibbutz and Moshav, by Dov Weintraub (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969); and The Moshav in Israel, by Maxwell I. Klayman (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970).
Some twenty-eight thousand tons of metal: Evans, They Made America, p. 311.
equal shareholders in a newly incorporated: According to a document titled “Minutes of First Meeting of Incorporators and Subscribers,” in the Maidenform Collection, this happened on August 31, 1922—but other sources including Evans, They Made America, and an entry on “Ida Rosenthal” in Great Lives from History: American Women Series, Vol. 4, by Catherine Coleman Brawer (Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 1995), pp. 1547–1550, say that the partnership began in 1921. Brawer puts the year in which Itel and Enid stopped making dresses as 1925.
Mrs. Bissett had a brainstorm: Maidenform salesman Jack Zizmor in an interview with Hy Lieberman on June 27, 1973, transcribed and edited by Kathryn Salwitz, in March 1986, said that Mrs. Bissett “got the idea of the first bra from a dance set that she used to wear.” In Uplift, Farrell-Beck and Gau date brassieres, or at least breast supporters, back to 1863. In the intervening decades there had been various types of support including “breast puffs” and so on.
Mrs. Bissett christened the garment: Evans, They Made America, p. 312.
In 1924 they registered: Brawer, Great Lives from History, p. 1548.
“same old story”: Isaac Babel, 1920 Diary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 12.
the Tarbut Gymnasium: Tarbut, the Hebrew word for culture, was an interwar network of Hebrew-language schools that prepared students for life in Palestine through a grounding in modern spoken Hebrew and a mainstream Zionist curriculum; Chaim’s older brother Yishayahu was one of the founders of a Tarbut school in Volozhin in 1925.
He felt not the slightest twinge: Some of the details of the train ride and voyage, and the phrase dust of exile are from S. Y. Agnon, Only Yesterday (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 21.
“still mostly stony desert”: Koestler, Arrow in the Blue, p. 138.
“but thorn and thistle, ruined cities . . .” Elon, The Israelis, p. 85.
Was it I who long ago . . .: Ra’hel, Flowers of Perhaps (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2008), p. 47.
“We dreaded comfort”: Quoted in Katznelson-Shazar, The Plough Woman, p. 61.
“In those days we were a band . . .” Dayan, The Promised Land, pp. 17–18.
depression and suicide were “rampant”: Elon, The Israelis, p. 143.
They had “dreamed of a life rich in heroic deeds . . .”: Katznelson-Shazar, The Plough Woman, p. 60.
“Every single person who left . . .” Dayan, The Promised Land, p. 18.
Then he called it quits: A third group of halutzim tried to make a go of Har Kinneret in 1927, but they also gave up after a couple of years. “Most of the last remaining settlers up there were crazy,” remembers one old-timer whose father pioneered the first lakeshore colony. “By 1929 only one family remained. When Smoshkavitz, the last settler, died of malaria, that was the end of Har Kinneret.” Today groves of mango, eucalyptus, and date palms stand on the slope where the Har Kinneret halutzim tried to farm. Nothing of the settlement is left and nothing has replaced it. Beside the dirt track that wanders past where Chaim and Etl and their comrades once lived, there is a sign in Hebrew and English that reads “Switzerland,” referring to a bit of nearby forest with a fabulous view funded and maintained by a Swiss group. But for the wind and the drone of insects, the silence is complete.
“Joe Bissett was, in my opinion, a hot and cold sales manager”: Jack Zizmor interview, June 27, 1973.
“I understand you’re with Maidenform”: Robert A. Brawer, Fictions of Business: Insights on Management from Great Literature (New York: Wiley, 1998), pp. 70–71.
Family lore has it that Itel: “Uplift” (support of women’s breasts by undergarments) had been around for half a century by the 1920s. Maidenform’s signal innovation was to provide uplift from above.
“Two stitches more or less . . .”: Martin, “Her Half-Billion Dollar Shape,” pp. 28–78.
Then the chills returned: Dayan, The Promised Land, p. 9.
feasting on the hemoglobin: Sonia Shah, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), pp. 18–19.
“We worked and suffered”: Katznelson-Shazar, The Plough Woman, p. 63.
“the enchantress-bride . . .”: Shapira, Berl, pp. 58–59.
It was like the Model T: Brawer, Great Lives from History, pp. 1548–1549. This new “section work” production process is not to be confused with the piecework pay scale that was implemented in 1937.
Abraham and Sarah made the classic hopscotch: It has been impossible to ascertain Abraham’s and Sarah’s birth years definitively because of discrepancies in the documentary evidence. In the 1920 census Abraham and Sarah both gave their age as fifty-five, which would indicate a birth year of 1865; in the 1930 census he is sixty-five and she is sixty-two, which would put his birth year at 1865 but hers at 1868; on Abraham’s death certificate the birthday is omitted but his age at time of death in 1940 was given as seventy-eight, which would put his birth year at 1862; Sarah’s death certificate gives her birthday as February 7, 1862.
Arab village of Ijlil al-Qibliyya: For more about this village, which Palestinian sources say was abandoned by its Arab inhabitants on April 3, 1948, because they feared for their safety under the new Israeli regime, see the Palestine Remembered Web site, www.palestineremembered.com/Jaffa/Ijlil-al-Qibliyya/index.html. The Web site says that the original village was “completely destroyed and defaced” by the Israelis.
“You want to found a state without bloodshed?”: Quoted in Elon, The Israelis, p. 161.
“not a Jewish soul”: Maurice Samuel, What Happened in Palestine: The Events of August, 1929: Their Background and Significance (Boston: Stratford, 1929), p. 120.
The casualties on both sides were heavy: Statistics from Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
the end of a Zionist era: Shapira, Berl, pp. 166–167.
Self-defense now occupied: Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 177.
The idea of peaceful coexistence: Ibid.
Sam’s buy was thirteen shares: Cohen, As I Recall, p. 61.
10 billion dollars in stock value: T. H. Watkins, The Hungry Years (New York: Holt, 1999), p. 32.
America’s Jewish community was emerging: Johnson, A History of the Jews, p. 460.
CHAPTER TEN: THE DEPRESSION
Unemployment more than doubled: Watkins, The Hungry Years, pp. 43–44.
right parietal lobe: Lewis Rosenthal death certificate, August 4, 1930; additional information on Lewis’s death came from interviews with Drs. Leona Laskin and Jay Epstein.
respect for Abraham and Sarah: According to Inda Epstein Goldfarb (Ethel and Sam Epstein’s daughter), Abraham and Sarah were on summer vacation in the Catskills in South Fallsberg and unable to get back in time for the funeral; but Leona Laskin recalls that the men went to South Fallsberg only on weekends and returned to work during the week—so since the funeral was on a Tuesday, Abraham would have been around; as a Kohain he was forbidden to enter a cemetery but he could have attended the memorial service beforehand.
The year 1930 was bad: Watkins, The Hungry Years, p. 44.
Stocks continued to sink: Robert T. Patterson, The Great Boom and Panic 1921–1929 (Chicago: Regnery, 1965), p. 194.
That summer, drought decimated grain crops: Ibid., p. 191.
New York City soup kitchens . . . 40 percent of Chicago’s workers . . . in Detroit it reached: Watkins, The Hungry Years, pp. 44–45, 59.
Dow Jones industrial average bottomed out: Patterson, The Great Boom and Panic, p. 194.
over a quarter of the nation’s population subsisted: Watkins, The Hungry Years, p. 44.
the biggest parade in its history: The Jersey Journal, October 17, 2009.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: “WE WILL BE GLAD TO TAKE YOU BACK”
a considerable sum: An authority on Polish economic history notes that teachers earned an average of three hundred zloty a month then.
CHAPTER TWELVE: IN LOVE IN THE LAND
the bitter women in the kitchen: Bernstein, Pioneers and Homemakers, p. 64.
even the priest: In Sonia’s Story, the memoir written by her son Benny, Sonia says that Shepseleh played chess with the son of the Catholic priest but this must be an error.
He found his checkbook and wrote out a check: The dates here are extrapolated from the letters; it’s possible he wrote the check somewhat earlier since in a letter sent before Sukkoth—which started the evening of October 4 in 1933—Shalom Tvi wrote Chaim that Avram Akiva still had not received a receipt from him, Chaim, for the two hundred dollars he had sent. Actually, he could have sent the check in midsummer, given the slowness of mail in those days.
Back in the autumn of 1929: This date comes from the Kfar Vitkin Web site. According to “The Tenants of Wadi Hawarith: Another View of the Land Question in Palestine,” by Raya Adler (Cohen), International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 20, no. 2 (May 1988), p. 204, the date of first plowing may actually have been September 6, 1930. Adler writes that settlers “were able to continue their work only under the protection of a British security force.” The protests continued—when the Jews tried to plow during the winter of 1931–1932 Bedouins “threw themselves in front of the tractors” (Adler [Cohen], “The Tenants of Wadi Hawarith,” p. 206). Police came in and twenty-six members of the tribe were arrested. Adler (Cohen) writes on p. 207: “The violent incidents against the Jewish settlers in Wadi Hawarith resulted above all from the tenants’ spontaneous resistance to their miserable existence. . . . The tenants reacted with the only weapon at their disposal—their power to sabotage their neighbors’ fields.”
Adler (Cohen) notes that the British government floated a number of resettlement ideas to the Wadi al-Hawarith Bedouins, including ones guaranteeing appropriate housing and compensation for crops—but all were rejected by the tribe.
a Bedouin woman struck the landlord and drove him off: This is from the history section of the Kfar Vitkin Web site, www.kfar-vitkin.org.il/.
moved quickly—and perhaps unscrupulously—to snap it up: “Mandatory Land Policy, Tenancy and the Wadi al-Hawarith Affair, 1929–1933,” by Raya Adler (Cohen), “Studies in Zionism, vol. 7, no. 2, 1986, pp. 233–257. On pp. 233–234 of this article, Adler (Cohen) writes: “In secret collusion with Yehoshua Hankin acting on behalf of the JNF [Jewish National Fund], and for the consideration of a bribe, the lawyer representing the claimants . . . succeeded in foiling a compromise between the creditors and the landowners. This ploy led to the outright sale, in the guise of a public auction, of the Wadi al-Hawarith land to the JNF.” Adler (Cohen) goes on to point out that “a forced sale by order of the court” “annulled the tenant farmers’ rights to protection under the Protection of Cultivators Ordinance, as well as their right of first purchase of land put up for sale (the right of preemption under Ottoman law).”
The tenant farmers fought: Adler (Cohen), “Mandatory Land Policy” says the total number of Bedouins dispossessed was two thousand.
“the basis of justice”: Albert M., Hyamson, Palestine Under the Mandate, 1920–1948 (London: Methuen, 1959), p. 39. Hyamson also states on p. 87 that “the urgency” of legislation to protect Arab farmworkers’ rights “was due to the relatively large purchases of land that were being made by Jewish agencies from large landowners resident in Paris, Beirut and Cairo, without any regard for the moral if not legal rights of their tenants who had been long established on their land. . . . The vendors, having no local interests, were, of course, anxious to sell at the highest prices. They quickly found at small cost a means of circumventing the legislation” and protecting tenants.
“directly through the courts”: Adler (Cohen), “The Tenants of Wadi Hawarith,” p. 202. Adler (Cohen) presents a full and nuanced account of the sale: “In fact, the land had secretly already been sold to Hankin for three times (£136,000) the sum fixed by the courts for the auction. Thus, the entire transaction was extremely profitable for the Tayan family . . . and since it was ostensibly carried out by a court auction order, it was not considered a voluntary sale of land to Jews . . . by making the purchase directly through the courts, the JNF was granted automatic ownership. Accordingly, the tenants’ right to preemption (i.e., priority of tenants according to Ottoman law to buy the land they cultivated when it was offered for sale) was null and void.”
another parcel fifty miles away: Adler (Cohen), “Mandatory Land Policy,” p. 203.
camped out at the side of the highway: Adler (Cohen), “Mandatory Land Policy,” p. 240.
a large traditional Arab agrarian community: Adler (Cohen), “The Tenants of Wadi Hawarith,” p. 203, reports that the head of the Jewish Agency’s Settlement Department stated that the tenants were not deeply rooted in the area, and that in 1929 “the Wadi Hawarith tenants numbered 850 persons who cultivated one-tenth of the land.” On pp. 214–216, Adler (Cohen) points out that “the Zionist aim was to attain political control of the country rather than merely formal ownership of the land,” hence they offered and accepted no compromise with Bedouin neighbors. “The Wadi Hawarith affair illustrates how problematic the question of Jewish land acquisition became when this entailed eviction and how central it was in exacerbating the conflict between the Zionist and Palestinian Arab national movements. . . . The Wadi Hawarith tenants were fighting with all their might to maintain their traditional tribal framework and to stay in their place of birth. . . . Had the JNF compromised with the tenants and allowed them to cultivate part of the land as they demanded (and as was proposed by a Jewish peasant journal), the affair might have ended differently. But the JNF’s goals were national rather than economic: it could not content itself with legal ownership; Jewish settlers had to replace the Arab tenants. The displacement of the Bedouin violated the customs of Arab society and united the community in protest against this blatant injustice.”
I would like to add a personal note. I was initially alerted to this battle by Salah Mansour, whom I contacted through the Palestine Remembered Web site. Mansour wrote me, in rather inflammatory language, that the Bedouins of Wadi al-Hawarith were “the first to be dispossessed and thrown out by the Jewish colonizers in the early to mid-30s. . . . Many came to my village Qaqun in the mid-thirties and became day laborers (an insult to a proud farmer). You can find most of them in Tulkarm refugee camps and in Baq’a’ refugee camp in Jordan. What a terrible experience; it should have been an early warning to all Palestinians. We have paid dearly for it. . . . Zionism is a terrible disease of mind. I feel sorry for whoever carry [sic] this dangerous ideology.”
I find Mansour’s rhetoric offensive, but as a result of his message, I was able to track down Adler’s (Cohen’s) articles and report on the legal battle that accompanied this sizable and highly controversial land deal. The history of land transfers in Palestine has become explosively politicized, which makes it all the more critical to bring the facts to light.
third-largest land deal: Adler (Cohen), “Mandatory Land Policy,” p. 233. In “The Tenants of Wadi Hawarith,” p. 200, Adler (Cohen) goes on to state that the main difference in the Wadi al-Hawarith purchase was that “communal lands . . . were being purchased, thus undermining the infrastructure of the countryside . . . its purchase involved the eviction of a large number of tenants, and the fact that it became an issue for the Palestinian national movement makes it relevant to the struggle against the displacement of Arabs in the 1930s.” Adler (Cohen) further notes on p. 213 that the tension with Arabs and the isolation were exhausting and debilitating for the Jewish settlers, including, presumably, Chaim and Sonia and their comrades at Kfar Vitkin: “Irritated by constant tensions with the resentful neighbors, exhausted by the work of swamp drainage, and socially isolated—for geographical reasons—from other Jewish settlements, the settlers were not able to increase their numbers significantly” in the first years. In 1934, there were only one thousand Jews in “11 pioneering groups living there.”
In the spring of 1930: These details on the birth of the baby and the first Passover come from the Kfar Vitkin Web site, www.kfar-vitkin.org.il/, translated by Aza Hadas.
“It is necessary that we have a language . . .”: Quoted in Sachar, A History of Israel, p. 82.
Hebrew became a badge of honor: Donna Robinson Divine, Exiled in the Homeland (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), p. 125.
excruciating internal warfare: Sachar, A History of Israel, p. 83.
Haganah had arranged to meet: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/irgunill.html.
Under cover of night: Shapira, Land and Power, p. 229.
“We are fated to live in a state of constant battle . . .”: Quoted in Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs: 1882–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 246.
British commissions radically pared back: Sachar, A History of Israel, p. 118.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: RETURN TO RAKOV
Sales picked up again after the brief stumble: Maidenform Collection.
Production tripled: Evans, They Made America, p. 314.
This is what he wrote after the visit: Rakov Yizkor book.
Gentile shop owners now displayed signs: Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 73.
Members of the fascist anti-Semitic ONR . . . routinely attacked: Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, pp. 70, 73.
A big family wedding was celebrated: Interview with Tsipora Alperovich, Tel Aviv, June 2010. Tsipora remembered it as Etl’s wedding but she was mistaken.
Vilna’s Jews accounted for a substantial percentage of the population: According to http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/vilna/vilna.htm#jewstatistics, 40 percent of the 154,532 residents were Jewish in 1897; 43.5 percent in 1916; 45 percent at the time of Sonia’s visit. But Dov Levin, “The Jews of Vilna Under Soviet Rule, 19 September–28 October 1939” in Poles, Jews, Socialists: The Failure of an Ideal, and Polin, in Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 9, edited by Antony Polonsky, Israel Bartal, Gershon Hundert, Magdalena Opalski, and Jerzy Tomaszewski (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996), p. 108, says 37 percent of 200,000 residents were Jewish prior to the Second World War.
But another, more shadowy motive: See Giles MacDonogh, 1938: Hitler’s Gamble (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 217, for the possible homosexual connection.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: “THE WORLD OF TOMORROW”
A “special inquiry”: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, File Series A-File, File Number A-2958053, records relating to Sholom Kahanowicz. The documents in this file detail the special inquiry hearing, the issuance of the bail and the tourist visa, and so on.
Now just to visit he needed: Saul S. Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed: United States Policy Toward Jewish Refugees, 1938–1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), p. 23.
The 1939 World’s Fair: Details on the fair from 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, by David Gelernter (New York: Free Press, 1995); and Trylon and Perisphere, by Barbara Cohen, Steven Heller, and Seymour Chwast (New York: Abrams, 1989).
the seventy neon signs: Farrell-Beck, Uplift, p. 77, and Tom Reichert, The Erotic History of Advertising (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), p. 145.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: SECOND WORLD WAR
Vilna, which had flown God knows how many flags: Dov Levin, “The Jews of Vilna,” p. 111.
“Vilna is congested with refugees . . .”: Quoted in Dov Levin, “The Jews of Vilna,” p. 126.
wounding 200 and killing 1: Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939–1945 (Jerusalem: Institute of Contemporary Jewry, 1981), p. 108.
Meanwhile, 14,000 Jewish refugees: The statistics in this paragraph come from Bauer, American Jewry, p. 112; Shtetl Jews Under Soviet Rule, by Ben-Cion Pinchuk (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 37, which places the number of refugees at ten thousand; and Vilna, by Israel Cohen (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1943), p. 471. The quote on “the spiritual elite of Polish Jewry” is from Pinchuk, Shtetl Jews, p. 37.
“The food supply is being rapidly depleted”: Quoted in Dov Levin, “The Jews of Vilna,” p. 119.
Vilna’s travel agents arbitrarily stopped: Cohen, Vilna, p. 473.
a total of 137 Vilna Jews had immigrated to all countries: Bauer, American Jewry, p. 116. But this figure is far from definitive. Herman Kruk in The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944 (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2002), p. 49, describes how the Joint arranged for refugees to get out by traveling through Siberia; and Pinchuk, Shtetl Jews, p. 38, says “many” refugees found a way out to the West and Palestine—though no number is specified. Doba also indicated that many were getting out. There is no easy way to reconcile these discrepancies. My conclusion is that the American family could have done more but that Doba and Shepseleh were timid and indecisive, burdened with two young boys and unwilling to run big risks or take unorthodox paths like traveling via Siberia or Shanghai.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: UNDER THE BIG ONES
Young Jews and the Jewish “working intelligentsia”: Pinchuk, Shtetl Jews, p. 51.
“had lost their Jewish essence . . .”: Quoted in Volozhin Yizkor book, “Under the Soviet Regime.”
“Nonproductive elements” disappeared: Pinchuk, Shtetl Jews, p. 34.
“Within an hour, in one stroke . . .”: Quoted in Pinchuk, Shtetl Jews, p. 44.
“We assembled the pieces”: Volozhin Yizkor book, “Under the Soviet Regime.”
Khost was ordered to introduce special classes: Pinchuk, Shtetl Jews, p. 85.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: “THEY SNATCH WHOLE STREETS”
Reuven Rogovin was such a Jew: Volozhin Yizkor book, “Under the Soviet Regime.”
Next came tanks: Mendel Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron: The Destruction of Vilna Jewry 1941–1945: An Eyewitness Account (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing, 2010), p. 13.
Khost and the others were taken prisoner: There are conflicting bits of testimony concerning the fate of Khost. In the “Testimony by Uri Finkel,” http://rakowshtetl.com/UriFinkel_8.htm, Rakov survivor Uri Finkel writes the following: “Thus did our shtetl lose the active ones of our Jewish community still in the first days of the fascist occupation. Further on, in addition to the 255, the shtetl lost the active Soviet educators from the Jewish school and a few other employees, who were evacuated and then overtaken by the Germans near Minsk and were with the Minsk Jews as the first victims. Among them were the teacher Kehas Goldshteyn [Khost]. . . . Together with them were about a dozen Rakov intellectuals and a dozen young men who arrived to be mobilized into the Red Army and ended up with the rest. Of these I know Sholem Finkel (Fayves), M. Chayet (Ade . . . ), I. Kaplan (Israel Moshakhezes), Aizik Katz, and others. The ten who remained alive escaped from the Minsk ghetto. The relatives of 50 Rakov families were in the Minsk ghetto. A much larger number ran away to other shtetls, many to Krosne, not believing the provocations of the commander, that the Jews who were sent to a work-camp would not be killed. Many of these were murdered along the way, not knowing where to turn.” But another Rakov survivor named Hillel Eidelman wrote to Sonia from Rakov on July 20, 1945: “I was with your brother-in-law [Khost] in the German camp, where the murderers killed him. I would write more, but my hands are trembling as I tell you such terrible news.” Eidelman does not specify which camp it was. Khost’s fate after June 27 is unknown, but from Eidelman and Finkel it seems clear that he was captured outside Minsk and killed in a camp in the vicinity of Minsk—most likely Maladzyechna.
the Lithuanian police were on hand to divide shoppers: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 51.
every Jew in Vilna had to wear two badges: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 25. Dates and details about patches versus armbands differ slightly from one account to the next. See Kruk, The Last Days, p. 57. What is clear is that the Nazis kept changing the rules in order to confuse the ghetto prisoners and provide themselves with excuses for roundups and murder.
“They Snatch Whole Streets”: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 52.
“What is happening in Ponar?”: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 66.
a paramilitary police force that reported directly to Hitler: Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 2002), p. 4. My account of the organization of the Einsatzgruppen and the killing pits at Ponar relies heavily on Rhodes. I also consulted The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads’ Campaign Against the Jews: July 1941–January 1943, by Yitzhak Arad and Shmuel Krakowski (New York: Holocaust Library, 1989), pp. vi–vii.
Dr. Alfred Filbert, a lawyer: It’s not entirely clear that Filbert was in charge of Vilna. Filbert was head of Einsatzkommando-9 at the time and this was the unit assigned to Vilna, but his name does not appear in any records attached to this period. The Web site deathcamps.org says that Horst Schweineberger and Martin Weiss were in charge of the Sonderkommando of EK-9 situated at 12 Vilenskaia Street in Vilna—but Weiss and Schweineberger seem to have come later. Balberyszski in Stronger Than Iron confirms that Weiss and Schweineberger came later and that Schweineberger directed the establishment of the ghetto in September 1941. Rhodes in Masters of Death, p. 223, notes that Filbert later had a nervous breakdown.
an auxiliary force of 150 men cherry-picked from the Lithuanian political police: Rhodes, Masters of Death, p. 54.
“The graves are to be leveled . . .”: Quoted in Rhodes, Masters of Death, p. 48.
“between about twenty and fifty. . . . These prisoners were really quite well-dressed . . .”: Quoted in Rhodes, Masters of Death, pp. 54–55. I rely heavily on Rhodes’s account, p. 55, of Ponar at the time of the killings and for eyewitness accounts. I visited Ponar in 2011, but the pits had been smoothed over and trees had grown up. Old photos from the war also helped me visualize the scene. I used Rhodes’s vivid and carefully documented account as the basis for what I imagine were the circumstances of Shepseleh’s death, though the exact details will never be known. The idea that he was rounded up early in the occupation and killed at Ponar is speculative—but Tsipora Alperovich, who was in the ghetto, said during our interviews in Tel Aviv that this was his fate (though she did not see him snatched).
“We all said to one another . . .”: Quoted in Rhodes, Masters of Death, p. 57.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: “AKTION”
“Until further notice, about 200 persons are being liquidated daily”: The Einsatzgruppen Reports, p. 52.
The prisoners, according to one account: “Testimony by Uri Finkel.”
rounded up fifty-five Rakov Jews: The size and composition of the group varies from account to account: In “Testimony by Uri Finkel” Finkel states there were forty-nine victims, most of them young men; The Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Report No. 36 puts the number at fifty-eight. My account is a composite of Finkel and “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation” in www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/rakov/rkv_pages/rakov_stories_occupation.html.
A Rakov Jew named Moshe Pogolensky: “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation” in www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/rakov/rkv_pages/rakov_stories_occupation.html.
One day the Germans announced: “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation,” Ibid.
Some of the tortures could have been concocted only by madmen: Details from Eliach, There Once Was a World, pp. 580, 584.
People were “driven out of their minds”: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 44.
Some boys put on their father’s work clothes: Ibid., p. 53.
“The children did not complain”: Ibid., p. 47.
“Who has inflicted this upon us?”: Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), p. 207.
CHAPTER NINETEEN: VILNA GHETTO
On August 6 he told the Judenrat: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 35.
“Lines of people march on both sides . . .”: Kruk, The Last Days, pp. 83, 86.
In the course of two days Hingst evicted: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 58.
The Einsatzgruppen report broke down the numbers: Rhodes, Masters of Death, p. 137.
wild new rumors: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 95.
“Better stop thinking”: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 96.
“a picture of the Middle Ages”: Yitskhok Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto: June 1941–April 1943 (Tel Aviv: Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1973), p. 30.
“A bundle was suddenly stolen . . .”: Rudashevski, The Diary, pp. 31–32.
“The Lithuanians drive us on . . .”: Ibid., p. 32.
Anyone who could not be crammed: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 83.
CHAPTER TWENTY: YOM KIPPUR, 1941
Maiden Form, now one of the largest family businesses: Evans, They Made America, pp. 314–315; Maidenform Collection.
Itel and William bought an eighteen-room mansion: Details from Maidenform Collection and interviews with Sallie Cohen Goldwyn, various dates, and Marvin Sleisenger, Kentfield, California, November 10–11, 2010.
father was “a wonderful man . . .”: New York Post, September 6, 1964, on file at Maidenform Collection.
first accounts of the atrocities: David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 20. The subject of how much was known about the Holocaust in the United States and when is highly complex and controversial. Yehuda Bauer in American Jewry and the Holocaust, p. 187, says that “There can be no doubt that anyone who read the papers, listened to the radio, or read the daily reports by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) had access to all the information about Europe’s Jews that was needed to establish the fact that mass murder was occurring.” Bauer notes that Yiddish papers in the United States published “accounts of the mass murders in Vilna as early as March, 1942.” “Until June, 1942, all this information was admittedly scattered. Nobody imagined a campaign of mass annihilation, and the information was always presented in a form which allowed for doubts as to its veracity.” According to Bauer, the Bund sent the first “authoritative and exact report of a general plan to annihilate Polish and, by implication, European Jewry.”
See also Henry L. Feingold, Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995). Feingold says in part that the American Jewish community failed to speak out against the Holocaust because the community was disunited, bent on assimilating, had no effective leaders, had shed its communal religious traditions, and thus had no general public forum they could use to oppose the slaughter.
At 8:50 in the morning on September 3: Details on the Maidenform strike come from newspaper clippings from September and October 1941, in the Maidenform file of the Bayonne, New Jersey, public library; journal name has been omitted from the clippings, but the articles are apparently from the Jersey Journal and Bayonne Times. Additional articles, many undated or with the journal name omitted, are from the Maidenform Collection.
Clippers and operators working on the piecework scale: Clipping from Bayonne library, no title or journal name, November 4, 1941.
A survivor named Uri Finkel: “Testimony by Uri Finkel.”
When all 112 men were dead: I have relied on the account of the killings recounted in “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation” in www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/rakov/rkv_pages/rakov_stories_occupation.html, but there are several different accounts of this massacre. A survivor named Nachum Greenholtz is quoted as follows in “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation”: “I was among the people who were taken from the market in Rakov to the road of Buzmanu, where a hundred and twelve Jews were annihilated. A few others as well as I were able to escape. The Germans shot at us but I ran quickly to the forest. I spent the night there and in the morning I returned home.” Greenholtz’s relative Adi Grynholc, who has done extensive research into Rakov history, insists that Nachum’s accounts of Rakov during the war are the most reliable.
At some point during that Yom Kippur: My account of Beyle’s death and Etl’s existence in the Rakov ghetto is based on conversations with my Israeli relatives, and their information in turn came from conversations with their mother, Sonia. Unfortunately, Sonia did not tell her children how she came to know about the killing of Beyle or that Etl and her daughters survived the first rounds of shootings. It’s likely that one of the Rakov survivors told her—possibly Hillel Eidelman, who wrote letters after the war about the dire situation in Rakov.
The British adopted a strict policy: Arthur Koestler, Promise and Fulfilment—Palestine, 1917–1949 (New York: Macmillan, 1949), p. 59.
Finally, the Turks ordered the ship: Kramer, A History of Palestine, p. 300; Koestler, Promise and Fulfilment, p. 63.
“The tortures lasted for hours . . .”: Volozhin Yizkor book, p. 534.
“Life in the Ghetto grew harder . . .” : Eliezer Leoni, ed., Wolozin: The Book of the City and of the Etz Hayyim Yeshiva (Tel Aviv: Wolozin Landsleit Association of Israel and the USA, 1970), p. 32.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: WONDER GIRL
Nazi officers convinced the Rakov Judenrat: “Testimony by Uri Finkel.”
“Many such shameful and worn-out lies: . . .”: Rakov Yizkor book.
Murder by gas would be perfected: Timothy Snyder, review of “The Auschwitz Volunteer,” by Witold Pilecki, New York Times Book Review, June 24, 2012, notes that Zyklon B was used at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor.
In the six months between June and December 1941: Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 189.
By the end of 1941: Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 186.
Heydrich announced that the Reich’s goal: “The Wannsee Conference and ‘The Final Solution,’” U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Web site, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005477.
February 4, 1942: This date is from The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos During the Holocaust, edited by Guy Miron (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009); other accounts, including “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation,” put the date at February 2, 1942.
all assembled in the courtyard: Accounts of the liquidation of the Rakov ghetto and the torching of the synagogue have serious discrepancies and I agonized over which account to choose in narrating this event. The essential difference concerns whether the ghetto prisoners were shot outside the synagogue and the corpses then thrown into the synagogue and torched, or whether the prisoners were herded into the synagogue and then incinerated alive. Ultimately, I chose the latter because more sources give this account. I also followed the advice of Adi Grynholc, who has researched this episode thoroughly. It’s possible, as my friend Ivan Doig speculated, that both accounts have some truth: it could have been that the Nazis began shooting the prisoners in batches and at some point decided that it was taking too long—there were 950 men, women, and children to kill—and so they herded the remainder into the synagogue and set the place on fire.
A group of six witnesses: “The Destruction of Rakov Jews” report written in August 1945, in “Memory to Volozhin Region,” www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/volozhin1/Volozhin1.html#TOC.
Moshe Pogolensky gave a different account: “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: BREAKDOWNS
“I was torn,” he recalls: Interview with Leonard Cohn, Stamford, Connecticut, August 5, 2011.
Two rabbis imprisoned in the stifling house: Volozhin Yizkor book, pp. 33–34.
Itel managed to secure a “declaration of essentiality”: Evans, They Made America, p. 314.
Itel’s campaign to “safeguard the value and goodwill of Maiden Form’s name”: www.apparelsearch.com/names/M/Maidenform/Maidenform_Brands.htm.
Gold, though restricted, was still available: Cohen, As I Recall, p. 80.
Twenty-three years old in 1942, Rose was a pretty: Interview with Rose Rubenstein Einziger and her daughter Laurie Bellet, Walnut Creek, California, February 27, 2010. Also unpublished diary that Rose Rubenstein kept as a young woman.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: DESPAIRING PEOPLE
another nine thousand souls had been slaughtered: www.deathcamps.org/occupation/vilnius%20ghetto.html.
“the blood-drenched delusion”: Rudashevski, The Diary, p. 36.
Doba had no permit: Most sources, including www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/terrible_choice/ter002.html, note that only those who held permits were allowed to live in Ghetto 1—the Large Ghetto where Doba and the boys were recorded in the 1942 census. But Tsipora Alperovich, in interviews in Tel Aviv, June 8, 2010, and March 29, 2011, described visiting with Doba and her sons in the ghetto and insisted Doba had no permit.
He was a good man, a confirmed bachelor: H. Kazdan, ed., Teacher’s Memorial Book (in Yiddish; New York: Committee to Perpetuate Memory of Deceased Teachers, 1954), pp. 284–285. Yitskhok Senicki is mentioned on p. 233 of Kruk, The Last Days; the footnote to this page states that “He was killed in a camp in Estonia.”
the average “living space” in Vilna ghetto: www.deathcamps.org/occupation/vilnius%20ghetto.html.
She remembered that he suffered serious hearing loss: Tsipora Alperovich in the June 8, 2010, interview said that Shimon suffered hearing loss after contracting meningitis—but from the letters it seems that he suffered some hearing loss after contracting scarlet fever as child. It’s possible that Tsipora was mistaken or confused. The extent of Shimon’s deafness is unknown.
“the insanely wild conditions of life . . .”: Mark Dvorzhetski quoted in Rudashevski, The Diary, p. 16.
“The book unites us with the future”: Rudashevski, The Diary, p. 106.
“the same sad ghetto song . . .”: Rudashevski, The Diary, p. 73.
“Frozen, carrying the little stands on their backs: . . .”: Rudashevski, The Diary, pp. 91–92.
“Let us not go like sheep . . .”: www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/vilna/during/responses_to_the_murder.asp?WT.mc_id=wiki.
to arm his Jewish ghetto police with guns: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 562.
“An American incursion has landed”: Rudashevski, The Diary, pp. 93–94.
Battle of Kasserine Pass: H. R. Knickerbocker and Jack Thompson, Danger Forward: The Story of the First Division in World War II (Washington, DC: Society of the First Division, 1947), pp. 13, ff.
Seventy years later, Len: Interview with Leonard Cohn, Stamford, Connecticut, August 5, 2011.
“Today the terrible news reached us . . .”: Rudashevski, The Diary, pp. 138–140.
Gens, though by some accounts he secretly supported: www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/terrible_choice/ter002.html.
“The chase after Wittenberg went on for hours”: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 241; www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/gens.html.
Gens coined a slogan: Kruk, The Last Days, p. xlvi.
A throng of “underworld characters . . .”: Kruk, The Last Days, p. xlvi.
“Look, Jews are standing in the street,” Abba Kovner told Wittenberg: www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/terrible_choice/ter002.html.
signaled the beginning of the end: Kruk, The Last Days, p. xlvi.
Of the eighty thousand Jews living in Vilna: deathcamps.org.
At Ponar alone, some seventy-two thousand Jews: Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 192.
“No other Jewish community . . .”: deathcamps.org.
By then Jacob Gens was dead: Gens remains an extremely controversial and enigmatic figure. Some believe that as the ultimate pragmatist he saved many Jews from death, doing the best he could in an impossible situation. Others write him off as a megalomaniacal collaborator—a traitor, a perpetrator of shameful deeds, and a leader who was taken in by German lies and ended up “pushing others to their deaths.” For a good discussion of Gens’s contradictions, see www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/terrible_choice.ter002.html.
At seven o’clock on the morning of September 23: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 265.
“Screaming obscenities . . .”: Lily M. Margules, Memories, Memories: From Vilna to New York with a Few Stops Along the Way (Annapolis, MD: Lighthouse Press, 1999), p. 69.
“As soon as we passed the gate . . .”: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 265.
“It is naïve, absurd, and historically false . . .”: Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Summit Books, 1988), p. 40.
“Germans tore into our columns”: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 266.
“there were two rows of Gestapo . . .”: Sonia Pauline Beker, Symphony on Fire (New Milford, NJ: Wordsmithy, 2007) pp. 58–59, quoted in www.untilourlastbreath.com.
“I don’t know how to describe the sound and the smell of death . . .”: Margules, Memories, Memories, p. 72.
“No, they won’t do this to you”: Beker, Symphony on Fire, pp. 58–59, quoted in www.untilourlastbreath.com.
“Ukrainian guards walked among the half-sleeping people . . .”: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 662.
the gas chambers at Sobibor: I have found a number of conflicting accounts about the liquidation of the women and children of the Vilna ghetto. Some sources, including Vilnius Ghetto Lists of Prisoners, vol. 1, Vilnius: Jewish Museum, 1996, say that the women who were not sent to Kaiserwald (labor camp) were exterminated at Majdanek concentration camp—not Sobibor. Balberyszski in Stronger Than Iron also cites Majdanek. Other sources, including Howard Margol, a past president of LitvakSIG at Jewish Gen and a well-known expert on the Vilna ghetto, says the women were all transported to Ponar and shot there. Dr. Rose Lerer Cohen wrote the following in an e-mail of October 25, 2012: “From The Holocaust in Lithuania a Book of Remembrance published by Rose Lerer Cohen and Saul Issroff—I found the following references—between June and November 1943 Jews from the Vilna Ghetto were transported to Kaiserwald and on 23–24 September 1943 3,500 prisoners were transported from the Vilna Ghetto—males to Estonia via Siauliai and women were transported to Kaiserwald. The weak were murdered on the spot. The remaining prisoners were transported to Stuttoff, and from there the children were transported to Auschwitz together with their mothers. Others were transported to Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Natzweiler and Neuengamme.”
However, Zvi Bernhardt, a researcher with the reference and information services of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, wrote the following in an e-mail message dated October 31, 2012: “According to [Yitzhak] Arad’s 2004 book History of the Holocaust Soviet Union and Annexed Territories volume 2, pg. 572–573: 1400–1700 younger women were sent to Kaiserwald, 4000–4500 were sent to Sobibor and a few hundred were shot in Ponar. Arad’s 1980 book Ghetto in Flames is still considered the authoritative book on the Vilna Ghetto.” However, in Ghetto in Flames (New York: Holocaust Library, 1982), Yitzhak Arad writes the following on p. 432: “About 1,600–2,000 of the males assembled at Rossa Square were dispatched to camps in Estonia, and 1,400–1,700 women to Latvia, totaling 3,000–3,700 persons. Another 4,300–5,000 women and children were sent to the Majdanek gas chambers, and several hundred elderly and sick people were shot at Ponar.”
Many questions remain unanswered—and will never be answered—about the final months of Doba’s life and about her death. My narrative choices were based on the following: the majority of the prisoners recorded in the May 29, 1942, census were still alive when the final liquidation of the ghetto was made on September 23–24, 1943—therefore it seems logical to conclude that Doba was among them; Yad Vashem’s researcher has identified Arad as the authority on the Vilna ghetto and Arad says in his most recent account that “4000–5000 were sent to Sobibor”—so again, it seems logical to conclude that Doba and Velveleh were among those. I have been unable to resolve the question of whether the women and children of Vilna who were selected to die perished at Majdanek or Sobibor, about which Arad himself offers conflicting accounts.
My intention was that Doba would represent the thousands of Jewish women in Vilna whose stories have never been recorded—so I chose to narrate her final days to reflect the most common experiences.
For details about the gas chambers at Sobibor, I relied on Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp, by Jules Schelvis (Oxford: Berg Press, 2007), pp. 99–113. Schelvis cites two contemporary accounts of transports arriving at Sobibor from Vilna (p. 220).
Gestapo Chief Kittel did the counting: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 268.
One hundred of the old and feeble: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 662.
“People started to cry”: Saul Slocki testimony in the archives of Beit Lohamei Haghetaot (The Ghetto Fighters’ House), Israel.
the train halted at Klooga . . . on Wednesday, September 29: Anton Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), p. 301; Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 286.
The next morning they gave him a cup of chestnut coffee: These details on life in the camp come from Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred, and from interviews with Tola Urbach, Adele Jochelson, and Michael Turner recorded by the USC Shoah Foundation, Institute for Visual History and Education, archived at Stanford University Library, Palo Alto, California (among other libraries). In Stronger Than Iron, Balberyszski noted that roll call was usually held at 6 P.M. and initially was not so bad—only gradually did it become a torture.
Gradually the daily quotas were raised to nineteen, thirty: Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred, p. 303.
“Everywhere [the strong ones] are the first ones . . .”: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 680.
“They would use the roll call to punish ‘offenders’ . . .”; When Kurt Stacher: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, pp. 286, 301; and Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred, p. 304.
Michael Turner watched SS guards: USC Shoah Foundation testimony.
“The hunger was unbelievable”: Tola Urbach, USC Shoah Foundation testimony.
The food ration was “neither enough to live on nor to die on”: This quote and details about camp life are from Kruk, The Last Days, pp. 685–687, 690.
Occasionally the slaves sang Hebrew songs: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 678.
Some of the men smuggled prayer shawls: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 301.
A few written traces: These traces were located by research wizards Leah Teichthal and Rita Margolin at Yad Vashem and William Connelly at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Mr. Connelly helped me translate the German and interpret the various terms on the forms.
One hundred were shot after three prisoners succeeded in escaping: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 306.
In June 1944, Klooga had 2,122: Statistics for Jewish forced-labor camps in Estonia, September 1943–June 1944, based on monthly reports by camp chief physician Franz von Bodman, archived at Yad Vashem.
“Everything is being liberated . . .”: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 698.
Itel was also doing her bit: Information on the pigeon vest from Maidenform Collection and Evans, They Made America, p. 314.
“mighty explosions and bombardments,” “Soon you will be liberated,” and “You can sense the front . . .”: Kruk, The Last Days, pp. 699, 694, 702, respectively.
transferred to Danzig: Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred, p. 307.
The 301 healthy men: My description of the last hours of Klooga comes from Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred, pp. 311–313; testimony of Tola Urbach, Adele Jochelson, and Michael Turner, USC Shoah Foundation. Also Kruk, The Last Days, p. 685, and Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, pp. 314–315. For the appearance of the funeral pyres, I relied on the extensive photo archive at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
491 could be identified: Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred, p. 318.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: POSTWAR
For Future Generations: Kruk, The Last Days, epigraph.
Shalom Tvi booked the first available passage: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, File Series A-File, File Number A-2958053, records relating to Sholom Kahanowicz.
hundreds of thousands of Arabs: The exact number is a source of heated controversy—with estimates ranging from 335,000 to nearly a million depending on the source.
In 1998, an estimated 15,672 refugees: www.palestineremembered.com/Tulkarm/Wadi-al-Hawarith/index.html.
the Jewish population of Israel almost doubled: Kramer, A History of Palestine, p. 320.
print ads crafted by Mary Fillius: Reichert, The Erotic History of Advertising, p. 145, and Evans, They Made America, p. 315. Material at Maidenform Collection, Series 1: Company History, 1922–1990, states that Kitty D’Alessio “worked extensively” on the Dream Campaign and may have originated the idea.
The tagline was so catchy: Evans, They Made America, p. 315.
“The edge of Vilna Street stayed intact”: Zelig Kost in Rakov Yizkor book. Additional information from telephone interview with Estelle Trooskin, December 2011, and interview with Inda Epstein Goldfarb, Freehold, New Jersey, July 26, 2010.
Hyman includes one paragraph: Cohen, As I Recall, p. 82.
“Auschwitz,” writes Yale historian Timothy Snyder: Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” The New York Review of Books, July 16, 2009, www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jul/16/holocaust-the-ignored-reality/.
“First, I can’t afford it”: Maidenform Collection.
EPILOGUE
So Shimon Dov is my great-great-grandfather: Technically I am not a Kohain because membership in the priestly caste passes from father to son.