The Family (6 page)

The fact that Bloody Sunday fell on Itel's nineteenth birthday was a coincidence. Who could blame her, though, if she took it as a sign? All over Russia, young revolutionaries were on fire at the news. Bloody Sunday was the moment they had been waiting for. In the immediate aftermath, strikes broke out—some four hundred thousand workers in the major cities walked off their jobs in protest within hours of the slaughter. The numbers were most impressive and solidarity most intense in the Bund strongholds of the northern and western sections of the Pale. Warsaw, Vilna, Lodz, cities with large well-organized Bundist operations, were all but shut down. Bund organizers moved swiftly to capitalize on the popular outrage. “Comrades! We have flooded the earth of Russia with our blood, and now freedom is blooming from this earth,” one Bund leader exhorted the ranks of the new “soldiers of the revolution.” “
Attack the stores where arms are sold! Everyone get a gun, a revolver, a sword, an ax, a knife! Arm yourselves! . . . Let us give up the blood of our hearts and receive the rights of human beings!” It was the zenith of the Bund's power and influence and glamour.

In Rakov, the local Bund came out of hiding and organized strikes at some of the larger factories; Rakov workers declared their solidarity with revolutionaries in the bloodstained streets of the capital. Thanks to the Bund, Rakov's Jews had weapons; thanks to the uprising, they had political will and momentum. Now what they needed was a leader. With Wolf in America—he had arrived at Ellis Island on January 26 with $1.50 to his name and the address of an uncle in Manhattan in his pocket—Itel stepped up to the task. Every Monday and Friday—Rakov's market days—Itel stood in the market square to rail against the injustice of the autocracy. Commanding beyond her years and height, she was a fiery orator and a born leader. And her moment—the moment of all Russia's downtrodden workers—was at hand.

The strikes continued into February and March. The peasants joined the uprising. There were rumblings of mutiny in the army. Riga, Warsaw, Lodz saw bloody street battles. Students shut down the universities; doctors and lawyers and journalists voiced their support for the workers. Pogroms, always the shadow of upheaval in Russia, erupted in the Pale—though in
many places armed Bundists were able to counter the violence. In fact, the Bund seemed to be unstoppable in those first magnificent months of 1905. “
It could achieve everything, reach everyone,” one Bundist declared with fierce, hopeful pride. “The word of the Bund was law; its stamp worked like hypnosis. . . . It was legendary.”

Sadly, the legend was no match for the flypaper of custom and the noose of authority. In the way of small towns, Rakov's police chief was a customer at Gishe Sore's shop, and he strolled in one day to give her a bit of friendly advice. Either her rabble-rouser of a daughter stop making speeches in the marketplace or he would personally have the brat arrested, spanked, and thrown in jail.

Itel had no intention of rotting in Siberia like Wolf's brother and sister-in-law. And anyway, her heart was in New York.

In April of 1905, as the last patches of snow retreated to the depths of the pine woods, Itel left Russia and its revolution in the care of her fellow Bundists. She packed up what she could call her own, tucked away a slip of paper with the address of her uncle Joseph in Hoboken, and bid farewell to her mother, father, three younger brothers, and two small sisters. A horse-drawn wagon brought her to the nearby town of Olechnowicze and there she boarded a train that took her, after many changes and border crossings, to Rotterdam, the same port Wolf had embarked from three months earlier. “I couldn't live without him,” Itel confessed later. It was like something out of a novel: they were each other's first love and only love. They would never be apart again.

Together, Itel and Wolf would bring revolution to America—though it proved to be a very different kind of revolution than the one they had fled.

—

The year of revolution was a year of tragedy for the family of Shalom Tvi. Worldly and easygoing, Shalom Tvi had settled comfortably into his new life in Rakov. His wife's family was rich, the leather business brought in a tidy income, there was enough work to keep him busy but not so much that he couldn't enjoy life. And enjoying life was important to Shalom Tvi. Not a scholar like his brother Avram Akiva, not a revolutionary like his niece, not a restless seeker after fortune like the relatives in America, Shalom Tvi was
a charming, faithful, self-possessed man, and he and Beyle should have reaped the blessings of a large, loving family.

It was not to be.
In the first years of their marriage, Beyle bore her husband two daughters—Shula, named for Beyle's mother, in 1900; and Doba, round and adorable, three years later. But in the year of revolution, Shula died. No record survives of what disease or accident carried off the firstborn child or the exact date of her passing. More than a century later she is still faintly, sadly, remembered.

T
he 1905 revolution went on without Itel and Wolf. All spring and summer, demonstrations, mutiny, and assassinations were rampant in Russia. Since the uprising had blown the lid off government censorship, newspapers were free to report on the protesters' demands and the growing solidarity between workers and intellectuals. Every day, there was a fresh account of a policeman or government official gunned down or ripped to pieces by a bomb. The countryside was literally on fire as peasants torched the manor houses of the great landowners and divided the estates. As the year went on, spontaneous local flare-ups spread and merged until they took on the character of a true national revolution. The climax came in October, when a general strike spread from Moscow and St. Petersburg to the far reaches of the empire, shutting down the railroads and crippling the economy. Cornered and desperate, the tsar issued a series of concessions known as the October Manifesto granting his subjects limited democratic representation along with an array of civil liberties, including freedom of religion. Bundists hailed the “Days of Freedom,” but the violence continued unchecked.

Then the violence metastasized. A group calling itself the Black Hundreds—a proto-fascist confederation of die-hard tsarists, Russian Orthodox zealots, arch-nationalists, ethnic purists, urban workers, displaced
peasants, and drunken thugs—took to the streets in counterrevolution. Once more, Jews were targeted. “
The root of all evil, the root of all our misfortunes is the Jews,” proclaimed one of the insidious leaflets that circulated through Russia's cities. “Soon, soon a new time will come, friends, when there will be no Jews.” In October and November of 1905, the Black Hundreds instigated the deadliest pogroms in Russian history. Over one thousand Jews were slain in some six hundred communities, primarily in Ukraine. For three days the anti-Semitic violence raged in Odessa. Scores died in Kiev, Zhitomir, Ekaterinoslav. Kishinev exploded again. Isaac Babel, who lived through the Odessa pogrom as a boy of eleven, described the ecstatic release of anti-Semitic rage in his sketch “The Story of My Dovecote”:

A young muzhik [Russian peasant] was smashing a window frame in the house of Khariton Efrussi [a wealthy Jewish wheat merchant]. He was smashing it with a wooden hammer, his whole body steeped in the movement. He breathed in deeply, smiled in all directions the gentle smile of drunkenness, of sweat and hearty strength. The whole street was filled with the crackling, crashing song of shattering wood. . . . Old men with painted beards were carrying the portrait of a neatly combed Tsar, banners with sepulchral saints fluttered above the religious procession, inflamed old women were running in front of it. When the muzhik in the vest saw the procession, he pressed the hammer to his chest and went running after the banners.
 . . .

Though Bundists fought back, they were no match for the Russian mob. The revolution had become “drenched in a
torrent of Jewish blood,” one Bundist wrote in despair.

—

Fearing that violence would spread to their own shtetl, Rakov Bundists dispatched a delegation to Minsk to purchase more weapons—two Finnish knives and seventy rubber clubs—but Itel's brothers stayed out of it. One revolutionary was enough for the family. The three sons of Avram Akiva—Hersch now seventeen, Shmuel sixteen, and Chaim Yasef thirteen—were not inclined to make speeches in the marketplace or fire guns in the forest.
The boys were becoming men in a world that was splitting beneath their feet, but they were still Kohanim, descendants of Aaron, the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of priests and scribes. A daughter might play at insurrection; it was a son's duty to protect his father's name and the family reputation. But what future could they expect in a country where a thousand Jews were slaughtered in the street while their king tutted about the “
brazen, insolent way” of the victims? The boys looked around at the shul, the market, the fields, and the woods and saw no future for themselves. To work as a butcher, carpenter, tailor, shoemaker was out of the question for the sons of the scribe. But they were too restless and ambitious to settle down to a life of Torah. “It would please the parents,” Chaim Yasef wrote, “but the sons were not agreeable.” And so, between tradition and revolution, they chose a middle course. They learned to fix watches.

Hersch was apprenticed to a watchmaker in the nearby town of Smargon, and in 1906 his younger brother Chaim Yasef joined him. The brothers rented a room in the house of a local freight carrier (“the conveyance was his own back”) and on every morning but the Sabbath they went off together to Mr. Rudnick's little shop, in the center of town, to master the craft of repairing clocks and watches. Hersch, with a bit of experience under his belt, was paid two rubles a week; Chaim Yasef a quarter of that. The boys worked hard, dined on crumbs, and lived like monks—but during the year they spent together in Smargon they forged a bond that endured all their lives. The apprenticeship was like boot camp, and the brothers emerged from it comrades—though they never ceased to be rivals.

Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore's seven surviving children were arrayed symmetrically by gender—two girls, then three boys, then two more girls. Having three sons one after another in the space of four years is a sure formula for internecine warfare, and the Kaganovich boys were no exception. Whenever they were together under one roof, the atmosphere turned stormy. Hersch, the first son, was a born diplomat—funny, calm, soft-spoken, nice-looking—but where Hersch put out fires, Chaim Yasef, the domineering youngest son, started them. Where Hersch negotiated, Chaim Yasef provoked. Once he truly became a man, Chaim Yasef had a rough barking voice, which he used, mercilessly, on those he considered his inferiors. If you quailed, Chaim Yasef barked more; if you barked back, he
backed off. The person Chaim Yasef barked at the most was Shmuel, the middle brother. He was born to be insulted. Thin-skinned and bighearted, Shmuel was tense, stocky, loyal, and volatile. Shmuel grew up to be the most pious of Avram Akiva's children—he was the only one of the sons who learned the art of the scribe from his father—but being close to God did not make him serene or confident. Little things set him off, especially things done by his brothers, and then you never heard the end of it. Later in life, Shmuel became intensely jealous, even a touch paranoid, about the bond between his brothers. That jealousy first became acute during the year when Hersch and Chaim Yasef lived together in Smargon. For whatever reasons, the family decided that Shmuel, instead of apprenticing with the other boys, should follow his older sisters to America. And so, in 1906, Shmuel sailed for New York and missed out on the ticktock boot camp. He never really broke into the rough easy camaraderie that Hersch and Chaim Yasef developed in Smargon. He was a good Jew, a hard worker, and an upright man. But he was not the favorite son or the favorite brother, and he knew it.

—

Premature death touched the family again in the year the boys left Rakov for apprenticeship and America. Avram Akiva's brother Arie died in Volozhin at the age of thirty-one. The only one of Shimon Dov's five sons who had chosen to remain in Volozhin, Arie was married and the father of two small children—a daughter, Chana, and a son, Yishayahu (the Hebrew form of the name Isaiah). But in 1906, with his wife Leah nine months pregnant with their third child, something happened—whether disease or accident has been erased by time. When the baby was born, they named him Chaim—
life
—after Shimon Dov's father. But Arie died before his new son was a week old. Chaim's bris took place during his father's shiva—an inauspicious way for a Jewish son to come into the world.

—

“
Repairing watches or clocks is fascinating and interesting, to those who love the work,” Chaim Yasef wrote of his apprenticeship in Smargon. “You get to revive a dead watch or clock by adjusting and replacing worn or broken parts (which part you had to make yourself). There was no such thing in those days or in that town as replacements parts, so when you finished
your work and brought the watch back to normal, useful life, you got a great feeling of professional pride.” However gratifying, dead clocks were not enough to keep Chaim Yasef's brother Hersch in Smargon very long. In June 1907, the oldest Kaganovich son put apprenticeship behind him and made his way to Antwerp, where he boarded the Red Star Line's
Samland
and set sail for New York. His older sister Itel, now Mrs. Ida Rosenthal, paid the fare, and she and Wolf, now William, were on hand to meet Hersch when he arrived at Ellis Island on June 28. Harry Cohen, as Hersch Kaganovich promptly restyled himself, was eighteen years old and five feet three inches tall, with dark hair and brown eyes. Bent on becoming an American as quickly as he could, he moved in with his relatives and went to work.

That left fourteen-year-old Chaim Yasef alone in Smargon, the last of Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore's sons in the Russian Pale. To save money, Chaim Yasef gave up the room in the freight carrier's house and set up a folding cot in the watch repair shop. “I became my own chambermaid. As companions I had the repaired clocks that struck the hour and half hour and the repaired alarm clocks that would go off at all hours of the night. The shop was located in the building where the owner lived so I was given the privilege of heating water on his stove to make breakfast usually consisting of a roll and tea.”

Chaim Yasef was a proud, lonely, brooding teenager in Smargon. He took umbrage at the snobbish aunt who offered to pay him to stay away lest her pampered children be contaminated by a poor watchmaker's apprentice who slept in the shop. He dreamed of landing a job at a fancy clock shop in Moscow or Petersburg. Preoccupied with his own sensitive feelings and glittering prospects, the boy failed to notice that all thinking people in the Pale were plunged in blank despair that year. By 1907 it was apparent that the revolution had failed utterly: after the Days of Freedom came the Years of Reaction, when hope of reform was crushed, pogroms raged, the Bund withered, and the net of surveillance tightened. Though the tsar had agreed in 1906 to an elected assembly—the Duma—it was dissolved after a few months of mostly ineffective debate and toothless investigation of official corruption. Freedom withdrawn is worse than no freedom at all. Now, in the aftermath of revolt, a drizzle of ash settled over the land. Hooligans of the Black Hundreds prowled city streets like wolves. The economy
stagnated. Those who suffered and those responsible for the suffering blamed the Jews for everything—the incitement to revolution, its failure, the sour revulsion that followed. Infected by the general virus, Rakov sweated, shivered, and cracked its aching joints. “The economic situation in our town is bad,” wrote one of the Botwiniks. “Poverty is on the increase, and emigration is getting stronger from day to day.” New Catholic churches were built in the neighboring villages—seemingly a matter of indifference to Jews, but in fact it hit the Kaganovich family hard. As Polish and Belarusian peasants flocked to churches closer to their farms, attendance at Rakov's church fell off—with the result that there was less traffic at Gishe Sore's general store. A Catholic merchant opened up a competing store in town—and priests urged their parishioners to boycott Jewish shops and buy only from their fellow Catholics. Business declined further.

Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore agonized about joining the exodus to America. Itel, Ettel, Hersch, and Shmuel—now calling themselves Ida, Ethel, Harry, and Sam—were already in New Jersey and urging them to sell out, pack up, and get out of Russia. The American children did the math—they had become very skilled with numbers: if the parents sold out in Rakov, if the sisters and brothers pooled their earnings, if the younger ones got jobs, if they all worked hard, if God smiled on them and gave them health, then they could live comfortably in America. They could live free—and they could live together.

Concern for their next-to-youngest daughter also factored in. Chana had developed an alarming cough—possibly a reaction to the damp atmosphere near the lake. The Rakov doctor thought a change of climate would do her good, and maybe there were better doctors in the New World.

The parents turned to Chaim Yasef, the oldest child still at home, for advice. “I see no future here,” the boy intoned with the wisdom of his seventeen years. “If I stay, it will not be in this town. One thing Rakov does not need is another watchmaker.”

By the spring of 1909, they had made up their minds. Gishe Sore and Avram Akiva found a buyer for the house by the lake, the cow, the calf, the garden. Rubles changed hands and the store that had fed the family for so many years passed to another shopkeeper. Avram Akiva assembled all the bits of parchment he had on hand—tiny scrolls for the mezuzot, pages for
the Passover Haggadoth and Purim megillahs, beautifully lettered prayers—and sold them to pious friends. The family went to Volozhin to say farewell to Shimon Dov. They found the patriarch hale but wizened and more alone than ever after Arie's death. Avram Akiva asked for and received his father's blessing. The men prayed together for the souls of the dead and the health of the living. Father and son must have known that they would never see each other again.

Before their departure, Rakov's mayor, who lived on the same street, made a state visit to wish them Godspeed and to announce solemnly that he had never seen a more upstanding shopkeeper or finer homemaker than Gishe Sore (he had clearly never tasted her cooking). Most painful was the parting with Shalom Tvi. The brothers had become inseparable during their decade together in Rakov, and despite their differences, they were alike in the ways that mattered. Once Avram Akiva and his family left, Shalom Tvi, Beyle, and their two daughters (Doba was six and the baby, Etl, was two) would have to keep the Kaganovich name alive in Rakov on their own. Shalom Tvi promised to visit one day. Avram Akiva promised him a clean bed and a place to say his prayers in New York.