The Fish That Ate the Whale (23 page)

Sam Jr. was attached to the Western Desert Air Force, which consisted of British, South African, Canadian, and American fliers. There were fighter wings, bomber wings, reconnaissance wings. P-51 Mustangs and Hawker Hurricanes stood tail to nose on the runways. It was extremely dangerous work. The German antiaircraft guns were only part of the problem; the real challenge was the landscape, the fog that settled on the desert floor, the hills that rose up from nowhere. Show me a picture of Allied pilots from the North African campaign—tanned, dark eyed, happy—and I will show you young men who did not survive.

Here's a photo of Sam Jr. taken in the fall of 1943. He's broad shouldered and handsome in his flight suit, aviator's cap, goggles pushed back on his head, hands in his pockets, smiling as the landing strip behind him swarms with vehicles. He was assigned a P-51 modified for photo reconnaissance. He flew dozens of missions, the desert falling away, the sky filling with stars. He flew over the German lines into enemy territory. He photographed military camps, ridges, beaches, artillery positions, and guns, the hazards Allied infantry would have to face. He was transferred to a base in Algeria, where the mess hall buzzed with men from a half dozen nations. He was probably happiest in the sky, when the world was a pattern of lights. He set out again and again, his plane creeping to the end of the runway, the go signal, the rush of speed, the hills suddenly far below. Recon pilots in the Desert Air Force had to fly dangerously low to get their pictures, brush the rooftops of towns, swing out over the sea to escape.

Sam Jr. took off at sundown on January 7, 1943. The ground crew would see him closed in his helmet, closed in his head. Then he was a star on the horizon, fading as it goes away. He vanished over the hills or into the sea. No one is sure exactly what happened—it's a puzzle without a solution. The best guess: Major Samuel Zemurray Jr., thirty-one, having lost his way in heavy fog, flew his P-51 into a mountain. There was a flash when the fuel tanks ignited, then darkness. I don't know when Zemurray Sr. got the news. There was often a delay of days or even weeks before word made it back to the family. It's impossible to express the horror he must have felt: one moment there was a world full of people and markets, the next moment there was nothing.

The story was reported in
The
New York Times
on February 4, 1943.

NEW YORK MAJOR KILLED

Samuel Zemurray Jr. Loses Life in Plane Crash in Africa

Major Samuel Zemurray Jr., son of Samuel Zemurray, president of the United Fruit Company, was killed Jan. 7 when his plane struck a mountainside on a scouting expedition somewhere in Africa, according to word received here yesterday. He was 31 years old. The major left the United States last October for foreign duty. He had seen action in Casablanca and later was assigned to service in Algeria.…

A memorial was held at Temple Sinai on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. It was the saddest thing of all—a funeral without a body. For a time, Zemurray had clung to the hope that Sam Jr. had escaped the wreck and was still alive, lost and wandering in the desert. The memorial ended such fantasies. The service was led by Rabbi Julian B. Feibelman. Zemurray wept as he chanted the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, the rhythms falling on the hushed heads of the congregants:
Yis'ga'dal v'yis'kadash sh'may ra'bbo.
… Standing beside Sarah, he suddenly looked very old.

Friends and family gathered at 2 Audubon Place afterward. It was the start of the shiva, the seven-day mourning period that follows a death.

Rabbi Feibelman chronicled these events in his autobiography,
The Making of a Rabbi
, starting with a description of “the banana king,” an “innately modest and retiring [man who] wore no conspicuous prominence on his sleeve.”

“His son Samuel Jr. was the first casualty in the Second World War among our members,” Rabbi Feibelman wrote. “I offered to have a memorial for the family on the Friday evening following the announcement of his death. Mr. Zemurray came, together with his wife and closest friends. After services I went to his home, the imposing, white columned house on the avenue … I was told he had gone for a walk in Audubon Park, across the avenue. When he returned, we shook hands and spoke solemnly. He still spoke with an accent, but I was always impressed with his well-chosen words and his unfailing manner of projecting his expressions with precise meaning. ‘Rabbi, I never believed my son was dead. I toyed with the idea that he was still alive in spite of contrary reports. But when I listened to you recite the Kaddish … then I knew he was dead.'” Zemurray paused, wiped away his tears, then said, “Well, you've opened the wound all over again. But now it can heal.”

It was the blackest period in his life. Historic events transpired—the invasion at Normandy, the dropping of the atomic bombs—but he did not notice. All these things (soldiers on the march, men returning from war) were seen as if from a great distance. The war ended on August 14, 1945. V-J Day. In New Orleans, the squares filled with sailors. The men got drunk. The mothers wept with joy. Sam did not know what they were celebrating. The first peacetime shipment of bananas arrived soon after. He did not care. Everyone I spoke to who knew Zemurray—there are fewer each year—told me the death of Sam Jr. was the great tragedy of the old man's life. He came out of it and got back to work, but he was never the same.

 

17

Israel Is Real

Sam Zemurray needed a project to take him out of his trance, a cause bigger than his own. He would find it in the nascent state of Israel.

Here's how it started:

In 1922, Zemurray was contacted by Chaim Weizmann, who would become the founding president of the Jewish nation. Weizmann had been traveling the United States when he heard his first Banana Man story. “I made an unusual ‘find' in New Orleans, where lived a very remarkable personality in American Jewry—Samuel Zemurray, the banana king,” Weizmann wrote in his autobiography. “I paid my first visit to New Orleans specially to meet him. He had been told of my arrival and postponed his own planned departure from the city for several days—days which I found not only extremely interesting, but also profitable for the Funds.”

The men met several times that year. Their conversations lasted for hours, drifting from English to Russian to Yiddish, whatever language best expressed the thought of the moment: English for money, Russian for struggle, Yiddish for the heartaches faced by a Jew in the world. Weizmann talked about his hometown in Poland, his disappointments and anger, his realization that the Jew will be free only when settled in his own land. Zemurray talked about life on the isthmus, his career in ripes and greens. “Throughout all [his] success Zemurray retained his simplicity, his transparent honesty, his lively interest in people and things, and his desire to serve,” Weizmann wrote. “His chosen studies in leisure hours were mathematics and music, and he got a great deal of satisfaction out of them.”

In his memoirs, Weizmann took time to chronicle the career of Zemurray. Few Jews of that generation could resist the story, which unfolds like the legend of the Hebrew giant, gloriously free from the constraints of stereotypical Jewish life. For men like Weizmann, Zemurray was the
shtarker
, the tough Jew called on in dark times, the archetype of Willy Loman's Uncle Ben in Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman
, who laughs as he says, “Why, boys, when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by god I was rich!”

Zemurray did not have a strong sense of Jewish identity. It was never how he described himself, his religion being just another detail in his biography: a citizen of New Orleans, a foe of Huey Long, a resident of the isthmus, a trader of bananas, a man of the Hebrew persuasion. The fact that neither of his children married Jews, raised Jewish children, or much cared about Jewish causes tells you that Sam did not dwell on the subject at home, obsess, or fill his children with fear of the goyim. When offered the freedom of America, which is not only freedom here and now, but also freedom from the past, freedom to choose what to remember, he grabbed it.

And yet, like more than a few such men—European-born Jews who shrugged off ethnic identity as soon as they touched American soil—Zemurray became, in late middle age, a champion of Zionism. In part because of the personal connection with Weizmann; in part because of his sympathy for the early Zionists, Eastern European Jews who, like Zemurray himself, seized control of their own destiny. He gave them as much support as he could. “Zemurray was one of the highlights of my visit to the States,” Weizmann wrote. “I never missed an opportunity of seeing him on later visits. He did not take a public part in our work; but his interest has been continuous and generous.” Zemurray donated half a million dollars to the Jewish Agency in the 1920s, money used to buy land for settlers, build houses, buy farm equipment and seed. He served as director of the Palestine Economic Corporation, which put him in league with Louis Marshall, Felix Warburg, Samuel Untermyer, and Herbert Lehman, among the most powerful Jews in America. In 1926, he gave $700,000 to build a power station in Palestine, a gift reported in
The New York Times.
He met Weizmann again in 1939, soon after the British issued the hated White Paper, which banned immigration to Palestine, closing a last path of escape just as Hitler moved into the most murderous phase of his war on the Jews. Weizmann found Zemurray “depressed, yet hopeful of the ultimate outcome.” In the early 1940s, Sam used his influence in the Caribbean to help convince Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic to accept several hundred Jewish refugees from Europe, a harried contingent that settled in Sosúa on the country's northern coast.

Although Zionism was important to him, it was never a primary concern in Zemurray's life. This changed in the last days of the Second World War for two reasons: the death of Sam Jr., which left Sam bereft and in need of a cause; and the death of everything and everyone in the old country. It's hard to explain the effect of the Holocaust on men like Sam Zemurray. Self-made Americans who had always felt secure in their adopted country, they were suddenly reminded, in the middle of life, of the true nature of their condition. No matter his wealth or power, the Hebrew would always be a stranger in a strange land, vulnerable to the slightest shift in the popular mood. If it could happen in Germany, it could happen anywhere.

What's more, as the details emerged—six million—men like Zemurray came to regard themselves as all that remained of a lost world. The Jews of Europe had been a remnant of an ancient kingdom. The Jews of America were thus a remnant of a remnant, invested with special responsibility.
It's up to us to see it never happens again
was the sentiment of the moment. For many, the only solution was the creation of a Jewish state. Not only would it protect the living, providing shelter and a place of refuge, it would redeem the millions who had died.

Shortly after V-J Day, Zemurray received a call from a Zionist operative who had been charged with procuring ships for the Bricha, the secret effort to smuggle Holocaust survivors out of Europe and into Palestine, then under British blockade. His name was Ze'ev Schind. There was a joke going around Tel Aviv: David Ben-Gurion said, “Find me a man who knows everything about ships.” But because of his Polish accent, this was written down as “Find me a man who knows everything about sheep.” Which is why they recruited Schind, a twenty-five-year-old shepherd from a kibbutz in Palestine.

Of course, Schind was not just a shepherd, he was also a member of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. (He would take command of the Mossad in 1947.) Weizmann advised Schind to contact Zemurray as soon as he reached the United States. When Schind explained what he needed, Zemurray said, in essence, Not on the phone. Come down to Louisiana. Let's talk.

One morning in 1946, Schind, who worked out of the Jewish Agency at 342 Madison Avenue in New York, caught a plane from Idlewild Airport to New Orleans, then hired a car that took him north to the plantation near Hammond. Twice a year, the grounds bloomed with azaleas. Zemurray opened the door. His back was stooped, his hair was turning white, there was a tremor in his voice, but he was still imposing. His entire life was expressed in each gesture: his handshake, his smile, the flick of his eyes that said, “Follow me.” He led Schind to a kind of lodge in back of the house. The men sat by the windows. The country was swampy and green. Beautifully moody. The strip where Sam Jr. used to land his plane had already disappeared beneath chokeberry and sumac.

“What do you need?” asked Zemurray.

Schind explained the situation: There were a million Jews in displaced persons camps in Europe, many of them in Poland, in what had been concentration camps, now being run by American soldiers. These people, who had emerged from the fires of hell, were all that remained of Jewish Europe. America would not take them, France would not have them, the Russians jailed or deported them. The White Paper was still in effect, barring their entry into Palestine. When some tried to return to Poland, they found their houses occupied by people who chased them away, beat them, or killed them. There was a pogrom in Kielce, Poland, in 1946, a town I once saw from the window of a car, its streets ominous and mean. I've mentioned this pogrom in previous books because I find it unbelievable: to kill Jews after the Holocaust, or to survive the death camps only to be murdered when you have finally made it home.

On May 22, 1945, two weeks after Germany surrendered, Weizmann wrote to Prime Minister Winston Churchill and asked him to revoke the White Paper. Churchill told Weizmann such matters would be attended to when “the victorious Allies are definitely seated at the Peace table.” This angered Weizmann, who, on June 5, sent a second letter: “I had always understood from our various conversations that our problem would be considered as soon as the German war was over: but the phrase ‘until the victorious Allies are definitely seated at the Peace table' substitutes some indefinite date in the future. I am sure that it cannot have been your intention to postpone the matter indefinitely, because I believe you realize that this would involve very grave hardship to thousands of people at present still lingering in the camps of Buchenwald, Belsen-Bergen etc.”