The Family Read online

  VIKING

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  First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by David Laskin

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  Photograph credits

  Insert photo 3: © World Monuments Fund

  27: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Esther Ancoli-Barbasch. The views or opinions expressed in this book and the context in which the image is used do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of, nor imply approval or endorsement by, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

  29: Maidenform Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

  All other photographs courtesy of the author and his family

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Laskin, David.

  The family : three fates in the twentieth century / David Laskin.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-101-63804-0

  1. Kaganovich family. 2. Jews—Belarus—Biography. 3. Laskin, David, 1953– 4. Jews, Belarusian—United States—Biography. 5. Jews, Belarusian—Palestine—Biography. 6. Valozhyn (Belarus)—Biography. I. Title.

  DS135.B383A155 2013

  929.20973—dc23 2013017047

  Maps by Virginia Norey

  To my cousin Benny Kahanovitz,

  who saved the letters and shared the history

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  FAMILY TREE

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  VOLOZHIN

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE MOVE TO RAKOV

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE BOYS

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LOWER EAST SIDE

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE BIRTH OF A BUSINESS

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SOCIALIST IN A BLACK SATIN DRESS

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FIRST WORLD WAR

  CHAPTER NINE

  PIONEERS

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE DEPRESSION

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “WE WILL BE GLAD TO TAKE YOU BACK”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  IN LOVE IN THE LAND

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  RETURN TO RAKOV

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “THE WORLD OF TOMORROW”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SECOND WORLD WAR

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  UNDER THE BIG ONES

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “THEY SNATCH WHOLE STREETS”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “AKTION”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  VILNA GHETTO

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  YOM KIPPUR, 1941

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  WONDER GIRL

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  BREAKDOWNS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  DESPAIRING PEOPLE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  KLOOGA

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  POSTWAR

  EPILOGUE

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  GLOSSARY

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Your eyes saw my unformed body;

  all the days ordained for me were written in your book

  before one of them came to be. (New International Version)

  Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance,

  And in Thy book they were all written—

  Even the days that were fashioned,

  When as yet there was none of them. (Jewish Publication Society)

  —PSALM 139.16

  INTRODUCTION

  It all started, like so many family stories, with a plausible fiction—honest mistake, faulty memory, bit of embroidered imagination that got repeated so many times it became family truth. My mother told me that her cousin Barbara told her that Barbara’s parents had always insisted Stalin’s notorious henchman Lazar Kaganovich was a relative of ours. “Iron Lazar,” one of the prime culprits in the “famine genocide” that killed millions in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933, does indeed share my mother’s family name—Kaganovich or Kahanovitz (“son of Kagan”) in Russian, HaKohen (“the priest”) in Hebrew, Cohen in English—and there is some family resemblance in the old photos. He was born in 1893, the same decade as my grandfather Sam and his brothers, one of whom distinctly remembered that even as a little boy Lazar was mean and nasty—a mass murderer in the making. Here was the clincher. If Lazar Kaganovich was my grandfather’s cousin, that meant he was also cousin to my grandfather’s sister Itel, known to the world as Ida Rosenthal, the founder of the Maidenform Bra Company. What a story! While one cousin was raking in millions selling bras and girdles the other was engineering the famine that killed as many as 7.5 million people in Ukraine. The Entrepreneur and the Madman. From Madison Avenue to the Kremlin. Uplift and Oppression. I dreamed I was in the Politburo in my Maidenform bra. . . .

  Too bad it isn’t true. At least the part about Lazar. When I pressed my mother for more details—exactly how were we related to this monster? where does he fit on the family tree? who’s in touch with his descendants?—she drew a blank and suggested I e-mail our cousin Shimon Kahanovitz in Israel. Shimon has an interest in family history, my mother said, and he’ll know, if anyone does. I wrote Shimon a breathless message outlining my exciting new idea, and asked what he knew about our kinship to “the Wolf of the Kremlin.” Shimon’s response was brief and definitive: “Many years ago I asked my mother Sonia about him. She told me that Lazar Kaganovich is not part of the family.”

  End of story. Or rather, end of one story, beginning of another.

  Shimon’s phrase “not part of the family” got me wondering. Who exactly was part of this family of Cohens and Kaganoviches and where were we all? I knew about the relatives in Israel—I’d met Shimon and one of his nieces many years earlier—but I had no idea how or why or when they had ended up in the Middle East while the rest of us went to the States. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, my mother’s parents, Sam and Gladys Cohen, used to visit Israel for a month or two every year. They sent us Jaffa oranges; I wrote them aerogrammes on thin blue sheets that a fold and a lick magically transformed into thin blue envelopes. When they got back home, they always had a lot to say about Uncle—whose uncle or why he lacked a first name I never knew and never thought to ask. That was more than forty years ago; I was a teenager, barely interested in my American relatives let alone distant kin in Israel. “Uncle,” the oranges, and the aerogrammes lodged in my mind. Everything else washed over me and kept on going.

  But now that I had opened a line to S
himon, I was curious—more than curious, “beguiled,” as Alice Munro described herself when she began “rifling around in the past” in search of her own family’s story for her autobiographical collection The View from Castle Rock. I began peppering Shimon with e-mails, and bit by bit the story emerged. Shimon explained that the reason I have relatives in Israel is that his parents, Chaim and Sonia, both of whom were first cousins of my grandfather, made aliyah (literally “ascent”) to Palestine in 1924 and 1932, respectively. Chaim and Sonia could have gone to New York like my grandfather Sam and his sister, Itel, and their siblings and parents, gotten hired by Maidenform or the wholesale business (flatware and small appliances) that Sam and his two brothers ran, pulled down a tidy salary, and moved to the suburbs. But instead they chose the Holy Land. They were young, wildly idealistic Zionist pioneers—halutzim is the Hebrew word—bent on reclaiming the Land through “the conquest of labor.” In the 1920s, Chaim and his comrades tried to farm a parched rocky slope in the mountains above the Sea of Galilee and later helped found a cooperative agricultural village north of Tel Aviv. Sonia ran the family farm, raised four children, set a sumptuous table any Jewish mother would be proud of. Together they suffered malaria, poverty, an unforgiving climate, the hostility of Arab neighbors, and decades of relentless toil—and they survived to witness the violent birth of a new nation. In photos Shimon sent me, the young Chaim and Sonia look as tan, gorgeous, and happy as movie stars.

  So no, Stalin’s willing executioner does not hang on our family tree. Instead, through Sonia and Chaim, we have a stake in the story of Israel.

  But there’s more. The mysterious Uncle turned out to be Sonia’s father, Shalom Tvi Kaganovich. He was, by all accounts, a loving, sweet-tempered man who, together with his pious wife, Beyle—my grandfather’s aunt—ran a mildly prosperous leather shop and factory in a small village near Minsk. When Sonia went to Palestine in 1932, Shalom Tvi and Beyle remained behind with their two other daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren. The parents and sisters worried constantly that Sonia would be lonely or hungry or hot or poor or forced to eat nonkosher food or taken advantage of by randy halutzim. The terrible irony, of course, is that nine years later, all of them were imprisoned by the Nazis—all except Shalom Tvi, who by chance had come to visit the family in New York, in July 1939, two months before the Second World War began, and thus escaped the catastrophe.

  As a child writing aerogrammes to my grandparents in Israel, I knew about the Holocaust, but somehow it never occurred to me that the Holocaust had anything to do with my family. I dimly recall hearing that Uncle’s family was “trapped” in Europe after he had come to the United States in 1939. Yet I never asked what happened to them, never wondered about why they had stayed and suffered while the others emigrated and prospered. Though they were my grandfather’s aunt and first cousins, I never heard him mention any of their names. Two clicks on a Web site conjured their photos onto my computer screen—these relatives I never knew I had. Why was the name of the wicked Lazar Kaganovich batted around at family gatherings but never a mention of Doba, Etl, Shabtai, Khost? I took it for granted, as I studied the photos, that I would never learn anything more about them. What they experienced under the Nazis, I assumed, had been erased. I was wrong on all counts. Two years of research and travel to our towns and cities in Belarus and Lithuania have yielded staggering discoveries.

  I thought I knew about the Holocaust—or Shoah (“catastrophe”) as it is called in Hebrew—but my knowledge was made of clichés and blind horror. I thought I knew about my family but I discovered that I knew almost nothing. My grandparents and great-grandparents came to America to escape the ethnic and religious hatred that had poisoned Jewish life in Eastern Europe for centuries—and I had always assumed they succeeded. They did well in America; we, their descendants, are still enjoying the fruits of their hard work and imagination. We are living the lives they wanted for us. But despite their best efforts, they could not keep us from the nightmare of history. The three branches of my mother’s family endured and enacted the great Jewish upheavals of the twentieth century—mass immigration to the United States, the founding of Israel, and the Shoah. My grandfather and his first cousins fought in two world wars, ran two successful businesses, copied Torah scrolls, planted citrus groves in Palestine, lived in a mansion by the sea on Long Island, and watched tanks draped in swastikas grind through the boulevards of Vilna. One family—three fates. The story had been hiding in plain sight all my life. It took a shattered myth and a sifting of the remnant shards to make me see it.

  —

  I am a product of the baby boom. I grew up in a plush leafy suburb of New York City with other privileged kids from Eastern European Jewish backgrounds. Madison Street on the Lower East Side, where my grandfather lived in a cold-water tenement flat with his parents, two brothers, three sisters, and a boarder, is less than twenty miles as the crow flies from my parents’ house in Great Neck—but there may as well have been an ocean between them. Though I knew my grandparents were immigrants, I had no idea where precisely they had come from (Russia? Poland?) or why they had left—and I never thought to ask. I knew I was Jewish because they were Jewish, but what did being Jewish mean for a child born on Long Island in 1953? At the reformed synagogue my parents made me attend, I hated the repetitive prayers, the rabbi’s faux-folksy tales about Minsk and Pinsk, the defensive pride, and the self-congratulating liberalism. I quit when I was sixteen. By then I had found my true spiritual home in literature, and Judaism seemed like an archaic, artificial barrier between me and the great world of fiction, poetry, drama, epic I longed to inhabit. The older I got, the more I thought of myself as different from my family, especially the Cohen side. I had no head for business; my Judaism had dwindled down to culture, cuisine, and Bible stories; I forgot the Hebrew that had been drummed into me. I belonged to Greenwich Village, London, Paris, Rome, maybe James Joyce’s Dublin—certainly not to Jerusalem, Vilna, Minsk. As for my immigrant relatives, they struck me as a bunch of stout people with accents who got together at holidays to eat too much and talk too loudly. Itel, of course, was rich and famous after the Dream Campaign made Maidenform a marketing icon, but she was remote, chilly, imperious, more like a boss than an aunt (oddly, though all of her siblings adopted their Americanized names, she was always Itel in the family, even if they called her Ida in her Time and Fortune profiles). My grandparents loved us, plied us with delicious heavy food, tolerated the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew prayers we had learned at the reform synagogue (they adhered to the Ashkenazic pronunciation—“Shabbas” not “Shabbat”). They spoke to us rarely and reluctantly of the “Old Country.” My family, I assumed, was about business, not history. History belonged to pioneers in their prairie schooners, young soldiers mown down at Gettysburg, west African slaves chained in the holds of wooden ships, sons and daughters of the American Revolution. Not to us.

  Now I see how wrong I was. History made and broke my family in the twentieth century. My grandparents and their cousins were born into a world of tradition and religion that had lasted for centuries and died in the course of four years. In America, my grandparents, great-aunts, and -uncles were part of a huge influx of immigrants—some 23 million between 1880 and the 1920s—that transformed the culture, economy, accent, complexion, and politics of the nation. Sonia and Chaim’s struggle to make a new life in Palestine was as heroic—and tragic in its consequences—as the settling of the American prairie. Sonia’s father, Shalom Tvi—the “Uncle” in my grandparents’ stories—in his own modest way stood at the crossroads not only of the family but of the Jewish twentieth century. He left Europe on the brink of the abyss, watched helplessly from America as war swallowed his family, frantically awaited word or sign or scrap of news. As a child growing up, I heard about the oranges Uncle sent from the orchard, the modern appliances he brought with him from New York to his daughter’s farmhouse at Kfar Vitkin, the palms that grew by the beach on the Mediterranean where
he loved to swim. No one told me that during the six and a half years he lived in the same house with my mother and her parents, Uncle went out of his mind with anxiety over the fate of his wife, two daughters, two sons-in-law, and four grandchildren in Europe. Were he alive today to read these words, Shalom Tvi would shake his head in humility and deny it, but in his life, his loss, his wanderings, he connected the three branches of the family and bound them together, emotionally and morally. Though they lived on three continents, they were a real family joined by love, need, guilt, worry, religion, culture, cooking, sense of humor, and outlook on life—in short, by Jewishness.

  I don’t know why my grandparents and parents never spoke to me about the Shoah. But I know they were not alone. Saul Bellow mused eloquently on this question in a letter he wrote to Cynthia Ozick in 1987: “We (I speak of Jews now and not merely of writers) should have reckoned more fully, more deeply with it. Nobody in America seriously took this on and only a few Jews elsewhere (like Primo Levi) were able to comprehend it all. . . . Growing slowly aware of this unspeakable evasion I didn’t even know how to begin to admit it into my inner life. Not a particle of this can be denied.”

  I am not proposing to take on this “unspeakable evasion” but rather to give light, life, words to one facet of it—my family’s facet. The stories I never heard occurred at the same time and to the same family (the same generation of cousins) as the founding of Israel and the businesses booming in New York. The three stories—the three branches of the family—belong together. They twine into one inextricable strand. This story, then, is not about the branches in isolation but about the tree. That tree has stood many thousands of years—and, God willing, will stand many thousands more.

  —

  My grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and great-great-great-grandfather were Torah scribes—and for all I know the tradition goes back to the days before the Diaspora. The texts I compose and redact are not sacred, but I am a kind of scribe as well. I count myself proudly among the people of the book. I commit to paper the stories of those who came before me. What we have done, what we have lost, what remains, what we can pass on—this is the scope of my work. The family work, as I now understand.