The Family
Authors: David Laskin
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. JewsâBelarusâBiography. 3. Laskin, David, 1953â 4. Jews, BelarusianâUnited StatesâBiography. 5. Jews, BelarusianâPalestineâBiography. 6. Valozhyn (Belarus)âBiography. I. Title.
DS135.B383A155 2013
929.20973âdc23 2013017047
Maps by Virginia Norey
To my cousin Benny Kahanovitz,
who saved the letters and shared the history
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 writtenâ
Even the days that were fashioned,
When as yet there was none of them. (Jewish Publication Society)
âPSALM 139.16
I
t all started, like so many family stories, with a plausible fictionâhonest 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 nameâKaganovich or Kahanovitz (“son of Kagan”) in Russian, HaKohen (“the priest”) in Hebrew, Cohen in Englishâand 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 nastyâa 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.
Â
.
Â
.
Â
.
Too bad it isn't true. At least the part about Lazar. When I pressed my mother for more detailsâexactly
how
were we related to this monster? where does he fit on the family tree? who's in touch with his descendants?âshe 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 IsraelâI'd met Shimon and one of his nieces many years earlierâbut 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 Uncleâwhose 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 Shimon, I was curiousâmore 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 pioneersâ
halutzim
is the Hebrew wordâbent 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 toilâand 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, Beyleâmy grandfather's auntâran 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 Nazisâall 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 screenâthese 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 Holocaustâor Shoah (“catastrophe”) as it is called in Hebrewâbut 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 centuriesâand 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 centuryâmass 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 familyâthree 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.
â
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 Neckâbut 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
leftâand 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 Dublinâcertainly 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 pronunciationâ“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 immigrantsâsome 23 million between 1880 and the 1920sâthat 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 heroicâand tragic in its consequencesâas the settling of the American prairie. Sonia's father, Shalom Tviâthe “Uncle” in my grandparents' storiesâin 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 lifeâin 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 itâmy 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 storiesâthe three branches of the familyâbelong 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 yearsâand, God willing, will stand many thousands more.
â
My grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and great-great-great-grandfather were Torah scribesâand 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 onâthis is the scope of my work. The family work, as I now understand.
Though I have ceased to attend synagogue and don't claim my ancestors' knowledge or share their faith, I have come to love and revere the Judaism that sustained my family through the generations. The more I learn about them, the more amazed I am by the breadth and originality of their lives. Their daring, their drive, their inventiveness and ambition and confidence and secret melancholy strike me now like something out of Dos Passos or Isaac Bashevis Singer. They were giants; wittingly or not, they enacted epics. They gave me so much, these fierce, passionate immigrantsâmy life, my freedom and privileges, my education, my identity, my country. The least I can do is give their stories back to them.
