The Family (45 page)

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.