The Family (10 page)

Shalom Tvi and Beyle were both devout, strict in their observance of the commandants. But they wondered how God could let them go about their lives—unwitting, heedless—while their beloved child poisoned herself to death.

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In March of 1916, the Russians tried to punch their way back toward Vilna with a massive offensive—more than 350,000 men, 282 big guns, a huge stockpile of artillery shells and poison gas, cavalry, infantry, machine guns, bayonets—the combined arsenals of traditional and modern industrial warfare. All to little or no avail. “Epic confusion” snarled the Russian push. In the end, the Germans held on to Vilna; the Russian army suffered losses of 100,000 men, and 12,000 more succumbed to frostbite. The Eastern Front remained where it had been.

The winter of 1916–1917 was a bitter one. The cold and snow were so intense that roads and rail lines became impassable and food deliveries were disrupted to Russian cities; what food got through was fantastically expensive due to rampant inflation. In Rakov, there were so few vigorous men left that the Russian authorities began pressing the elderly into forced labor. “They were put to work digging trenches, cutting down trees, and other forms of hard labor, in exchange for dry bread and water,” recorded one resident. “One cannot describe the great suffering of the town people during that period.” In Volozhin, still on the front line, all trade had come to a halt; a stamped permit was required to enter or leave.

Shalom Tvi managed to secure a permit for his father. A congenital worrier, Shalom Tvi had been going out of his mind at the idea that his eighty-one-year-old father was living all by himself in a starving town at the front. He greased a palm, got the necessary papers stamped, and brought Shimon Dov to live with him and his family in Rakov. The scribe had precious few possessions. He took up hardly any room in his son's house. Pious, charitable Beyle did everything she could to make her father-in-law comfortable.

The long years of war had eroded the patriarch's will to continue. Who would want to live in a world where Cossacks shredded the sacred Torah
and rolled tobacco in the pages of the Talmud? On February 4, 1917 (12 Sh'vat, 5677), with temperatures plunging across Russia and food shortages worsening, Shimon Dov HaKohen died. His body was laid to rest in the Rakov Jewish cemetery, the cemetery of exile. The deceased grandchildren—Shalom Tvi's daughters Shula and Feigele and the two babies lost to Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore—may have been buried nearby, but the stones of the children have disappeared and only Shimon Dov's headstone remains at the back of the cemetery near the fence. “He was strong in Torah, he will rest with the hands of the Kohanim,” reads the Hebrew inspiration—and a pair of hands, the thumbs almost touching, the fingers spread in priestly blessing, hovers over the text. It was a comfort to Shalom Tvi that his father's grave was at the cemetery's far edge. Descendants of Aaron are forbidden to enter a cemetery—but Shalom Tvi could walk to the side and gaze through the railing at the patriarch's grave while he recited the mourner's kaddish. As long as Shalom Tvi remained in Rakov, his father's soul would be attended to.

—

Abraham and Sarah were already in mourning when word reached Abraham that his father had died in Rakov. A few months earlier, their daughter Anna, a delicate black-haired girl of twenty-two, had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. On the advice of a doctor, Anna was packed off to a sanatorium in New York's Catskill Mountains, but it was too late to do her any good. Anna died on November 1, 1916, and Harry was dispatched to bring the body home. Sarah had now lost three of her nine children—two buried back in Rakov, and now Anna, dying alone in a sanatorium at an age when most young women were just starting their lives.

With the death of Shimon Dov, the mantle of the patriarch passed to Abraham, the firstborn son. And finally Abraham was in a situation worthy of a patriarch. After eight years in America, the golden door had creaked open for him a bit. The business was now bringing in enough money that the family was able to leave the Madison Street tenement and move into a clean modern apartment building in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, a short stroll from the East River. No more cold-water flat on the dingy courtyard. The Roebling Street apartment had steam heat and unlimited hot water.

The war in Europe was bringing prosperity to neutral America, and the Cohens and their business rose with the tide. Now when Abraham wrote to his brother in Rakov, he sent a little money along. And judging by Shalom Tvi's letters, the family in Rakov was going to need all the help they could get. Russia was once again in turmoil, and who knew where it would lead or when it would end.

—

On March 8, 1917, a month after the death of Shimon Dov, Petrograd, as Russia's capital was now called, erupted in protest.
It was International Women's Day, and thousands of disgruntled women—textile workers, students, peasants, even a scattering of society ladies—marched in the street to decry the lack of bread.
Police and Cossacks were called in, but they were powerless to suppress or disperse the crowd. For some reason,
no one had thought to issue whips to the Cossacks that day—an oversight with serious consequences. The uprising was reminiscent of 1905—with this signal difference: after three years of war and a winter of food and fuel shortages and unbearable breadlines, not only the people of Russia but also the army had reached the breaking point. The strike of March 8 (
February 23 in the old-style Julian calendar that was still in use in Russia) turned out to be the gust that brought down an empire: it was the start of the Russian Revolution. The following day the strike doubled in size, and two days after that, soldiers called in to quell the uprising turned on their officers in open mutiny.
The Petrograd chief of police, rounding on the protesters with a bullwhip, was surrounded, forced from his horse, disarmed, beaten with a piece of wood, and then shot through the heart with his own revolver. One week after the women of Petrograd took to the streets shouting “Bread!” the tsar was persuaded to abdicate. On March 21, the imperial family was placed under arrest.

Romanov rule was over. Yet it was far from clear what would take its place. In the power vacuum that followed the autocracy's collapse, an unwieldy power-sharing arrangement emerged in which a provisional government, representing the elites (progressive politicians, liberal landowners, bourgeois professionals and intellectuals), ruled side by side with the Petrograd Soviet, a grassroots council of workers, soldiers, and radical politicians that was modeled on the soviets (councils) that had sprung up
during the 1905 revolution. The assumption, or hope, was that the dual power arrangement would in time evolve into a single democratically elected government, but that was not what happened.
As of March 15, 1917, Russia had no head of state—but it was still committed to fighting a devastating war. Had the world been at peace, revolution might have ushered in a stable, possibly democratic future. But revolution in the midst of world war proved to be catastrophic.

The Jews of Rakov and Volozhin and a hundred other shtetlach at the front erupted in wild euphoria at the news that the tsar had fallen. But joy, as always in Russia, was tempered by anxiety. Revolution had exploded and fizzled before; upheaval yielded freedom first, then repression and pogroms. Meanwhile, the war continued, practically at their doorstep. Though more and more soldiers were melting away and returning to their villages, though the officer corps was in shambles, though radicalized workers and soldiers were demanding with rising stridency that Russia pull out, still the fighting on the Eastern Front went on with no end in sight. Rakov and Volozhin Jews were giddy with their new rights, but their sons, those sons who remained after two and a half years of slaughter, were still being marched off to fight and die.

—

Of the three Cohen brothers, Hyman was the most taken with Germany. He loved the precision of German workmanship on clocks and watches, and his first job in New York, before A. Cohen & Sons got started, had been for the German-based Kienzle Clock Company. When Kienzle's president came over to inspect the New York operation, he was so impressed with Hyman that he offered to bring him back to Germany and train him in the manufacture of clocks. Hyman would have jumped at the offer had his mother not refused to let him go.

When Europe went to war in the summer of 1914, Hyman was naturally sympathetic to the German side. He was not alone. Even if they didn't share Hyman's love for German craftsmanship, the majority of American Jews supported Germany because it was fighting against Russia, the land of the pogrom. Russia's enemy was their friend—it was as simple as that. The pro-German stance was reinforced by stories and letters that came from the Pale attesting to how much better Jews fared in territory conquered by
Germany. Under the Germans, there was no rape, no plunder, no desecration of synagogues. German officers billeted in Jewish homes were considerate, even kind. Germans laid down the law, but it was the same law for Jews and gentiles. So even though England and France were more appealing politically and socially than the Central Powers (Germany, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire), Jewish America had very little appetite for the Allied cause. Jewish socialists abhorred the war as a capitalist plot to distract workers from their legitimate struggle. Jewish moderates worried about the consequences of an Allied victory for their relatives still in Russia. Apolitical Jews shrugged their shoulders and thanked God that they had gotten out. But the consensus was that a Jew would have to be crazy to fight on the same side as the tsar.

Everything changed when revolution broke out in Petrograd. With the tsar gone, with Russian Jews granted full civil rights, suddenly the world was a different place—not only on Nevsky Prospect but on East Broadway. Even William and Itel's beloved
Forward
abandoned its socialist-pacifist stance to declare, “
There is nothing more to discuss. Feelings dictate, reason dictates, that a victory for present-day Germany would be a threat to the Russian Revolution and dangerous for democracy in Europe.” The revolution for which Itel and William had been chased out of Russia twelve years earlier had resurged and triumphed at last. At a stroke, American Jewry renounced Germany and realigned itself with the Allies. On March 20, five days after the tsar abdicated, twenty thousand American Jews packed New York's Madison Square Garden, shouting and dancing in the aisles to celebrate the revolution.

They were dancing on an earthquake. That same day, President Woodrow Wilson assembled his cabinet secretaries in Washington, DC, and sought their advice on the situation with Germany. Wilson had been reelected the previous November on the promise to keep America out of the war, but in the late winter of 1917 that promise seemed doomed to be broken. On February 1, the Germans announced their intention to resume unrestricted submarine attacks on Atlantic commercial shipping, and several American vessels were sunk by German torpedoes in the following weeks. In March, as revolution swept Petrograd, the American press intercepted and published the so-called Zimmermann telegram, in which
Germany's foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, was instructed to secretly enlist Mexico as Germany's partner in a war against the United States. Zimmermann was told to dangle the promise to “re-conquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona” as an incentive for Mexico to join with Germany. Public pressure on the Wilson administration to deal with German aggression had been mounting all winter, and the Zimmermann telegram was, in the minds of many, the tipping point. Wilson felt he no longer had any choice. He presented the options to his cabinet, and on March 20 they voted unanimously to go to war. Two weeks later, Wilson made his case before Congress. “The world must be made safe for democracy,” the president exhorted America's lawmakers—and the lawmakers agreed. The Senate reached its decision on the night of April 4—82 voted for war, 6 against. In the predawn hours of April 6, the House vote was tallied: 373 members of Congress in favor, 50 opposed.

Had the family stayed in Rakov, Abraham's three sons would have been drafted into the Russian army and sent to the front. But now, just when revolution had freed Russia's Jews, the war had crossed the ocean and crashed into their home in Brooklyn. None of the boys was safe from conscription after all.

—

June 5, 1917—National Draft Registration Day—dawned fair and mild over New York City with a soft breeze out of the south. The temperature had approached eighty the previous day—and what green there was in the city looked bright and fresh and miraculously clean. Nowhere more miraculous than in the tiny garden of the narrow three-story Williamsburg row house at 73 South Tenth Street, where the Cohen family had just moved from Roebling Street. At last, Abraham and Sarah had a home of their own—not a couple of rooms off a shared hallway but a whole house rising out of God's earth with a bit of grass in front and a small bed in back where Sarah could grow a few flowers and vegetables and remember her garden in Rakov. Harry and Hyman were careful when they left the house that morning not to crush a single precious leaf or blade underfoot. Freshly shaved, neatly dressed, and nervous as hell, the brothers walked together to the local polling place to register for the draft. Every male between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one was doing the exact same thing—not only in
New York City but from coast to coast all over the country. Citizen, immigrant, naturalized, disabled, disaffected—it made no difference: all had to register for the draft that Congress had been forced to reinstate in order to bulk up America's paltry army of 210,000 men (seventeenth in the world). Harry was twenty-eight, Hyman was twenty-four—right in the bull's eye of Uncle Sam's ten-year draft target—and so, they went off to do their civic duty along with 10 million other American males.

Sam, who was twenty-seven, wasn't with them because Sam was now a married man with a place of his own. Four years earlier, he had married a girl named Celia Zimmerman, a fellow Russian Jew, and the couple was now keeping house on John Street—not in Williamsburg, like the rest of the family, but in Brooklyn's Vinegar Hill neighborhood near the Manhattan Bridge. The two houses, though just a couple of miles apart, were in different precincts, so Sam had to go off by himself to register that morning. But before he could get out the door, Sam had to deal with his wife. Celia was flighty and high-strung and two months pregnant, and this war was making her frantic.
What if they took him? What if he never came back? What if he came back with his legs blown off?
In truth Sam was worrying himself.