The Family (14 page)

The Battle of Soissons raged on without him for one more day. At the end of Sunday, July 21, the fourth day of fighting, the American soldiers still in action accomplished their mission of cutting German supply routes at the neck of the salient and driving the Germans back to a line running south from Soissons; the German retreat from the salient would continue for another month. Soissons was chalked up as a success—but the price was ruinous. A thousand men in the regiment's Third Battalion had gone into battle alongside Hyman on the morning of July 18;
only seventy-nine returned when the regiment was withdrawn on July 22.
The First Division Infantry as a whole suffered casualty rates (dead, wounded, gassed, missing) of 50 percent, and 75 percent of the infantry's field officers were knocked out. “The flower of the American Army had been cut to ribbons,” wrote one soldier in the regiment.

The generals, however, had cause to celebrate.
For the first time since
September 1914, the German high command had ordered a general retreat. Appalling as the casualties were, Soissons proved to be the beginning of the end of the war.

—

For Hyman, the war was over. “It would be foolish for me to say that I am well for this letter is written in a Hospital,” he wrote home on July 22. Two days later, he elaborated a bit—though he was clearly distraught and disoriented. “I am not well enough just now to go under the same strain that I was under recently while at the front. . . . I lived through days that a fellow does not have to make [illegible] to remember and if God will be as kind to me in future operations, as he has been in the last, then [these] days will always live in my memories.” Whatever memories he carried, Hyman never again wrote or spoke of them. “What's done is done,” he told the family.

The blisters raised by the mustard gas eventually closed and healed, though he would always have scars on the lower part of his chin and on his neck behind his left ear. Hyman remained in French military hospitals long enough to get thoroughly bored and restless. While nurses changed his dressings, he argued with the other wounded guys about which American state was the best (“I certainly have a heck of a time when I tell the Westerners and Southerners that New York is the only place”). In September he was well enough to go to Yom Kippur services. He boasted in a letter to his parents that “it is a known fact the First Division has done wonderful work.” It shamed him that the division was still in combat while he convalesced behind the lines. Indeed Company K, its decimated ranks filled out with replacement soldiers, fought at Saint-Mihiel and the Argonne, the massive American engagement that brought the war to an end on November 11, 1918.

Hyman finally returned to the States in February 1919. He went back to work in the business, married Anna, fathered two children. But in ways that counted, ways he would never speak of, Hyman's life was not the same. He had been in war. He had seen men get torn apart by exploding shells and bleed to death in a wheat field; he had marched into machine-gun fire and shot his rifle at enemy soldiers; he had been burned and scarred by poison gas. Hyman had passed a test that every man wonders about. His uncles and cousins in Russia had endured occupation and revolution, but they had
not been in the army; his brothers in America had spent the war building the business. Hyman alone had worn the uniform. It wasn't his choice to be a soldier. But he did his duty and was proud that he had. “What's done is done,” Hyman said when his family asked about the war. But that wasn't the whole story. To soldiers like Hyman—Jews, immigrants, naturalized Americans—the war made a critical difference. They all knew the stereotypes—pants presser, watchmaker, pale-faced scholar, slacker, coward. They knew the skepticism of the likes of Captain Quesenberry and Colonel Parker and Major General Summerall.
Is it possible to make soldiers of these fellows?
Hyman had seen for himself the new respect in the eyes of his officers and comrades after he returned from battle. It was a point of honor that the percentage of Jews in the U.S. Army was higher than in the civilian population. Two thousand American Jews were killed in action in the Great War; Jewish American casualties topped ten thousand; 72 percent of Jews in uniform served in combat units. Sarah had been devastated when her son was drafted, but she wept tears of pride when he came home to Brooklyn safe and mostly sound. Hyman's service bound the entire Cohen family more closely to America. One of their own was a Doughboy. When the Purple Heart—the American military medal bestowed on those wounded or killed in action—was reinstituted in 1932, Hyman was awarded one retroactively. He wore it proudly all his life.

—

It was different for the children and grandchildren of Shimon Dov who remained in the Old Country. An armistice was declared, a treaty was signed, but in Rakov and Volozhin, revolution and civil war continued. Indeed, the treaties that formalized the cessation of hostilities in 1919 proved to be less the end of the Great War than the beginning of the next one.

O
n November 2, 1917, British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote a letter to Walter Rothschild, Second Baron Rothschild, informing him with “much pleasure” that “His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Balfour vowed that his government would “use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

The Balfour Declaration, as Britain's new stance on the Middle East came to be known, transformed Zionism, at the stroke of a pen, from collective dream to political reality. World events hastened its realization. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed during the Great War, the British took control of a huge swath of the Middle East, including all of Palestine and Jordan. Under the terms of the British Mandate for Palestine, Britain became the de facto governor of the Holy Land, and the Balfour Declaration became state policy. Zionist claims and aspirations remained controversial, even in the Jewish community, but they would henceforth play a part in all negotiations over the future of the region.

The Balfour Declaration marked a turning point with immense consequences for the lives of millions of people, including two of Shimon Dov HaKohen's grandchildren. Balfour's brusque, three-paragraph letter was addressed to “Dear Lord Rothschild,” but Shimon Dov's grandson Chaim and granddaughter Sonia would count themselves among its recipients.

—

When the United States entered the Great War, the American army was rudimentary, its arsenal skeletal. The War Department was so famished for steel that its hungry eye fell on women's corsets. The hourglass figure then in vogue called for constriction of the waist and elevation of the bosom, and such feminine engineering required steel ribbing. Because bayonet blades and shell casings required steel too, there wasn't enough for both weapons and corsets. Bernard Baruch, the Jewish financier who managed the nation's flow of military equipment and supplies through the War Industries Board, issued a plea for American women to abandon their corsets.
Some twenty-eight thousand tons of metal, enough to construct a battleship, were thus diverted to the war effort.

Once fashionable women shed their ribs of steel, there was no going back.

The corset ban altered not only the way women dressed but how they walked and danced and worked and ultimately how they lived their lives. From a tear in the fabric of history emerged new fashion, new economy, new mores, new freedom, new lifestyle. And Itel, with her uncanny knack for being ahead of the curve, in this case literally, was on hand to make the most of it.

The Balfour Declaration and the passing of the corset, events connected only by time and war, would redraw the map of the world for a generation of young Jewish cousins just coming into their own.

—

The Great War was still raging in Europe in the winter of 1918 when Itel broke off diplomatic ties with the city of Hoboken. The breach was precipitated by a blizzard—two feet of snow with waist-high drifts dumped on the East Coast during a stretch of frigid weather. Snow is always inconvenient for the small business owner—but this was worse than usual because William was stranded in Manhattan and Itel had to fend for herself. When a
Hoboken cop told her she had to promptly clear the considerable expanse of sidewalk that wrapped around her corner house/dress shop, Itel hit the roof. “I couldn't ask a maid to do it, she would have quit,” she fumed. The cop refused to lend her a hand. So that left four-feet-eleven-inch Itel to battle the drifts by herself. “I was not built for snow shoveling,” she noted drily. “I resolved right then that I wouldn't spend another winter in Hoboken.” And she didn't.

Itel and William gathered Lewis, now eleven, their two-year-old daughter, Beatrice, and the child's nursemaid and crossed the river to Manhattan; sewing machines, dress forms, ironing boards, and bobbins followed behind in a horse-drawn wagon. They set up shop and housekeeping at 611 West 141st Street, between Broadway and Riverside Drive, nine blocks south of where Itel's brother Harry was living. Officially, the neighborhood was called Hamilton Heights after its most illustrious former resident, founding father Alexander Hamilton, who'd had a farm here at the turn of the nineteenth century, but people thought of it as Harlem. Not the elegant Harlem of Sugar Hill brownstones or the flashy louche Harlem of Lenox Avenue jazz clubs or the slum Harlem of tenements filling up with poor blacks from other parts of the city and the rural South: West 141st Street was immigrant Harlem, meat-and-potatoes Harlem, drab industrious Harlem of six-story brick apartment buildings and wide sidewalks shoveled by someone other than Itel. Itel and William turned the living and dining rooms of their ground-floor apartment into the dress shop, installed the children and maid in the back bedrooms, and got down to work. “Mrs. W. Rosenthal, Gowns,” read her business card. They even had a telephone—Audubon 6917. Most of the Hoboken clients remained loyal, and new ones came knocking soon enough. Friends had been urging Itel for years to relocate to Manhattan. Now she realized they were right. Thirty-two years old, crackling with energy and itching with ambition, Itel was now a
New York
dressmaker. Her dresses, their skirts growing shorter by the month, were selling for as much as eighteen dollars each. The big pond suited her.

—

Itel's timing was impeccable. When the war ended and the 1920s began to roar, she was firmly ensconced in Manhattan with her platoon of seamstresses ready to make beautiful uncorseted New York women even more
beautiful. One of those women was the director of the nursery school that Beatrice, called Bea, attended. This was clearly a nursery school director with taste and style and ready cash, for not only did she employ Itel to make her dresses but when she needed a hat she frequented Ferlé Heller's ultra chic millinery on West Fifty-seventh Street, just a few steps away from the posh precincts of Bergdorf's, Bendel's, and Jay Thorpe.

One day in 1921 the nursery director was browsing Ferlé Heller's latest confections when a small elegant woman with a musical English accent accosted her.
Where on earth had she picked up the divine dress she was wearing? Such craftsmanship, such detail and flair. Who was the dressmaker and how could she find her?
The bedazzled Englishwoman was Enid Bissett, the proprietress of a dress concession called Enid Frocks, which occupied a corner of Ferlé Heller's millinery. Mrs. Bissett's praise was not bestowed lightly, for she had seen plenty of lovely dresses in her day. In her youth, she had waltzed and shimmied her way across the vaudeville palaces of Europe as the female half of the Dancing Bissetts. When she crossed the Atlantic with her husband, Joe, she glided from show biz to couture, though she still had many useful connections in the theater. Refined and beguiling, Enid Bissett was one of those naturally stylish women whom people with more money and less taste like to have around. Though no longer in her first youth, she had the slender angular figure that looked wonderful in the sheath dresses just coming into fashion. Fifth Avenue socialites, Broadway starlets, society-page matrons, and flapper demimondaines who wanted to look like her flocked to Enid Frocks. Sophisticated ladies with money to spare paid Mrs. Bissett to make them look and feel beautiful.

Now, thanks to little Bea's nursery school principal, Mrs. Bissett had discovered Itel. A meeting was duly arranged and Mrs. Bissett made her way uptown to Hamilton Heights. She had a look around the dress shop, the whirring Singers, the girls bent over their works in progress. She liked what she saw, she liked Itel, she liked the intense quiet industry of the workshop. She decided to see how Itel did with some Vogue patterns for suits and dresses—essentially work on spec. Itel delivered, and Mrs. Bissett was more impressed than ever. “That little woman on 141st Street makes the others look like amateurs,” Mrs. Bissett confided. Itel was pleased but not surprised. She had never had any doubts about her superiority.

Mrs. Bissett made a proposal: she would provide the designs and fabrics; Itel would transform them into flawless dresses. The tastemaker and the dressmaker were perfectly suited to be partners. Mrs. Bissett had the contacts, Itel had the drive. Mrs. Bissett knew how to make a splash, Itel knew how to make clothing—or rather, at this stage, how to get other skilled women to make clothing to her order. Neither of them was afraid to try something new, as long as impeccable standards were maintained. They were a winning duo and their moment was at hand. Every fashionable woman in New York, it seemed, wanted an Enid Frock executed in the workshop of the Jewish seamstress with the golden hands. As the orders rapidly piled up, Mrs. Bissett came back with another proposal: they would go into business together on the condition that Itel give up her own customers and devote her workshop entirely to Enid Frocks. To seal the deal, Itel would need to pay in a cash investment of four thousand dollars.

Four thousand dollars was just about all the money she and William had. Her brothers advised against it. Fashion was notoriously fickle. What if the fancy ladies moved on and Enid Frocks fell from favor? Itel was a seamstress—what did she know from business? Even Ferlé Heller thought it made no sense for Itel to stake so much of her money and security. “Enid can afford it,” the milliner told her, “but you will sink whatever you have.”

Itel had a powerful instinct for opportunity and to her this looked like opportunity supreme. It was her chance to leapfrog the jobbers, the schleppers, the sweaty crowded middle and go right to the glittering peak of money and glamour.

She weighed the risks, calculated the potential profit, and made her decision. In the summer of 1922, Itel and William Rosenthal and Enid Bissett became
equal shareholders in a newly incorporated company called Enid Frocks, Inc.

Business was good from the start and it just kept getting better. Day in, day out, the shop door of the stone-clad, vaguely French Renaissance building at 36 West Fifty-seventh Street would swing open and another lovely customer—patroness, Mrs. Bissett liked to say—breezed in. Rich, of course, fashionable, bobbed, cloche-hatted, displaying the requisite inches of ankle and lower calf. The ideal Enid Frocks type. Alas, Itel knew at a glance that, when the dress was done, neither she nor the new patroness would be 100
percent happy. The problem was the patroness's bust. The problem, to be precise, was that she
had
a bust. Soft yet firm, full and swelling, round, smooth, perfectly symmetrical, the perfumed essence of American femininity made flesh—this lovely pair of breasts was doomed to be squashed into submission by the dictates of 1920s fashion. The flapper style du jour called for dresses to drop with barely a bulge or curve from neck to knee, and in order to achieve this sticklike silhouette a woman wore a flattener—“a towel with hooks in the back,” as Itel described it. These hideous mammary mashers were marketed under the trade name Boyish Form, which pretty much said it all. Itel knew from sad experience that no Enid Frock ever looked right when worn over a Boyish Form bandeau. It was a crime and shame for a chic well-endowed lady to spend upward of three hundred dollars, a fortune in those days, for her Enid Frock and come away with a less-than-perfect fit because of the cursed flattener. “It was a very sad story,” Itel sighed. “Our cheapest dress sold for a hundred and a quarter, and it just didn't fit right. Women were told to look like their brothers—that was just not possible. Nature made women with a bosom, so nature thought it was important. Why argue with nature?”

Mrs. Bissett had a brainstorm. She grabbed a Boyish Form bandeau, sliced it down the middle of the front with a pair of scissors, took the two edges and shirred each one to a small bridge of elastic so that they formed a pair of slightly bulging pockets. William was summoned to take a look. “If you want to wear something like that,” he harrumphed, “at least let me make you a nice one.” William was an artist, a
male
artist, and by the time he was done, it was very nice indeed. Satin shoulder straps were added; the pockets—the primordial cups—were fashioned of fine ivory-pink cotton net trimmed with silk rosebuds in pink and jade; the elastic center piece was shiny and striated; three tiny hooks were affixed to the back.
Mrs. Bissett christened the garment Maiden Form to distinguish it from the hateful Boyish Form bandeau.

Itel saw at once that her frocks fit better with a Maiden Form brassiere sewn into the bust or worn separately underneath, but it took the partners a while to realize what a hot commodity they had on their hands. At first every woman who purchased an Enid Frock got a Maiden Form bra for free. When the ladies came back marveling at how good the bit of mesh and
elastic made them look and feel, Itel offered to whip one up custom for twenty-five to fifty dollars a pop. She also kept a bowl of one-dollar ready-made bras on a table in the shop. The dress business kept booming—bras were just a sideline, a novelty item that the seamstresses ran off in their spare time. It was Broadway that made Maiden Form a star.

Mrs. Bissett may have moved uptown to cater to the carriage trade, but she and her husband, Joe, were still chummy with Broadway actors and actresses (especially the latter in Joe's case)—and Joe's female chums became the brassiere pioneers. Broadway had been lit up with energy and hot jazzy new music since the Great War ended, and it was ablaze the year the bra was born. Jerome Kern, Florenz Ziegfeld, Oscar Hammerstein II, and George and Ira Gershwin were cranking out one hit after another. Singing-dancing-shimmying starlets like Marilyn Miller, Billie Burke, Josephine Baker, and Adelaide Hall reigned as showbiz princesses (royalty without civil rights in the case of Baker and Hall, who were black). Chorus girls who strutted onstage half naked in George White's
Scandals
at the Globe Theater or
Ziegfeld Follies of 1922
at the New Amsterdam had no qualms about trying out a slinky new undergarment that made them look sexy, even if it broke with fashion. “The acting trade were the first customers because they were brave enough to uplift,” Moses (Moe) Rosenthal, William's brother and later the company's general manager, said. Where brave busty showgirls led, ordinary busty women were sure to follow. Transgression was in the air in 1922. Women had won the right to vote two years earlier; they smoked in public and no one batted an eye (Itel herself put away four packs a day); they scandalized their mothers with their clothes, dances, drinks (illegal as of January 1919), and love affairs. F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Beautiful and Damned
was a best seller that year, and he and Zelda were the toast of the town. Nowhere was the spirit of transgression headier and more pungent than on New York's Forty-second Street. What better locale to kick up a lingerie revolution? Joe Bissett hit every specialty shop between Forty-second and Fifth-ninth streets. He placed Maiden Form bras and racy little counter cards touting their virtues in the Astor Shop, in the Hotel Astor, and the Regina Shop, abutting the renowned Palace Theater vaudeville house. If a manager was reluctant to place an order, Joe got one of his chorine pals to sashay into the shop, demand a
Maiden Form, and storm out in disgust when told they didn't carry them. The next day a salesman came calling. “It was an extreme product but was accepted there [the theater district],” said one of the early salesmen.