The Family (15 page)

Getting it accepted elsewhere required greater powers of persuasion. “I would take it out, and when I showed them this little bit of bra, all hell would break loose,” recalled Jack Zizmor, who became a top salesman. “If it were the husband, he would call to his wife, ‘Come over here and see what this crazy guy is trying to sell me!' They laughed and they ridiculed us, and said, ‘This is a fly-by-night thing. It will die out next week, next month, next year.'” They didn't laugh for long. Within months the company was doing enough business that Itel and Mrs. Bissett had to take over the top two floors of the West Fifty-seventh Street building—the fifth floor for a workshop and the sixth-floor attic for processing and shipping orders. Ten employees were hired, most of them in sales. William, who had eleven siblings, put the arm on brothers and sisters. In 1923 the company had to relocate four times; that's how fast it was expanding.
In 1924 they registered the name Maiden Form as their trademark.

The Maiden Form bra was the quintessence of the 1920s—fun, novel, vaguely risqué, easy to mass-produce, perfectly promotable, seemingly frivolous but in fact eminently practical and instantly indispensable. No one had heard of a brassiere in 1920. By 1924, all the fashionable women had to have one. The daughter and granddaughter of scribes had stumbled on one of the pure products of America.

—

Nineteen twenty-four, the year that cemented the cornerstone of Itel's fortune, was also the year that the first of Shimon Dov's grandchildren made aliyah—literally “ascent”—to the Holy Land. After two thousand years, a Kohen returned to the place where Jews had become Jews.

Itel was not the only revolutionary in the family. In Volozhin, her first cousin Chaim, the third child of Shimon Dov's son Arie, fomented revolution by deciding all by himself that the time had come to end the exile. Chaim would not spend his life poring over sacred texts or dripping gallnut ink onto parchment. He shunned laws decreed by strangers and customs enforced by a stateless people. America—increasingly difficult to enter after the tight new immigration quotas imposed that year—held no appeal
either. Eighteen-year-old Chaim wanted revolution, but not in Russia. Zion alone consumed his young heart.

Though he was barely shaving, Chaim was ready to be a pioneer. He tossed out the
kippah
(skullcap) and the boxes and straps of the tefillin. He exchanged the somber garb of the ghetto for a farmer's rough open-necked shirt and a pair of sandals. He sang but he refused to pray. Prayer was for shtetl Jews. Love and contempt—pure, unmediated—propelled the boy out of exile and into the Holy Land. With him the line of the scribe blazed a third road.

Impulsiveness, stubbornness, and self-reliance came naturally to Chaim. He had taken his first breath in the shadow of tragedy, and turmoil was all he had known. Born in 1906, when Russia was still in the throes of the 1905 revolution, Chaim lost his thirty-one-year-old father, Arie, before he was a week old. Arie's widow, Leah, was left with three children—a daughter named Chana, a toddler son, Yishayahu, and the newborn, Chaim. Leah remarried and bore her second husband a son, Shlomo. So Chaim grew up a middle child in a broken and mended family, a stepson raised beside a full son. He was eight years old when the Great War began and Volozhin starved and trembled on the front line. The war ended the year he turned twelve. The year of his bar mitzvah, another war broke out: Soviet Russia and newly reunited Poland clashed over their boundary, and Volozhin promptly fell to the advancing Polish army—though later the Russians regained control only to lose it again. After living under five different governments in the first dozen years of his life, Chaim became a citizen of Poland under Chief of State Józef Piłsudski. Rakov was also on the Polish side of the border after the Polish-Soviet war, and Vilna was absorbed into Poland in 1922 after much wrangling with the newly formed nation of Lithuania. To Chaim and his family, Polish sovereignty made no difference. Polish, Russian, Bolshevik, capitalist—it was all the same. Chaim was a proud, lonely, defiant kid with a jut to his jaw and large liquid brown eyes peering out at a world not even sages could comprehend. Jews died and Jewish homes burned under Piłsudski just as they had under Lenin, Kerensky, Nicholas, and Alexander—“
same old story,” as Isaac Babel wrote: “. . . shrieks, whips cracking, shouts of ‘dirty Yid.'”

In Volozhin, devout Jews cautiously reopened the yeshiva, which had
been shuttered since 1915. But Chaim chose to study in Vilna at
the Tarbut Gymnasium (Zionist high school), where instruction was in Hebrew and love of the Land wafted through the classrooms like the scent of Jaffa oranges. Devout old men muttered that it was a sin to speak the sacred tongue outside of shul, but Chaim didn't care. He never went to shul anyway. Yiddish was the language of oppression and fear. When he made his ascent to the Land, he would speak only Hebrew.

Chaim was aware that he couldn't simply pack up and leave the way his cousins had when they immigrated to America. To live in the Land, you had to train; you had to prepare; you had to be part of a group. By 1920, two generations of Zionist settlers had been trying to survive in Palestine. The first waves had come close to disaster because they knew nothing about farming, about finding work, about the climate, the food, the Arabs. They brought their dreams but they had no idea how harsh reality was. Chaim was determined not to make those mistakes. He didn't just declare himself a Zionist: he transformed himself into a pioneer. After the Great War, Zionism raged through Eastern Europe the way Hasidism had raged through the Pale at the end of the eighteenth century. Volozhin and Rakov and a thousand other shtetlach like them were full of headstrong boys and girls bent on returning to the Jewish homeland as farmers, swamp drainers, road builders. A score of Zionist organizations sprang up to absorb and channel all this ardor—youth groups; political parties; secular, religious, and quasi-military factions; bands of like-minded idealists who pledged to learn and practice and sing and dance together and one day to make aliyah together. Chaim chose to join HeHalutz. “The Pioneer” is the usual translation for HeHalutz, but in a Zionist context the word connotes something much more romantic—not just an agricultural settler but an ecstatic acolyte bent on mystical union with the Jewish soil through the sacrament of labor. Chaim and his pals started a HeHalutz chapter in Volozhin. They put out a newspaper called
Der Shtekel-Dreier
denouncing the degeneracy of life in exile and heralding the glorious national homeland that awaited them in Palestine. A photo of Zionist leader Theodore Herzl hung on Chaim's wall, but his true hero was Joseph Trumpeldor, the handsome, one-armed Russian army officer who had founded HeHalutz. “I am not a person,” Trumpeldor declared after making aliyah in 1911. “I am the pure
embodiment of service, prepared for everything. I have no ties. I know only one command: Build.” Chaim's ardor grew all the fiercer after Trumpeldor was killed at the age of thirty-nine while fighting off Arabs in the Upper Galilee. In his dreams, Chaim would take the hero's place. He would plow and plant and make the desert bloom; if necessary he would water the crops with his blood. But first he must learn how to work. Not the degrading Diaspora work of keeping shop, peddling merchandise, brokering, smuggling. Chaim must master the noble labor of the
halutz
.

He and his group took up residence in the house of Bernshteyn the blacksmith. They hardened themselves by working at the Volozhin sawmill. They spoke and sang in Hebrew. They worked the soil, albeit Polish soil. Chaim was short and boxy but lean with broad shoulders, thick dark hair combed straight back from his forehead, and a stern, commanding demeanor. His olive skin would not burn under the fierce sun of Palestine; his stubbornness and passion would serve him well. Chaim toughened up like a soldier in boot camp. He was among the first of his comrades to win the certificate confirming his readiness to make aliyah. Now came the moment of truth. The
halutzim
believed that you could not be a Zionist in exile: the only true Zionists were Zionists in the Land, in Eretz Israel.

In the late autumn of 1924, at the glorious, precipitous age of eighteen, Chaim departed Poland for the Holy Land. He never set foot in Europe again.

—

The voyage began with horse and cart and song. Trailed by friends and families, Chaim and his fellow
halutzim
set out in a long convoy of wagons. The birch groves were yellowing, the pines black and dripping in the misty air. At the outskirts of town, a peasant stopped his work, stared at the procession, and shouted across the autumn stubble, “Damn Jews, to Palestine!”
They were going!
They were going as fast as they could and precisely so they would never hear such a shout again. To hell with ignorant peasants. To hell with churches full of pious supplicants spitting at pictures of the dirty Jew. To hell with snow and mud and jackboots kicking in the door. Chaim and his comrades raised their voices even louder to the strains of “Artza Alinu”—a Hebrew folk melody powered by a toe-tapping rhythm:
We ascended to the land, we've ploughed already and sown too, but we have not yet reaped
.

At the town of Horod'k they parted ways: the
halutzim
climbed aboard the train bound for Warsaw; the friends and family members stood on the platform and waved their handkerchiefs. Then in a cloud of smoke and soot, Chaim lurched into his future.

He had never been farther from home than Vilna. He had never seen the sea. He had never looked out at a horizon that wasn't low, green, smooth, settled. No matter. The images in the train window went by in a rattling indifferent blur.
He felt not the slightest twinge of curiosity or nostalgia. It had required a terrific effort of will for Chaim to shake off the dust of exile. So many talked and dreamed and sighed but finally subsided back into the humid green. To
act
, to cut his ties with everything familiar and
go
, Chaim had to be as fanatical as Lenin. Eastern Europe passed before him like a rotten corpse. The scenery was so much pasteboard and tinsel. The other passengers, those not bound for the Land, were trivial, inane. Even the startling appearance of the sea was worthy of notice only because the same water laved the shores of the Land. For Chaim, for his fellow
halutzim
, Zion was the sole reality. Only the Land had meaning.

At the Romanian port of Constanta they boarded a ship and set sail southbound on waters that Roman galleys had plied two millennia earlier. Down the western edge of the Black Sea, through the straits of Bosphorus at Istanbul, across the Sea of Marmara, into the blue Aegean, around the storied islands of Turkey's western coast, and then, once they had cleared Rhodes, a straight shot southeast to the port of Haifa. Chaim's excitement became all but unbearable in the final hours at sea. For two thousand years his family had lived as strangers and sojourners. He had claimed for himself the honor of being the first to return.

Chaim stood on the ship's deck as Haifa Bay opened before him in an immense blue arc sweeping nine miles north to the ancient citadel of Acre. His first glimpse of the Holy Land was a crinkly brown smudge rising from the sea—the heights of Mount Carmel, freshly washed by the November rains. A Carmelite monastery crowned the summit; terraces of olive groves, vineyards, and carob trees ran along the flanks; palms etched their fronds against the sky. Beaches came into view as they neared the harbor. The water turned a deep royal blue. Red and white blocks of buildings—limestone walls, red-tiled roofs—rose in clusters near the shore and climbed to
the base of the mountain. The ship dropped anchor and Chaim and the other passengers disembarked onto an open barge; they crossed the last stretch of water on a deck crammed with piles of cargo: until the British dredged the sandy harbor in 1933, this was the only way to get from ship to shore. Chaim finally allowed himself to exult in the warm air, the luminous sky, the smell of brine and spice and smoke, the utter unexpected strangeness pressing at every sense.

He stepped from the boat to a wharf backed by train tracks. Arabs sat on the ground next to blankets and rugs covered with produce—the Haifa vegetable market. If he wept or danced or fell to his knees and kissed the soil when he finally came ashore, he never mentioned it to his family. No Zionist arrived in Palestine with a still pulse or dry eye. Probably he danced. Chaim was always a great dancer. The joyous circle dances of the pioneers were his form of worship.

Chaim was lucky to have disembarked at Haifa. Most settlers in those days landed at the seedy old Arab port of Jaffa, sixty miles to the south. Situated on a long, low-lying stretch of sand (since swallowed up by Tel Aviv), Jaffa was the preferred port because of its proximity to Jerusalem, but it has always been awkward to approach by sea. The shallow harbor is so beset by rocks that passengers and their luggage had be off-loaded into tipsy dinghies and rowed to shore, and as soon as they landed they were swarmed by hawkers, beggars, street vendors, shills for every kind of shady business. “This was not my idea of the new life,” future Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion recalled of his arrival at Jaffa early in the century. “It was worse than the Plonsk I had come from.”

Disillusionment came, sooner or later, to everyone. No Zionist who stayed in Palestine escaped it. No matter how exalted the arrival, how hot the tears of joy or the gush of gratitude, the dust of disappointment eventually settled on all of them.

Sweating copiously in their European clothes, Chaim and his comrades made their way from the port to their guesthouse. Haifa called itself a city, but with a population of twenty-five thousand it was a small city with dramatic topography and a salubrious climate, peacefully shared by Jews and Arabs. Chaim saw his first camel and his first palm tree. He saw white-robed Arab traders gathered at the cactus hedges that grew outside
the city gates. He saw the tidy little German colony of tile-roofed cottages and tree-lined streets that members of the Templer sect founded in the 1860s and still maintained as an incongruous little corner of Gemütlichkeit. He saw the deep velvety shadows that the white houses cast on the unpaved roads. He packed away his European clothes. There was rail service between Damascus and Saudi Arabia, with a stop at Haifa. Chaim and his comrades made their way to the train station, an elegant Renaissance toy of a building with a dainty clock tower and banks of high windows. The young men wanted to get to the Galilee as quickly as possible.