The Family (18 page)

—

Itel had more proximate reasons to rejoice that year: Sales of Maiden Form bras hit half a million. In fact, the bras were moving so briskly that the operators in the Bayonne factory were having a hard time keeping up with orders. Itel and William and William's sister Masha, drawing on their long experience with needle and thread, devised a streamlined new production process. Instead of having each operator sew a complete bra from start to finish, as Itel had done with her dresses, they broke the fabrication down into separate units and assigned each unit to an individual operator: one person handled only the binding, another did the joining, another worked on the
shoulder straps, another affixed the labels, and so on.
It was like the Model T assembly-line approach applied to lingerie. “We took a book out of the library on production efficiency,” Masha recalled, “but I told them, ‘Don't worry about it. I'm doing it efficiently without that book. I'm doing it better than the book.'” William hired his brother Moe to take charge of the factory. Moe turned out to be a crack general manager—tough, intimidating, eagle eyed. With Moe breathing down the operators' necks, the Bayonne plant became a quiet and extremely productive factory floor. “In those days, everybody had his head down,” recalled Stella Kotowski, the assistant plant manager. “You didn't talk! You just did your work, very quietly. We were so close to the boss and he was always looking right at us! We came to work at eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, with an hour for lunch, and with no breaks.” Moe was scary, but production spiked under his iron rule.

Enid Manufacturing (the company name did not become Maiden Form until 1930) relocated its headquarters to 245 Fifth Avenue, at Twenty-eighth Street, a few blocks from the site where the Empire State Building would soon rise as the world's tallest freestanding building. Itel was convinced that the only way to grow was to advertise, and she commissioned a fledgling ad campaign of black-and-white sketches (photography was way too risqué) of slinky women lounging around in their bras and slips. “Maiden Form Loveliness” read the copy line. “The new contour—siren rather than flapper—rounded yet slender.” Clergymen chirped that it was indecent, but the company shrugged and kept moving forward. In 1928, the first Maiden Form ad appeared in
Harper's Bazaar
. They had scaled the heights of elegance.

Joe Bissett's days were numbered as sales manager. Mrs. Bissett, ailing, had pretty much withdrawn from daily operations and decisions. The company still bore her name, and she and Joe still held a one-third share, but in every other way the business belonged to Itel and William. Now that they could afford to splurge a little, the Rosenthals left Hamilton Heights for a stately brick apartment building right off Central Park West, at 18 West Seventieth Street. Lewis, now a graduate of Columbia College, was bound for Columbia Law School. Beatrice, thirteen, attended the Ethical Culture School, a few blocks from the apartment. They had a live-in Czech maid named Marie and a car (though it was usually in the shop because William, as one associate put it, “had more accidents than anybody ever had driving
a car. Mrs. Rosenthal would take six aspirins before she got into the car with him”). Their neighbors were solid respectable lawyers, doctors, manufacturers, and stockbrokers—hardly an immigrant among them aside from the maids and baby nurses.

—

Itel had always separated herself from the rest of the family, both geographically and emotionally, and Abraham and Sarah knew it was pointless to try to reel her back in now. The parents had better luck keeping their other children in their orbit.
Abraham and Sarah made the classic hopscotch of early twentieth-century Russian Jewish immigrants—from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn and, when finances permitted, from Brooklyn to the Bronx. In 1924, the family bought both units (up- and downstairs) of a duplex house at 1819 Andrews Avenue, a street of modest brick row houses in the University Heights neighborhood (named for New York University, which had its main campus in the Bronx from 1894 to the early 1970s). Abraham and Sarah lived upstairs with Ethel and her husband Sam Epstein and their three kids (Bernard, Inda, and David). Sam and Gladys and their five kids (the twins Dorothy and Sidney, Lester, Marvin, and Leona, Gladys's only child to survive infancy) lived in the downstairs unit. It was a schlep to the business on Lower Broadway, but the house suited Abraham and Sarah because it was in a nice predominantly Jewish neighborhood, it had a bit of a backyard where they could put up a sukkah during Sukkoth (Sarah had given up on vegetable gardening), and above all because it was a five-minute walk to the shul. Abraham was a founding member of the Hebrew Institute of University Heights—one of the great Orthodox synagogues of the Bronx, with more than 1,500 congregants in attendance during the high holidays. The patriarch might be president of a going wholesale concern in Manhattan, but he was a man of God before he was a businessman. Each day before work, he taught a Talmud class at the shul. On Saturday his discourses on the Mishna were packed. When the synagogue started a religious school, they named it Akiva Academy in his honor. Shimon Dov would have been proud.

—

Chaim moved from the Kinneret to Herzliya to regain health and strength, but his first impression of the place sent him reeling. An unpaved rutted
track delivered him to a collection of huts and barracks set in a wasteland of sand. Instead of mountains ringing a gorgeous lake, dunes speckled with brown scrub rolled out in every direction. Goats from the nearby
Arab village of Ijlil al-Qibliyya browsed the low hills. Spindly citrus orchards surrounded the identical rows of workers' houses (which had replaced the original tents), and two dozen acres of banana trees, planted the year before, flapped their tattered green banners in the sun.

Herzliya was founded in 1924 as a training center for
garinim
—Zionist youth preparing to relocate to collectives and cooperative farms—and a strong Labor Zionist ethic prevailed. Once he got over his shock, Chaim fit right in with the young, idealistic comrades.

Chaim had come to Herzliya to work, not to supplant Arab workers—but it happened nonetheless. Whatever land and livelihood Jewish workers gained, Arabs lost: the equation was fixed and inescapable. Herzliya was a small, tightly organized Jewish outpost—really a tiny Jewish world unto itself—and Chaim lived and worked there without a thought about who had owned and grazed this land before him. The first wave of Zionists had relied on Arab workers because they were cheap and skilled, and because Jews were considered too intransigent and expensive to make good farmworkers. But by the time Chaim made aliyah in 1924, things had changed. Now “Hebrew land, Hebrew language, Hebrew labor” was the rallying cry. It was a point of pride for Chaim and thousands like him to join colonies and collectives where everything, even the most menial tasks,
especially
the most menial tasks, was done exclusively by Jews. The intent was not to squeeze out the Arabs but rather to establish their own self-sufficient independent settlements, villages, regions, and, one day, God willing, nation. “Not to dominate—not to be dominated” was the formula David Ben-Gurion endorsed. Peaceful coexistence. Side by side but separate in this sliver of a land. Why not?

It was a beautiful dream, part and parcel of the wild blind idealism that the
halutzim
brought with them. But it was doomed from the start. “
You want to found a state without bloodshed?” sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz demanded of Theodore Herzl. “Where have you ever seen such a thing?”

Chaim had come to Palestine to work, not to fight. But fighting was inevitable given the ambitions of the Zionists and the deep roots of the
Arabs. All it took was an irritant—an economic downturn, a sudden spike in Jewish immigration, a squabble over holy places—to bring the latent violence to the surface. There were isolated incidents from the start of Jewish settlement—thefts, harassment, destruction of Jewish property, the occasional ambush or sniper attack—but more organized and widespread anti-Zionist rioting broke out in 1920. More Jews would have been hurt had the Zionists' rudimentary militia Haganah (“Defense” in Hebrew) not turned out to oppose the attacks. This was something else Jews had taken into their own hands in Palestine—Hebrew self-defense. Mobilized under the command of militant Zionist Ze'ev Jabotinsky, cofounder with Joseph Trumpeldor of the Jewish Legion during World War I, Haganah was still shadowy, decentralized, illegal, and amateurish. When even bloodier anti-Zionist rioting roiled the port city of Jaffa, in May 1921, and spread to the surrounding agricultural settlements, Haganah once again stood up to the attackers.

The
halutzim
had made aliyah to farm, not to fight. But if they had to fight in order to farm, they would. Only the next time they would be better prepared.

By the late 1920s, Haganah service had become all but mandatory for workers on the collective and cooperative farms. Chaim was ripe for recruitment. Soon after he settled in Herzliya, the local Haganah leadership approached him about enrolling in their commanders' course. The induction ceremony was like a sacred ritual. Chaim was ushered into a darkened room lit by a single candle. The door was locked. He sat at a table with a revolver and a Bible in front of him and, with the officers looking on in silence, recited the militia's oath: “I swear to be faithful all the days of my life to the Haganah organization, to its constitution, and to its duties as defined by the high command. I swear to dedicate all my powers and even to sacrifice my life to defense and to the war for my people and my homeland, for the freedom of Israel and for the redemption of Zion.” The oath bound Chaim to strict secrecy. If he so much as betrayed the existence of the organization or revealed to an outsider the location of an arms cache (
slik
in Haganah slang), he would pay with his life.

Chaim trained for six months, from January to the start of July 1929. Five nights a week and Saturdays he and Herzliya's sixteen other Haganah
recruits learned how to load and shoot weapons, take out snipers, toss grenades, and obey orders without arguing. For target practice, they descended into an ancient Roman tunnel that served as the Herzliya
slik
and firing range. The boys blasted away, and no one up above heard a thing. Chaim was lucky—his group was trained by Yisrael Amir, a charismatic leader who had been active in Haganah from the start and rose rapidly through the ranks. In 1935, Amir would set up two secret factories to produce grenades and mortars for Haganah, and in 1942 he would found and head up the Haganah intelligence branch, known initially as Shai, that later morphed into Mossad and Shin Bet, Israel's intelligence and internal security services. After independence he became the first commander of the Israeli air force.

When Amir's training course was over, Chaim and his comrades were rewarded with a hiking trip through the backcountry. It was July and the heat and drought of summer had scorched the land. Still, Chaim embraced the return to the mountains and valleys he had come to love in his first years in Palestine.

It was good Chaim had gotten away when he did. A month after the hiking trip, there was another round of anti-Zionist violence—far worse than the outbreaks of 1920 and 1921. No one used the word
pogrom
for what started in the summer of 1929. This time it was more like the opening battle in a civil war.

—

That summer in New York all anybody talked about was the stock market. Or so Sam told his brothers after making the rounds of their accounts. Everywhere he went, Sam heard about how rich other people were getting off their investments. It wasn't just the businessmen and salesmen either. The shoe-shine boy, the barber, the grocer, the guy delivering milk—all of them were trading stock tips, cashing in, moving up. Even if you didn't have a dime, a broker would front you. You couldn't lose. Sam worried that they were missing out on the greatest run-up in history. “We have more brains than any one of these people I meet,” he told his brothers. “Yet we just sit here and let opportunities pass us by.” Sam proposed to Harry and Hyman that they take the company's excess cash and sock it away in the market.

Hyman was against it. They hadn't gotten where they were by taking foolish risks, he told Sam. They'd be better off investing in the growth of their business. The market was going up now, but it couldn't last forever. Hyman got Harry to take his side—two against one.

Sam kept hammering away at them. By August the city was sweltering and the market was sizzling. Headlines blazed with reports of equity shares hitting new records. “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau,” declared one prominent economist. The brothers had always pulled together—all for one and one for all. But if Harry and Hyman refused to budge, Sam would go it alone.

—

The fighting began on August 15, 1929, at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. There was no place on earth more sacred to Jews—or more contested by their enemies. The Romans had destroyed the temple that rose atop this massive retaining wall in 70
C.E.
, laid waste to Jerusalem, and cast the Jews from its ruins—but for two thousand years the pious had found a way to come back and pray beside the slabs of stone. Muslim Arabs conquered the Holy Land after the fall of Rome, and in the seventh century they crowned the platform that the Wall supported—the Temple Mount—with two splendid mosques, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Ottoman Turks supplanted the Arabs in 1517 and made Jerusalem an outpost of their vast empire. Still the Wall endured in substance and even more in the imaginations of Diaspora Jews; a trickle of the faithful always came to worship and to mourn in its shadow.

As long as the Jews remained small in number and docile in demeanor, the rulers of Jerusalem let them daven and weep by the Wall. But the Jews who massed here on August 15, 1929, had not come to pray. Their demeanor was anything but docile. Militant young followers of Haganah commander Ze'ev Jabotinsky had organized a youth movement called Betar, and on August 15, Betar members gathered by the Wall to stage a large, noisy anti-Arab demonstration. Brandishing the blue-and-white Jewish national flag, the Jabotinskyites sang the anthem “Hatikvah” and shouted, “The Wall is ours!” That was all it took to light the fuse. Arabs demonstrated the following day and fighting flared; there followed five days of wild rumors, random attacks, extreme tension—and killing. Seventeen Jews were dead
at the hands of Arab rioters in Jerusalem by August 24. More died in Hebron, an ancient city north and west of Jerusalem, where a long-established Orthodox Jewish community had lived peacefully for decades with the majority Arab population. Earlier in the week, the Hebron Jewish community, convinced that their Arab friends would keep them safe, had turned down an offer from Haganah to protect them or assist with evacuation. It was a terrible mistake. On August 23 and 24, sixty-seven Jews died in the violence at Hebron—stoned, stabbed, shot by Arab mobs. The victims included yeshiva students, women, and children under the age of three. One observer insisted that “
not a Jewish soul” would have survived in Hebron “if it had not been for some Arab families” who took pity on their Jewish neighbors and, risking their lives, hid them in their homes.