The Family (19 page)

Eighteen Jews later died in Safed, the ancient city in the Galilee where pious Volozhiners had supported a religious colony in the nineteenth century, and there were also killings in Tel Aviv. As wildly exaggerated rumors of Arab casualties flew from cities to the countryside, attacks began to flare up in the agricultural settlements as well. Here the conflict was more traumatic because the scale was so intimate—neighbors attacking neighbors in adjoining fields. At Kfar Uria, a cooperative farming village between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem where the writer A. D. Gordon had lived for a time, settlers were saved because a local village sheik took them in and gave them shelter. The Jews watched, however, as Arabs from a nearby village looted and torched their homes and farms. The settlement was completely destroyed and abandoned.

Chaim was lucky: the fighting did not spread to Herzliya, no doubt because local Arabs and Bedouins observed Haganah recruits manning the colony's observation posts around the clock. Drilling was stepped up, but there was no call to use the light arms and grenades hidden in the Roman tunnel.

Haganah units in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem managed to repel some attacks, and friendly Arabs kept the Jewish death toll down. But the Jews were outraged at how little British forces did to protect them and how late they were to respond. Zionists also bitterly resented the fact that the official British reports characterized the riots as “disturbances” or “conflicts” or “loss of life,” suggesting that the attacks were mutual, when in fact
Arabs struck and Jews tried to defend themselves—or perished helplessly.
The casualties on both sides were heavy: 133 Jews dead and 339 wounded; 116 Arabs dead and 232 wounded. But there was this critical difference: nearly all the Jewish blood was spilled by Arabs, whereas nearly all the Arab casualties were inflicted by British security forces attempting to restore order.

August 1929 was
the end of a Zionist era and the beginning of a new and far more troubled one. What little trust and cooperation there had been between Jews and Arabs crusted over. In the aftermath of the riots, there was no reconciliation, no easing of the trauma.
Self-defense now occupied a central place in the Zionist mission, as essential to survival as the conquest of labor. Haganah embarked on a rapid and intense expansion, transforming itself from a ragtag collection of cells to a regional fighting force with a steady supply of weapons imported from Europe. The training program that Chaim had completed was broadened in scope, seriousness, and membership. At Herzliya, they bulked up the
slik
with new weapons stashed handily in the workers' houses.

The violence finally ceased. A tense fragile peace returned. The dead were buried. Inquiries were held by the British authorities. Official “white papers” were handed down from London. Chaim went on working in the citrus groves. But the mood had shifted.
The idea of peaceful coexistence and gradual accommodation was finished; now came the era of resistance.

Chaim had been little more than a boy when he arrived in the Kinneret in 1924, a teenager buoyed by boundless hope and idealism. Idealism alters when it has to wear a sidearm. The tragedy of twentieth-century Palestine was that farmers like Chaim had to learn to beat their plowshares into swords.

—

Sam had had enough. In the middle of October, he called a stockbroker and put in an order for Consolidated Gas Company (the forerunner of Consolidated Edison). In Hyman's recollection,
Sam's buy was thirteen shares at $135 a share—a total of $1,755 (a hefty sum when you consider that Itel's initial $4,000 investment in Enid Frocks was just about all the money she and William had). Sam was superstitious. He never should have bought that odd lot of thirteen. On October 28—Black Monday—the stock market
crashed, losing 13 percent of its value between the opening and closing bells. The next day it plunged another 12 percent. In five hours,
10 billion dollars in stock value was wiped away. Sam hadn't even taken possession of his stock and already it was in the toilet. Harry and Hyman agreed to bail out their brother. They let Sam transfer ownership of the stock to the business so the company would absorb the loss. Though of course they would never let him live it down.

Itel, Harry, Sam, Hyman, their parents and siblings, aunts and uncles had done well for themselves in America. They arrived all but penniless in a flood of penniless immigrants and now a couple of decades later they had houses, cars, businesses, money in the bank, children in private schools, servants, security. Not that any of it had come easily. America was the land of opportunity, but it was also a land of xenophobes, bigots, nativists, anti-Semites, and racists. The decade just coming to an end had been a banner time for mass discrimination against any group perceived as foreign or un-American. New laws enacted in 1921 and 1924 all but barred the golden door. The Ku Klux Klan came roaring back to life. Red-baiting politicians blamed Jews for the Russian Revolution and the looming Soviet threat. In Germany, the rising Nazi Party said exactly the same thing.

Still, in 1929, there was no better place to be a Jew than the United States. Some four and a half million strong,
America's Jewish community was emerging as the world's largest, wealthiest, and most powerful. To the Cohen family, America, not Palestine, looked like the true promised land of the twentieth century.

And then in two calamitous days in October, the bottom fell out. In the Great Depression that followed the crash, all the world's major economies toppled—but the countries hit hardest were the United States and Germany.

Sam got off fairly easily. His Consolidated Gas shares tanked but at least he had family to bail him out. Business was cyclical, all the big shots kept saying. In a couple of months they'd look back and see the crash was just a dip. Things would come roaring back—just wait. Sam, for all his bluster when making a sale, was not an optimist, but he tried to believe it.

W
ho would buy a bra if she couldn't afford to eat?
Itel wondered about Maiden Form's prospects as 1929 slid into 1930 and the nation, and then the world, plunged into the worst economic depression in modern history. Sales of all the products that had buoyed the great boom of the 1920s slumped rapidly in 1930.
Unemployment more than doubled its 1929 level, from 1.5 million to 4.3 million. Some 26,300 businesses went belly up that year, including 1,372 banks. Life savings evaporated; salaries for those lucky enough to hold on to their jobs declined. Itel looked on in disbelief as one big dress house after another closed its doors. Had she followed her brothers' advice that would have been her fate. Somehow, Maiden Form not only stayed in business but sales continued to grow. Evidently a lot of women still had a few dollars to spare on beauty.

Itel's company survived the first year of the Depression, but her family did not. When he was sixteen years old, Lewis had contracted pneumonia. Still, bright and handsome, he seemed to have recovered and he went on to live a normal life, graduating from Columbia College and then enrolling in Columbia Law School. But his body had never rid itself of the abscess—the pus-filled cavity—that had formed in his lung. At some point an infected clot broke off from the lung and traveled through the aorta into the vessels
supplying Lewis's brain, where the clot embedded itself in the soft tissue of the
right parietal lobe and festered. By the spring of 1930, the brain abscess had become life threatening, and Itel and William rushed Lewis to Germany, which then had the most highly skilled brain surgeons in the world. In June, the German doctors performed a craniotomy—the surgical removal of a piece of the skull in order to reach and drain the abscess—but the procedure failed. The Rosenthals brought their son back to New York and on June 23 they had him admitted to the Neurological Institute of New York. The doctors did their best to keep Lewis comfortable—another operation was out of the question. The infection spread to the meninges, the membranes that sheathe the brain and the spinal cord. Lewis died in the Neurological Institute at 1:30 in the morning on Monday, August 4, 1930, six days shy of his twenty-third birthday.

The family gathered for the service at eleven o'clock the following morning at the Riverside Memorial Chapel on West Seventy-sixth Street. Itel and William had never been observant Jews. They had not circumcised their son at birth, nor had Lewis ever learned Hebrew, attended synagogue, or celebrated his bar mitzvah. Instead of Judaism, the Rosenthals belonged to the Ethical Culture Society, a quasi-religious group that advocated morality without theology, personal fulfillment through education and philanthropy, and the interdependence of self-reform and social reform. Nonetheless, when Lewis died, Itel and William chose a Jewish funeral home for the burial—no doubt out of
respect for Abraham and Sarah.

Whatever depths of grief Itel felt over losing her only son—by all accounts a promising young man who was expected to take over the company one day—she did not share it with her siblings or parents. Itel was a fiercely private, supremely disciplined person. Devastated, she forced herself to get back to work. Only on rare occasions did her feelings show. Years later, at a family Hanukkah party, she sat grim-faced while a tactless relative rattled on, not without a twist of envy, about how lucky she was. She lived in a mansion, drove to work in a chauffeured limousine, always flew first class, had hundreds of employees to obey her every command. “So lucky!” Itel replied, bursting into tears. “I'd give up all of it to have Lewis back.”

—

Sarah, a canny businesswoman in Russia, had become in America a timid, invisible wife who rarely left the tight circuit of house, market, and shul. Hyman was surprised, then, when his mother showed up unannounced at the Broadway showroom of A. Cohen & Sons one day. She had taken the trolley and subway down from the Bronx by herself; she had braved the transfers and the beggars, the apple carts and shoe-shine stands manned by former business executives and factory workers, the lines snaking outside soup kitchens. Sarah made her way through the arched granite portal at 584 Broadway, slipped into the A. Cohen & Sons office, murmured a few words in her halting, accented English to the receptionist, and found her son. She told Hyman that she wanted to have a word with him—without his secretary present. Sarah summoned up negotiating skills she had not used in two decades. She reminded her son of what terrible shape the city was in—unemployed men everywhere, no jobs to be had, no sign that this horrible depression had run its course. Hyman knew full well that his wife Anna's brother Harry Raskin had lost his job. Where on earth was he going to find another one? “Hyman, you are in a fortunate economic position,” said Sarah, “but you cannot live for yourself alone. I want you to make room for Harry.” There—she had said her piece. She knew she had no business meddling in her son's affairs, but she could not in good conscience remain silent.

“Stop worrying,” Hyman replied without hesitation. “Go home; be happy. Harry can start working just as soon as he can get here.”

It was not written into the bylaws, but A. Cohen had an unofficial policy of hiring any family member in need of work—in-laws too. Never had this policy been more welcome than during the Depression. They were not all promoted or highly compensated; some spent their entire careers wrapping parcels in the mail room or punching numbers into an adding machine at a bookkeeper's desk; occasionally, though rarely, one had to be fired. But no family member was turned away, even when the business was struggling to stay alive.

And the business was indeed struggling. At the end of 1930, Isidor Boguslav, a Brooklyn public accountant, did the A. Cohen & Sons audit and revealed that the company had earned a pretty skimpy profit that year. Though sales had netted $1,091,974.05, the brothers had to write off
$32,332.77 in bad debts. After subtracting salaries, rent, office expenses, insurance, taxes, the cost of the merchandise, and all the other odds and ends of running a business, they ended up netting $7,778.36. In other words, they were in the black—but just barely. Somewhere hidden in those columns of numbers was the loss that Sam had taken on his Consolidated Gas stock.

Nobody got rich off A. Cohen & Sons that year, but everyone in the family who wanted a job had one, including Harry Raskin.

—

Itel had always been more hard-nosed than her brothers when it came to the bottom line. If a relative showed promise, she'd find a place, but she had zero tolerance for deadwood, no matter where it grew on the family tree. Though Maiden Form had a raft of Rosenthals and eventually a couple of Cohen cousins and nephews on the payroll, the company never adopted A. Cohen's open-door policy for family.

Once the Depression hit, relatives had an even tougher time getting hired at Maiden Form, because they had to compete with huge numbers of unemployed strangers. William's brother Moe, the manager of the Bayonne factory, could barely get through supper without someone knocking on his door “crying that they needed a job to feed their children.” Their sister Masha was besieged by job seekers whenever she went outside. “They used to push presents into my hands,” Masha said, “I should give them a job. I never took the presents but would ask them to please come to the factory. Sometimes we would have hundreds of people, sitting and waiting for jobs at Eighteenth Street. Moe used to pick out some people, and I would pick out some of them, and we would interview them and hire them.”

The family firms were fortunate.
The year 1930 was bad but 1931 was worse. Nationwide, unemployment nearly doubled again from 4.3 million in 1930 to 8 million in 1931, more than five times what it had been just two years earlier.
Stocks continued to sink, with sharp drops from the late winter into spring and again in September and December.
That summer, drought decimated grain crops in the Plains states, killing the livelihood of tens of thousands of farmers, while European bank failures led to the collapse of the German and Austrian economies. By year's end,
New York City soup kitchens were serving some eighty-five thousand free meals every day.
In October 1931, about 40 percent of Chicago's workers were unemployed; in Boston the figure hovered around 30 percent; in Detroit it reached 50 percent. There was no relief and no end in sight.

On the last day of the terrible year of 1931, Abraham and Sarah gathered their family, friends, neighbors, and business associates—some 175 guests in all—to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary in the Bronx. The Cohens rented out the ballroom of Burnside Manor, a big fancy function hall with crystal chandeliers and brocaded drapes. Women arrived in full-length gowns and a few had furs wrapped around their shoulders against the winter chill; the men were clean shaven and sleek in their tuxedoes and slicked-back hair—except for Abraham and half a dozen
frum
(observant) fellows from the shul who covered their heads and left their beards untrimmed as the law prescribed. On the dais, Abraham and Sarah held the place of honor at the center of the table, with their offspring arrayed by age around them: Itel in a low-cut black dress sat beside her father; Ethel pinned to a huge trailing corsage sat beside her mother; then Harry and Sallie; Sam and Gladys; Hyman and Anna; Lillie and her husband Joe. They dined on gefilte fish and consommé, sweetbreads, roast chicken, and candied sweet potatoes. At midnight they cheered and toasted the patriarch and matriarch—not with champagne (Prohibition would not be repealed for two more years) but with celery tonic and Appolinaris sparkling water. The photographer hired to commemorate the event must have told the guests to look dignified because in the official photo nearly every face is wary and mirthless. William frowns fixedly at the tablecloth: Itel, sporting a long strand of pearls, seems about to cry; Sarah, standing behind her white tiered cake, gazes off anxiously to the side, as if scanning the doors for gate-crashers.

A week earlier a little boy had approached Abraham in the street, tugged at his sleeve, and asked for a present. “Can I have a new toy gun, please?” The same thing happened every December: because of the long white beard, they took him for Santa Claus or pretended they did. Abraham smiled and shook his finger at the child. “Vuz you good?” he asked, playing along. Maybe kids in the Bronx thought Santa had a Yiddish accent. Abraham laughed it off but Sarah worried. Who knows what the goyim said to their children about the rich Jew with the beard and the
business named after him? The scribe and his family had done well for themselves in their two decades in America—maybe too well. Back in Russia a Jew with money either left or lost it or had it taken by the government. Times were hard—if things got worse, the same thing could happen here.

The party broke up after midnight and the guests returned to their apartments and row houses. The next morning they all awoke to a new year—1932—the year that 12 million Americans, nearly a quarter of the labor pool, would be out of work. It was the year that the Great Depression hit its nadir. Even Maiden Form sales declined.

—

That summer in New York, the
Dow Jones industrial average bottomed out at forty-one points, nearly 90 percent below its high of three years earlier. Some 34 million Americans had no source of income—
over a quarter of the nation's population subsisted on handouts, or starved. Never had the extended family been so grateful to Itel, Harry, Sam, and Hyman for having the foresight and stamina to operate two successful, or at least solvent, businesses. Mrs. Bissett had retired from Maiden Form due to poor health and Joe had been more or less squeezed to the sidelines. The company was Itel and William's to run as they pleased. Itel kept her eye on the bottom line and dealt with the bankers; William cranked out one new patent after another—nursing bra, maternity bra, full-fashion bra “made with a knitted cup shaped on a form without a single seam,” scooped out demi-bra to wear with low-cut dresses, formal bra contoured around low-backed evening gowns. To keep growing they pushed into overseas markets—Europe, Latin America, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, Egypt, India. Women all over the globe had breasts, and Itel made sure they found out how much better their breasts felt with a little uplift. Back when she first started selling bras, Itel had offered her customers a money-back guarantee: go home, slip it on, and ask your husband what he thinks. If he turned up his nose, you could bring the bra back and collect your refund. Itel, of course, won that bet. There was no need for gimmicks or money-back guarantees anymore. Sales were a bit off in 1932, but Itel wasn't worried. She had become a shrewd businesswoman—one of the first and one of the best. She knew that this depression wouldn't last forever. Instead of hunkering down, she concentrated on expanding markets and maintaining quality.

“You've got nothing to worry about as long as we have back orders,” Moe kept telling the operators on the Bayonne factory floor. As a sign of their financial solidity, Itel and William moved the corporate showroom uptown to 200 Madison Avenue and added a second factory in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Maiden Form was in it for the long haul.

—

In the mad rush of legislation with which he kicked off his first one hundred days in office, FDR pushed through the National Industrial Recovery Act—a bill that significantly bolstered the heft of labor unions by granting them the right to collective bargaining. Plutocrats howled that the newly empowered unions would put them out of business, but the act was popular with workers, including workers at the Maiden Form factory in Bayonne.

On October 14, 1933, the city of Bayonne turned out for
the biggest parade in its history—the National Recovery Act parade mounted in support of the new National Recovery Agency. Sixty marching bands led twenty-five thousand working people up Bayonne's main artery and into the City Park Stadium. Every major Bayonne business from the A&P to Sears Roebuck did their bit with a flag or a poster or a special sale ($3.60 tires at Sears; 99-cent hats at W. T. Grant), and Maiden Form was no exception. The operators had whipped up an enormous brassiere and mounted it on poles like a banner; the prettiest girls in the company were enlisted to carry it up Broadway in the parade. It was a mild sunny Saturday afternoon, and the crowd cheered wildly when the breeze came up and the giant brassiere filled like a sail. Men standing on the sidewalks tossed coins into the swelling fluttering cups.