The Family (32 page)

S
onia and Shalom Tvi were both in terrible shape that February. Neither of them knew about the conflagration in Rakov; they received no news or letters from the handful of survivors (those would come later), not a word appeared in the press. But at some unconscious, visceral level they intuited what had occurred and collapsed.

Shalom Tvi was at shul one Thursday morning around the time of the fire when he was suddenly stricken with a “huge headache.” He stripped off the tefillin, folded his tallith, and “fled home with great pain.” The doctor called in by the Epsteins prescribed some pills and told him to apply an ice pack to the headache. A few days later Shalom Tvi took a turn for the worse and the doctor was summoned back. When a second round of pills had no effect, the doctor recommended that he be hospitalized, but there was a problem finding an empty bed. The Epsteins “immediately called the whole family,” Shalom Tvi wrote Sonia, “and since [William] Rosenthal is a director of a hospital, he said that he must have a room for his uncle, and through him they secured a hospital room and right away they sent an ambulance and took me on a stretcher since I was not allowed to sit up.” Shalom Tvi was exaggerating a bit—William was not a director but he did sit on the board of the Bronx Hospital (he went on to serve as its vice president after the war and he was among the founders of the Albert Einstein College of
Medicine at Yeshiva University). A team of doctors was called in, X-rays were taken, and eventually Shalom Tvi was diagnosed with hardening of the arteries in the head. When he was well enough, he wrote Sonia in detail about his recovery:

They ordered me to lie in bed for three weeks and not to sit up. They gave me medications several times a day, and two doctors came to see me every day—not doctors from the hospital but private ones for me. My family has insisted on doing everything possible to save me, and thanks to God and thanks to my family who helped me so much, after three weeks they brought me home. It cost several hundred dollars for a private room here in the hospitals and for the doctors, and they [the American relatives] paid it all. May God keep them all healthy and see that they never know illness.

At the same time, Sonia was suffering a kind of nervous breakdown. In the decade since she made aliyah, pioneering had lost its shine. She was thirty-four years old, a farmwife and mother with two young children to raise and no female relatives to help out or kvetch to. Seven-year-old Leahleh was a sweet studious schoolgirl, but at three and a half Areleh was a handful—obstinate, rambunctious, headstrong, impossible to manage. Sonia worried he was becoming a
julik
—Russian for wise guy or crook. Life at Kfar Vitkin in time of war was precarious and suffocating. She and Chaim were still struggling with the farm; the cows failed to thrive, their calves were puny; the harvests were often disappointing; the work was relentless; the summers punishing. When Chaim was away driving the truck, Sonia was left alone with the children, the cows, and the chickens. Reading had always been her great solace, but it was when she picked up the newspapers that she fell apart. There was nothing about Rakov—what shattered her were the accounts of what was happening elsewhere. Though Sonia's letters have not survived, it's clear from her father's responses that at the start of February she had reached the breaking point. Shalom Tvi wrote her in frantic anxiety:

I can tell you, my beloved daughter, that your recent letters broke me so much that I could not sleep the whole week and I am going around
confused. The last letter has actually made me ill and gives me too much heartache. The tragedies reported in the newspaper I avoid reading. I don't want to burden myself with much worry since the doctors have cautioned me to stay calm. You too need to remain calm. We cannot help them in anything. We can expect the worst and hope for the best. I believe you should see a nerve doctor—your nerves are too stretched. My situation is worse than yours. You are, thank God, in your nest, in your own house, in your bed, your husband, your children, thank God all of you are together, may all of you be healthy, and live whole and peaceful lives together. But I am an old man, alone without anybody. It is certainly good that I have such a family.

Shalom Tvi recovered his health and went back to work at A. Cohen & Sons. Sonia wept, poured out her heart in letters to her father, and dragged herself through the motions of life. It's unlikely a “nerve doctor” practiced anywhere near Kfar Vitkin, and in any case, Sonia was too proud and too busy to seek out psychiatric treatment. She carried on by force of will.

—

The United States had been at war for only three months, but already the American family was feeling it. Ethel, Harry, and Sam all had draft-age sons; Itel had a draft-age son-in-law; and two cousins—the sons of Uncle Herman—were also of draft age. Twenty years separated Abraham and Herman, the oldest and youngest of Shimon Dov's six children, and their first children, though technically in the same generation, were born thirty-one years apart: Itel in 1886 and Leonard in 1917. Itel and Leonard were first cousins, even though Itel was old enough to be his mother. In the American branch of the family, Len Cohn (his father, Herman, had broken ranks and dropped the “e”) was the one who saw the most action in the Second World War.

Handsome, blue eyed, and compact, Len entered Yale at the age of sixteen—no mean feat for a Jew in the 1930s—and graduated with the class of 1937. In his sophomore year he had signed on with ROTC, an odd choice for a self-described left-leaning pacifist, but he thought it would give him a chance to improve his horseback-riding skills. Two years out of Yale, he was approached by an army officer and pressured to join the reserves. “
I was
torn,” he recalls. “On the one hand I was a pacifist because of what had happened in the First World War—but on other hand it was 1939 and the horrors going on in Germany made me feel I should go.” Len shelved the pacifism and entered the reserves. On April 4, 1941, at the age of twenty-four, he was called up to active duty and sent to Fort Devens, outside of Boston. He was appointed second lieutenant—a “shavetail” in army slang, the lowest-ranking commissioned officer—with the First Engineer Combat Battalion of the Army's First Infantry Division. It was the same division—the Big Red One—that his cousin Hyman had served with during the Great War.

Eight months later came Pearl Harbor and “the whole world changed for us.” The division began intensive training in amphibious landings in preparation for storming the German-held beachheads of North Africa and Europe. On the night of August 1, 1942, the Big Red One, sixteen thousand strong, shipped out of New York harbor.

Forty years after his father Herman had come to America in steerage, twenty-four years after his cousin Private Hyman Cohen had been packed into the lower deck of a British troop ship bound for the trenches, Lieutenant Leonard Cohn crossed the Atlantic with the First Division officer corps in a first-class stateroom on the
Queen Mary
. By November, he was fighting in the British-American invasion of North Africa.

—

Chaim never learned when or how his brother Yishayahu, his sister Chana, and their families in Volozhin died (their mother, Leah, had passed away before the war). They could have been killed in the stadium
Aktion
of October 1941—or they may have endured six more months of misery and wretchedness before being shot and burned to death in the
Aktion
of May 10, 1942. Two thousand Volozhin Jews died that stifling spring day—dragged out of the ghetto, marched to a smithy behind the synagogue, imprisoned in the blacksmith's house, and slaughtered. Mendel Wolkowitch, a Volozhin Jew who managed to hide in an attic during the roundup, recounted that the killing was done in a leisurely, almost sporting fashion by a drunken troop of SS officers and local Polish and Belarusian policemen. The gunmen set up a table stocked “with all kinds of liquor” and they fired off machine-gun rounds “between one drink and the next. [T]hey
shot into the building in order to silence the weeping of the children and the outcry of adults.”
Two rabbis imprisoned in the stifling house argued about resistance: one urged his fellow Jews to “take a brick, a stone, or an iron bar . . . and attack the murderers,” but the other, quoting some sacred text, cautioned that “even when a sharp sword is pressed against a man's throat, let him not cease to hope for mercy.” Some prisoners did manage to bash a hole in the roof of the house and get away. Wolkowitch said that when the shooting was over, “they set the house on fire and the Jews of Volozhin went up to heaven in flames.” Strays who had hidden in the ghetto were ferretted out, shot, and buried in pits along with “dead cats, dead dogs and all kinds of rubbish” that their gentile neighbors flung after them. “Father in Heaven, I thank Thee for having purified us of this Jewish filth!” one devout Christian woman cried out when day was done.

There was one final
Aktion
in August 1942, when three hundred Volozhin Jews were killed in the streambed of the Volozhinka. The eighty or so survivors fled, some to join the partisan bands in the forest. The town that had been revered for its yeshiva for 140 years was now
Judenfrei
. A single relic remained: the chaste white yeshiva building survived the incineration of its community.

Yishayahu and his wife, Henia, had two children, a girl and a boy; Chaim's sister Chana and her husband, Meir Finger (Yishayahu's business partner), also had a son and a daughter. Four cousins of Leahleh and Areleh, two aunts and two uncles—gone forever without a grave, a prayer, a coffin, a date of death. Only the cause of their deaths can be surmised: bullets or fire, like their relatives in Rakov. Though in truth, bullets and fire were but the agents of death. The cause must be hunted elsewhere.

—

May 1942 was when Maiden Form switched over to “war production mode.” In addition to bras, the factories were now churning out pants, coats, shirts, and undershorts for the military, along with mattress covers, parachutes, pup tents, and mosquito netting. There was many a hoot of laughter when GIs spotted the Maiden Form Brassiere Company logo stamped on their army-issue briefs—but it kept the name in broad circulation. Not that bra production slackened off. “Women workers who wore an uplift were less fatigued,” claimed Itel—and the War Department bought it.
Itel managed to secure a “declaration of essentiality” from the government that gave Maiden Form priority in receiving scarce materials. God only knows how the war would have gone if American women did not have the proper support. Since rubber, elastic, and metal hooks and eyes were impossible to come by, William and his design team made some adjustments. Gingham plaid had to be substituted for imported lace—less sexy, but eminently practical for all those hardworking Wacs, Waves, and nurses.

Itel, as usual, was miles ahead of the rest of the pack. Though a third of the company's resources went into war production, bras continued to sell briskly on the home front. The “Variation” line set a company record in 1943 when sales hit 2 million. Itel kept pouring money into advertising even though everyone told her she was crazy and all the competition was retrenching. She knew that this war wouldn't last forever. When it was over, women would still be wearing bras; thanks to
Itel's campaign to “safeguard the value and goodwill of Maiden Form's name,” more women than ever would be wearing Maiden Form bras. The United States had only just begun to fight, but Itel already had her eye on the big money waiting to be made when peace returned.

—

The war forced Sam to change his job. Before the war, A. Cohen & Sons' bread and butter had been cheap consumer goods made of chromium, steel, copper, cast iron, and silver, but these materials were declared “strategic metals” after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The product lines dried up overnight. Unlike Itel, the boys were not able to persuade the War Department that chromium-backed hairbrushes, stainless steel flatware, waffle irons, pewter cocktail shakers, and oxidized copper radio lamps were essential for the war effort. The company was hit with a merchandising crisis. After thirty years in the field as a salesman, Sam was brought “inside” to help find suitable stuff for the company to sell.

It was a bittersweet moment. Being inside put Sam on a par with Harry and Hyman, but selling had always been his forte. He was good at schmoozing, wheedling, pressuring, persuading. Good with people. Now he had an executive role in an impossible business climate. Sam beat the bushes and came up with “fringe” lines of products made of glass, ceramic, and cloth.
Gold, though restricted, was still available so the company edged into the jewelry business. The brothers caught a break when they managed to secure some semiprecious German stones that had been seized by the Alien Property Custodian. Woodrow Wilson had originated this office during the First World War to appropriate enemy assets held in the United States—and President Roosevelt resuscitated it by executive order in March 1942. German and Japanese merchandise, real estate, business, and intellectual property in the United States now belonged to the U.S. government. When the Alien Property Custodian put the lot of semiprecious German stones up for auction, A. Cohen & Sons scored a big chunk, and the brothers cut some lucrative deals with leading jewelry manufacturers. “The purchase of the stones put us solidly in the jewelry business,” Hyman remarked later. Even with business barely limping along, the brothers were scrupulous about abiding by quotas and adhering to government price regulations. They also promised the union that all employees “fighting to preserve our American Way of Life” would be able to resume their former positions after the war.

It went without saying that the jobs of family members in uniform were safe. All three of Sam's sons were in the military—Sidney was with the 82nd Airborne Division; Lester had been drafted by the navy (he trained briefly at Annapolis and shipped out, but he had a nervous breakdown while home on leave and, after a stint in a military mental hospital, got an easy berth on a submarine hunter based in Florida); Marvin, the third son, was stationed in the Pacific. With Leona, the youngest child, away in college, only Dorothy remained at home with Sam and Gladys. Even in the best of times, Dorothy grated on everyone's nerves; with the anxiety of three brothers in the service, she became unbearable.