The Family (41 page)

Jill Kneerim is the dream agent and I can't imagine—don't want to imagine—my life without her. Jill totally “got” this project from the first whisper, masterfully stage-managed the proposal and contract process, and connected me with the perfect editor—Penguin's Kathryn Court, who has been a dream to work with as well. Ben George, with his keen eye for both minute details and big-picture structural elements (not to mention extraneous em dashes), did an exemplary job of line-editing the book. Jill, Kathryn, and Ben are my ideal team and I can't begin to express my gratitude for and admiration of their brilliance and professionalism. I'd also like to thank Jill's former assistant Caroline Zimmerman, Kathryn's former assistant Tara Singh, and her current assistant Scott Cohen (a distant relative, perhaps). And thanks to my cover designer, Jason Ramirez, and my copy editor, Nina Hnatov.

Finally, the home team: my wife, Kate O'Neill, and our three daughters, Emily, Sarah, and Alice. By the time I was done writing this book, Kate knew as much about the Kaganovich family as I did—her unflagging interest and curiosity helped keep my nose to the grindstone. Kate always believed in this project—and believed that I could pull it off, even when I had my doubts. She helped me puzzle out all sorts of emotional, moral, and legal quandaries, let me unload and vent and imagine to my heart's content, pushed me (lovingly) to go deeper and try harder, held the fort during my many trips, read the manuscript before anyone else, and made me feel loved and happy during the years I spent researching, writing, and agonizing. As for our three daughters—wonderful brilliant young women in their own right—to quote Doba, “What can I say, my children, may they be healthy, are the greatest joy of my life.”

Aliyah:
“ascent” to the Holy Land; to make aliyah means to move to the Land, or more loosely “to visit”

Bris:
the rite of circumcision performed shortly after birth on Jewish male babies; usually the occasion for a family celebration

Bochur (plural bochurim):
a yeshiva (q.v.) student

Cheder:
Jewish elementary school

Cohen:
the English form of Kohain (q.v.)

Dacha:
a country vacation cottage

Diaspora:
the dispersal of the Jewish people after their exile from the Holy Land

Frum:
Yiddish for observant, religious

Gymnasium:
a European secondary school that roughly straddles American high school and the early years of college

Halutz (plural halutzim):
a male Zionist agricultural pioneer

Halutzah (plural halutzot):
a female Zionist pioneer

HeHalutz:
an international organization of Zionist agricultural pioneers

Kibbutz:
a Jewish agricultural collective in Palestine (and Israel after statehood)

Kinneret:
Hebrew form of the place name Galilee, a region in northeastern Israel surrounding the Sea of Galilee

Kohain (plural Kohanim):
a member of the Jewish priestly caste, descended from Aaron, the brother of Moses. Used in various forms as a last name: Cohen, HaKohen, Kaganovitch, Kagan, etc.

Ma'apilim:
Clandestine Jewish immigrants to Palestine

Mezuzah (plural mezuzot):
a tiny Torah scroll in a protective case hung on the door-post of Jewish homes

Moshav:
a Jewish cooperative agricultural village in Palestine (Israel after statehood)

Pogrom:
an outburst of anti-Semitic violence

Shiva:
the period of mourning

Shoah:
“catastrophe,” another term for the Holocaust

Shtetl (plural shtetlach):
Hebrew for little town

Talmud:
a compendium of sacred Jewish texts that includes the recorded oral law based on the Torah (q.v.) and extensive commentaries; Talmud is the primary subject of study in yeshivot (q.v.)

Tefillin:
small leather boxes containing prayers that observant Jewish men wear during prescribed morning prayers

Torah:
the first five books of the Bible

Tzaddik (female, tzadeke):
a righteous, upstanding person

Yeshiva (plural yeshivot):
a school for Jewish learning, devoted primarily to Torah (q.v.) and Talmud (q.v.)

Family stories are the primary source for this book. I started with the stories that I grew up hearing from my mother, Leona Cohen Laskin, and her parents, Sam and Gladys Cohen, and went on from there in wider and wider circles. Once I committed to writing this book, I set about trying to gather as many stories as I could from the entire extended family, including lots of relatives I never knew I had. I can't claim to have interviewed all one hundred–odd living descendants of my great-grandfather or the thirty-two descendants of Shalom Tvi—but I did speak with everyone who knew anything about the “old days.”

Among any family's stories there are bound to be a fair number of what Huck Finn called “stretchers”—and my challenge throughout has been to try to separate truth from things that got, well, stretched a bit. Sometimes this has been relatively easy: my great- uncle Hyman Cohen writes on the second page of his self-published memoir,
As I Recall
(1967), that Avram Akiva's grandfather was Chaim the Volozhiner, the founder and head of the Volozhin yeshiva. Two minutes of research online revealed that this was a stretcher. But many other bits of information and conflicting accounts, both large and small, have been more difficult to resolve. For the sake of the narrative, I have written in the body of the text what I believe is the most likely version—and I use the notes that follow to present alternate versions and explain the basis of my choice.

As I indicated in the Epilogue, my Israeli cousins provided two essential sources of material without which I could not have written this book: the memoirs of Chaim and Sonia's early years that Benny wrote based on his 1992 interview with his mother; and the nearly three hundred letters written primarily by Doba, Etl, Beyle, Shepseleh, and Shalom Tvi between 1932 and 1946. In most cases the letters were
incompletely dated: the correspondents usually omitted the year and sometimes the month, heading the letter simply “14 June” or “Rosh Hashanah Eve.” Benny has performed the invaluable service of dating all the letters based on internal evidence or by correlating events described in the letters to the history of the time. In a very few cases I have contested the dates Benny assigned. I have not footnoted the letters or the family memoirs.

This is a work of history but I have taken some liberties. In order to make the narrative more vivid, I often put myself inside the minds of family members at crucial points in their lives. Examples of this include Gishe Sore's arrival at her Lower East Side tenement; Shimon Dov's experience of the first winter of the Great War; Chaim's adventures in the Kinneret during his first months in Palestine. Though I imagine these and other experiences, I do not invent. I based Gisha Sore's reaction to the cold-water flat on Madison Street on the account that Hyman recorded in his memoir; Chaim's experiences are built on what his son Benny wrote and told me, and so on. I have bolstered and deepened these scenes by researching the accounts left by others—and in the notes that follow I indicate which memoirs, letters, articles, and works of fiction have been most useful. None of the dialogue quoted in the book has been invented: all dialogue in quotation marks comes from accounts either written or recounted by family members. I use italics for dialogue or thoughts for which I have no source: I don't put words in my characters' mouths, but I do give them italicized reactions or expressions that strike me as likely or logical.

In the notes that follow, I indicate the major secondary sources that I have relied on in each chapter. I footnote only long quotations, controversial issues, and incidents or historic events for which I have found conflicting accounts or claims. These are not intended to be strict academic footnotes—but readers who need to know where I came by a crucial fact or assertion or who want to delve deeper into a particular issue will have the citations they need to do so.

INTRODUCTION

“the Wolf of the Kremlin”
:
In 1987, American journalist Stuart Kahan published a book called
The Wolf of the Kremlin: The First Biography of L. M. Kaganovich, the Soviet Union's Architect of Fear
(New York: Morrow, 1989). Kahan, claiming to be a relative of Lazar Kaganovich, wrote a highly colored account of “the Wolf's” relationship with Stalin and his role in the Ukraine famine as well as pogroms. Kahan's claim that he was a nephew of Lazar, as well as many other assertions in the book, were debunked by Kaganovich's family in the Soviet Union.

“beguiled
 . . . rifling around in the past”:
Alice Munro,
The View from Castle Rock
(New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 347.

“We (I speak of Jews now and not merely of writers)”
:
Letter from Saul Bellow to Cynthia Ozick, July 19, 1987, in
The New Yorker
, April 26, 2010, pp. 59–60.

CHAPTER ONE: VOLOZHIN

My description of Volozhin and the Volozhin yeshiva is based on the following sources:
Wolozyn: Sefer shel ha-ir-shel yeshivat “Ets Hayim”
;
Wolozin: The Book of the City and of the Etz Hayyim Yeshiva
, edited by Eliezer Leoni and written by former residents of Volozhin living in Israel and the United States (Tel Aviv: 1970). This is the so-called Yizkor book of Volozhin: after the Shoah, survivors of many shtetlach and towns assembled “memory books” describing the life and institutions of their communities before the war, recounting their destruction under the Nazis, and listing the names of the dead. Many of these books are available online through Jewish Gen,
the
first stop for anyone doing Jewish family research. Some of the Volozhin Yizkor book is available online at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/volozhin/volozhin.html. Henceforth I will cite this source as Volozhin Yizkor book.

I relied on these books for background on shtetl life in the nineteenth century:
There Once Was a World
, by Yaffa Eliach (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1998);
These We Remember: Yizkor Book of Ivenets, Kamin, and Surroundings
, translated by Florette Lynn (Emerson, NJ: Shoah Literature Press, 2008);
The Jews in Poland and Russia
, vol. 1 and 2, by Antony Polonsky (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010–2012);
From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry
, edited by Jack Kugelmass and J. Boyarin (New York: Schocken Books, 1983);
The World of Sholom Aleichem
, by Maurice Samuel (New York: Knopf, 1943);
Twenty-one Stories
, by S. Y. Agnon (New York: Schocken Books, 1970);
Shtetl
, by Eva Hoffman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); and
Life Is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl
, by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog (New York: International Universities Press, 1952).

For the history of the Volozhin yeshiva and its place in the revival of yeshivot in Lithuania I used the following:
Reb Chaim of Volozhin
, by Rabbi Dov Eliach (Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications, 1993);
Torah Lishmah: Torah for Torah's Sake
, by Norman Lamm (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1989); and
My Uncle the Netziv
, by Rabbi Baruch HaLevi Epstein (Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications, 1988).

For background on the work of the Torah scribe:
Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures
, by Philip R. Davies (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998);
A Torah Is Written
, by Paul and Rachel Cowan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1986); and
Sofer: The Story of a Torah Scroll
, by Eric Ray (Los Angeles: Torah Aura Productions, 1986). I gleaned additional information from an interview with working Torah scribe Jen Taylor Friedman at her home in New York City, on August 4, 2011.

 

since science and scripture eerily concur
:
Sharon Begley, “The DNA of Abraham's Children,”
Newsweek
, June 3, 2010, online version, p. 3, www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/06/03/the-dna-of-abraham-s-children.html.

“All day he sat
 . . .”:
“The Tale of the Scribe” in Agnon,
Twenty-one Stories
, pp. 9, 18.

“You must never, ever touch anything”
:
This quote and other details of Shimon Dov in Volozhin come from the unpublished manuscript “History of Louis Rubenstein, Recorded by Rose Einziger,” shared by their family. Louis Rubenstein and Rose Einziger are two of the children of Shimon Dov's only daughter, Leah Golda.

Precisely 304,805 letters
:
www.torahscience.org/newsletter7.html; other sources put the number of words in the Torah at 79,976.

In 1803, a yeshiva
:
Gershon David Hundert, ed.,
The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), entry on Volozhin yeshiva, by Shaul Stampfer, pp. 1984–1985. Other sources date the founding of the yeshiva to 1801 or 1802.

the most renowned and revered
:
Lamm,
Torah Lishmah
, p. 26.

to live beside the Volozhin yeshiva during its golden age
:
To understand Shimon Dov and the religious atmosphere of Volozhin, it helps to have some background on the conflict between Hasidim and
mitnagdim
—opponents of Hasidism—that emerged in the late eighteenth century and shaped the religious atmosphere and pedagogy of the Volozhin yeshiva.

 

Around the same time that the Gaon of Vilna became prominent, another great spirit arose to beckon the Jews down a different path. Israel ben Eliezer—the charismatic seer known as the Ba'al Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name), who is credited with the founding of Hasidism—is a figure cloaked in reverent mystery. Popular tradition has it that the Besht (an acronym for Ba'al Shem Tov) was a poor, orphaned, barely educated youth who received the call from God to bring ecstatic worship to the Jewish masses—but the rags-to-radiance story may have been fabricated or embellished later to lend a populist aura to the emergence of Hasidism. What is clear is that the Besht opened the way for a more joyous, more immediate, more inclusive, more intimately mystical form of Judaism that inspired the soul of Eastern Europe from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. Followers of the Besht believed that the way to approach God was not to shut yourself in a darkened room with your feet in ice water but to sing and dance and shout and pray with such heart-lifting fervor that the very words on the page dissolved into shimmering spirit. God is present everywhere in His creation, the Besht told his followers—pray and study joyously, live a life full of honesty and love, make worship a “joyous service of the heart,” and you will find Him. Jews who felt excluded by the pedantry and snobbishness of the Pale's scholarly aristocracy embraced the Besht as a tzaddik—a seer who had the power to deliver man's messages directly to God. When the Besht prayed, “everyone saw that the water was rippling,” wrote one of his followers. “The Shekinah [the divine presence of God] hovered over him and as a result the earth trembled.” (Dov Ber ben Samuel,
Shivhei Ha-Besht
, trans. and ed. by Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome Mintz, Bloomington, IN: 1970, pp. 50–51; quoted in Moshe Rosman,
Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov
, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 37). The Besht traveled through the Pale performing
miracle healings and purging the possessed of evil spirits; he foretold the future through his dreams; he dazzled the downtrodden with his radiant sweetness. Hasidism—Hebrew for “piety” or “loving kindness”—burst forth from the teaching and examples of this holy man and quickly gained popularity among poor, humble, yearning Ashkenazi Jews. By the 1750s, the Hasidic fire was spreading into Poland and from Poland throughout the Russian Pale.

But the flames flickered and died when they reached the icy footbath of the Gaon. “When a man studies or prays,” the Hasidim rhapsodized, “the word should be uttered with full strength, like the ejaculation of a drop of semen from his whole body” (quoted in Paul Johnson,
A History of the Jews
, New York: Harper & Row, 1987, p. 297). To the Gaon and his followers, such passion was an abomination. Abominators of Hasidism began calling themselves
mitnagdim
—opponents, no need to specify what or whom they opposed—and the Gaon of Vilna stepped, or was dragged, forward as their leader. To the
mitnagdim
, Hasidic ecstasy was an insult to the Almighty, Hasidic visions were delusions, Hasidic reverence for tzaddiks a form of idolatry. In 1781, the Vilna Gaon issued a
cherem
(ban) condemning the Hasidim (Eliach,
Reb Chaim of Volozhin
, p. 158). He ordered their books to be burned in public, he forbade pious Jews from intermarrying or doing business with them, he made formal pronouncements excommunicating them from Jewish communities. “It is the duty of every believing Jew to repudiate and pursue them with all manner of afflictions and subdue them,” the Gaon declared, “because they have sin in their hearts and are a sore on the body of Israel” (quoted in Johnson,
A History of the Jews
, p. 298).

According to many accounts, the Volozhin yeshiva, founded by the prime disciple of the Vilna Gaon, was a bastion of
mitnagdim
sentiment, though in recent years scholars have noted that Chaim the Volozhiner tolerated and may even have welcomed Hasidic students in his yeshiva. So, like a lot of scholarly and religious disputes, it's complicated.

 

“It was the Torah center of the great Russian Jewry”
:
Volozhin Yizkor book, p. 7.

mixed their essence with gum arabic
:
My description of the scribal process is based on the books cited above as well as my interview with Jen Taylor Friedman, a working Torah scribe, in her apartment in New York City on August 4, 2011.