The Family (42 page)

Avram Akiva duly enrolled in the yeshiva
:
There is a faint shadow of doubt in my mind as to whether Shimon Dov and Avram Akiva actually attended the yeshiva. My great-uncle Hyman Cohen in his memoir
As I Recall
claims that his father Avram Akiva studied there—but he also said that Chaim the Volozhiner was Shimon Dov's father, which was most definitely not the case. Shimon Dov's and Avram Akiva's names do not appear on the lists of yeshiva students from the nineteenth century that have come down—but these lists are fragmentary and incomplete. There is, however, strong circumstantial evidence and a bit of documentary evidence to support the idea that Avram Akiva and at least some of his brothers were enrolled in the yeshiva. While he was in the United States, Avram Akiva's brother
Shalom Tvi indicated on a U.S. immigration form that he had attended the Volozhin yeshiva: if a younger brother went, it's very likely that the oldest brother went as well. There is also the fact that Avram Akiva became a renowned Talmudic scholar in later life and that the synagogue he helped found, the Hebrew Institute of University Heights, named its religious school after him. It seems likely that so distinguished a scholar would have received his training at the most revered yeshiva in Europe, especially because that yeshiva was located in his hometown.

Under the Netziv
:
Lamm,
Torah Lishmah
, p. 28.

Without the work of the scribe
 . . . the linguistic historian:
Johnson,
A History of the Jews
, pp. 82, 90.

“Hashem, His will, and His word
 . .
 .”:
Quoted in Eliach,
Reb Chaim of Volozhin
, p. 170.

CHAPTER TWO: THE MOVE TO RAKOV

“I have no desire for any understanding
 . . .”:
Quoted in Eliach,
Reb Chaim of Volozhin
, p. 75.

marched to the house of the Netziv
 . . .:
Details on celebrations in Volozhin from Eliach,
Reb Chaim of Volozhin
, p. 103.

“Jewish kingdom of strength”
:
Volozhin Yizkor book, p. 114.

one third will die
:
Howard M. Sachar
, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time
(New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 12.

the family went by the name Kagan
:
According to records in the Minsk National Historical archive in Belarus, Sarah's father's name was Zelick-Movsha Kagan. However, on Sarah's Certificate of Death provided by the Bureau of Records, Department of Health, New York City, her father's name is given as Selig Moses Shapiro.

choice of four synagogues
:
I have based my supposition that Rakov had four synagogues on evidence provided in
Rakov Community Memorial Book
by former residents of Rakow in Israel and the United States, edited by Haim Abramson, translated by Ruth Wilnai (Tel Aviv, Israel: 1959)—hereafter the Rakov Yizkor book. I am guessing that the Old Shul was the Great Shul, though I have not been able to confirm this.

A barrel of herring and a barrel of kerosene
:
Details on a typical shtetl shop from Lynn,
These We Remember
, p. 6.

The students had organized
:
Eliach,
There Once Was a World
, p. 183.

in the holy city of Tzvat
:
The Volozhin Yizkor book says the community was in Jerusalem.

Even the Netziv
:
Rabbi Dr. Jacob J. Schacter “Haskalah, Secular Studies and the Closing of the Yeshiva in Volozhin in 1892” in
Torah U-Madda Journal
, January 1, 1990, p. 104.

“Don't manage me”
:
New York Post
, September 6, 1964, clipping on file with the
Maidenform Collection, 1922–1997, the Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC. Hereafter, Maidenform Collection.

Gishe Sore was a famously bad cook
:
The story of Gishe Sore's lousy cooking comes from my mother, Leona Cohen Laskin, who lived in the flat below Gishe Sore as a child. The story of Itel taking charge of the younger children and forcing them to eat their mother's bread comes from an unpublished biographical essay on Itel called “Ida Rosenthal: A Remembrance,” undated and unattributed, but apparently written in 1977 by Hy Lieberman. Hereafter, Itel's Story.

Kaganovich and Rubilnik
:
My cousins in Israel speculate that Rubilnik may have been Beyle's mother's maiden name.

CHAPTER THREE: THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY

Itel took it for granted
:
From Itel's Story.

the number of Jewish students capped
:
In
Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), Benjamin Nathans says that when quotas were first instituted, “Jewish female students were not regarded as warranting such drastic action,” though quotas for them started in the 1890s; pp. 266–267.

published in underground Jewish newspapers
:
See
The Jewish Bund in Russia from Its Origins to 1905
, by Henry J. Tobias (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972), p. 251, for a discussion of the Jewish press at the turn of the last century.

Nails were driven into the heads
:
Nora Levin,
While Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements, 1871–1917
(New York: Schocken Books, 1977), p. 305.

“
The riot was now at its height”
:
www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/Kishinev.html. Korolenko describes the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, from “Kishineff: The Medieval Outbreak Against the Jews” in
The Great Events by Famous Historians
, vol. 20 (n.p.: National Alumni, 1914), pp. 35–49.

the citizens of Kishinev killed forty-nine Jews
:
Statistics, facts, and background on the pogrom come from http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/kishinev/kishinev-pogrom.html.

It was “the last pogrom
 . . .”:
www.forward.com/articles/8544/. “Kishinev 1903: The Birth of a Century,” by J. J. Goldberg,
Jewish Daily Forward
, April 4, 2003. This article also provides text for some of Bialik's poem, “In the City of Slaughter.”

She was twelve years old
:
I have made an educated guess of Itel's age here. The Bund was founded in 1897; so assuming the push for membership happened in 1898, Itel would have been twelve.

One Friday evening
:
The account of the young Bundist with the mole is from the Rakov Yizkor book.

“organize armed resistance”
:
Tobias,
The Jewish Bund in Russia
, p. 226.

Bundists were being arrested
:
Ibid., p. 229.

“the halo of heroism”
:
“Memories of the Zionist movement and the Bund,” in the Rakov Yizkor book.

Students took to the streets
:
Abraham Ascher,
The Revolution of 1905: A Short History
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 19–20.

the Rakov Bundists held secret meetings
:
Rakov Yizkor book and Itel's Story (which has details about weapons and target practice in the forest).

Jews taken up arms
:
Tobias,
The Jewish Bund in Russia
, p. 343.

Wolf was drafted
:
From Itel's Story.

to agitate from within
:
Levin,
While Messiah Tarried
, p. 306.

happened to be Itel's nineteenth birthday
:
Correlating Itel's birth with Bloody Sunday raises a rather sticky chronological question. Before the Communist Revolution of 1917, Russia did not use the Gregorian (also known as new style—NS) calendar that had long been standard in the West and in the United States but rather the slightly different Julian, or old style (OS), calendar. Itel always gave her birthday as January 9, 1886—but it's unclear whether this was OS or NS. Bloody Sunday fell on January 9, 1905, OS—but the NS date was January 22. So if Itel was born on January 9, NS, then her birthday was not on Bloody Sunday after all. Specialists in Russian-Jewish genealogy consulted on this matter have pointed out that birth dates were notoriously imprecise for our immigrant ancestors. Many Russian Jews used the Hebrew calendar to mark their children's birthdays—and then rough correlations were made to the Julian and/or Gregorian calendar. Some simply invented or changed their birthdays. There was no official agency in the United States that translated OS birth dates to NS birth dates. Given Itel's character and politics, it's possible that she recorded her birthday as January 9 precisely
because
it coincided with Bloody Sunday—but the exact date is impossible to ascertain.

the official government count
:
David Floyd,
Russia in Revolt
(London: Macdonald & Co, 1969), p. 64.

“Attack the stores
 . .
 .”:
Quoted in Tobias,
The Jewish Bund in Russia
, p. 295.

“It could achieve everything”
:
Quoted in Tobias,
The Jewish Bund in Russia
, p. 309.

In the first years of their marriage
:
I have guessed at the year of Shula's birth. In the memoir that Sonia's son Benny wrote, Sonia states: “Shula, the oldest, died of an illness when she was 4 or 5 years old.” She had to have been born before 1902, since Doba was born in 1903.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE BOYS

“The root of all evil
 
. . .”:
Quoted in Tobias,
The Jewish Bund in Russia
, p. 312.

“A young muzhik was smashing . . .”
:
Isaac Babel, “The Story of My Dovecote” in
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel
(New York: Norton, 2002), p. 610. Khariton Efrussi is surely a reference to the Ephrussi family that Edmund de Waal belongs to
and wrote about in his recent family history,
The Hare with Amber Eyes
. Though there is no Khariton on de Waal's family tree, the Ephrussi family did make their fortune in Odessa and had a prominent house there.

“torrent of Jewish blood”
:
Quoted in Levin,
While Messiah Tarried
, p. 328.

“brazen, insolent way”
:
Quoted in Floyd,
Russia in Revolt
, p. 93.

“Repairing watches or clocks is fascinating
 . 
. .”:
Hyman Cohen,
As I Recall
(self-published, 1967), p. 5.

CHAPTER FIVE: LOWER EAST SIDE

East River, smelling of fish
:
All-of-a-Kind Family
, by Sydney Taylor, quoted in
Tenement
, by Raymond Bial (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), n.p.

Half a million Jews
:
Johnson,
A History of the Jews
, p. 372.

350 square feet between them
:
Lawrence J. Epstein,
At the Edge of a Dream: The Story of Jewish Immigrants on New York's Lower East Side, 1880–1920
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), p. 46.

Even on Kol Nidre night
:
Albert Waldinger, ed.,
Shining and Shadow: An Anthology of Early Yiddish Stories from the Lower East Side
(Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006), pp. 67–68.

On a special occasion
:
Epstein,
At the Edge of a Dream
, p. 177.

barely 12 percent of Jews
:
Tony Michels,
A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 13.

“Success, American style
 . . .”:
Harry Roskolenko
, The Time That Was Then: The Lower East Side, 1900–1914, An Intimate Chronicle
(New York, Dial Press, 1971), p. 33.

Zionism remained strong
:
Rakov Yizkor book, pp. 14–15.

it should have been Samuel
:
There is some confusion over my grandfather's name in Yiddish. In a letter to Sonia, Shalom Tvi refers to him as Shalom—and in fact the names Shalom and Solomon are closely related. My mother had always told me that her father's name was Shmuel in the Old Country—which became Samuel or Sam in America—but it's possible that his Yiddish name was Shalom or Solomon, not Shmuel, and he chose to Americanize it as Sam.

CHAPTER SIX: THE BIRTH OF A BUSINESS

Many of the details on the founding or A. Cohen & Sons and its early years come from Hyman Cohen's
As I Recall
.