Jacob's Cane_A Jewish Family's Journey From the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore; A M Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  ALSO BY ELISA NEW

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  ONE - Initials

  TWO - From Shavli, in Lita

  THREE - From the River Bug to Riga

  FOUR - The Free Hanseatic City of Balt-ee-mewer

  FIVE - That Bewitching Vegetable

  SIX - What Is to Be Done?

  SEVEN - Beautiful Machines

  EIGHT - What She Wears, What He Wears

  NINE - The Social-eest

  TEN - Mother Earth

  ELEVEN - The Arcadia Works

  TWELVE - Jacob’s Cane

  THIRTEEN - Blitzkrieg Barbarossa

  FOURTEEN - Yellow Star, Gold Star

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  SELECTED FURTHER READINGS

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR ELISA NEW’S

  Jacob’s Cane

  “In this poignant and wise study, New recreates that lost world for us, rebuilding it through memories, stories and archives, and presenting it through the prism of a single family.”

  —Edward Serotta, Director of Centropa.org, a Jewish historical institute; author of Out of the Shadows, Survival in Sarajevo and Jews, Germany, Memory

  “Elisa New has managed to honor the past while also showing how the research to recapture it is done. Because Jacob’s Cane is not only an historical detective story, but is also novelistic in its evocation of character and circumstance, Professor New’s book is singular, poignant, and compelling.”

  —Stephen J. Whitfield, Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University; author of In Search of American Jewish Culture

  “Here is a Harvard professor of literature, who goes in search of her family’s Lithuanian Jewish story, and finds it, and brings back something that she may not have previously realized she owned: a rich poetic voice.”

  —Paul Hendrickson, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Sons of Mississippi

  “Jacob’s Cane is an intricate, beautifully rendered mesh of memoir and genealogical enthusiasm. New describes places, possessions, even the rhythms of business with vividness, even sensuality.”

  —Steven J. Zipperstein, author of The Jews of Odessa

  “A lovely, fully grounded, yet lyrical family memoir . . . Jacob’s Cane wonderfully transcends its ‘back to my roots’ genre; its narrative is loving yet objective, informative, beautifully written and a pleasure to read.”

  —Jonathan Wilson, Professor, Tufts University; author of A Palestine Affair and The Hiding Room

  “Cultural history at its best. An engrossing exploration that reveals in its affectionate breadth the intimate ties between a Jewish family and major American manufactories.”

  —Susan Mizruchi, author of The Science of Sacrifice

  “Elisa New’s wonderful memoir adds a rich layer to the tapestry of American Jewish history.”

  —Suzanne Wasserman, Director, Gotham Center for NYC History/CUNY Graduate Center

  “A family narrative of great fascination that includes in-depth social and economic history, all written with the pen of a poet.”

  —Henry Rosovsky, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University

  “Elisa New’s brilliant memoir prefers convergences to chronology. That ‘history is a random business, made out of wanderings, guesses, and old glue’ is the major idea—and also method—of the book, and its themes converge, surprisingly and pleasurably and emotionally—every which way. . . . A gorgeously written, marvelously structured memoir.”

  —Al Filreis, Kelly Professor and Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, author of Counter-Revolution of the Word

  “Like Andre Aciman’s Out of Egypt and Rich Cohen’s Sweet and Low, Jacob’s Cane is a history of a Jewish family that is so much more—an imaginative recreation of two vanished worlds, Latvia and Baltimore from the 1880s to the 1940s; a natural, economic, and cultural history of tobacco, the product from which some of this family’s fortune was made; and a moving personal quest. And it ’s a wonderful piece of writing.”

  —Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club

  ALSO BY ELISA NEW

  The Line’s Eye:

  Poetic Experience, American Sight

  The Regenerate Lyric:

  Theology and Innovation in American Poetry

  This book is dedicated

  To my three great-aunts,

  Jean, Myrtle, and Fanny,

  Of blessed and beloved memory,

  And to those members of the Levy family

  Who perished between 1941 and 1945.

  Levy-Baron family tree Hand-draw London some time in the 1970s by Earle

  Adler (son of John Levy Jaffe ) and Paula Baron (daughrer of Paul Levy Baron ).

  Introduction

  It was not until I held my great-grandfather Jacob’s cane in my hands that all the hints and feints bestowed by those three sibyls, Aunt Jean, Aunt Myrtle, and Aunt Fanny, began to come together in this story.

  Until the day I held the cane, my own proud Jewish family’s history in America, and the history of many families like ours, remained to me obscure and hidden. Whenever I went looking for our story in the usual places, I found it missing.

  Picturing my own ancestor—assuming him, like every Jewish immigrant, a Tevye—I imagined first catching sight of him as a barge neared the immigration center at Castle Garden. Rounding the bay, the boat would pull in and I’d be there waiting, beaming at this wan, disheveled bumpkin as he peered anxiously over the river’s green chop. Or, I’d fancy myself meeting him in the Ellis Island registry room; I’d sympathize with his stumbling Yiddish phrases, his smell of steerage, his phylacteries.

  This must be he, my relative, gesticulating over the official’s stamp pad. This must be she, children pressed to her skirts, timid in her wifely modesty.

  Not finding them there, I’d persist. I’d seek them out in the stalls on Delancey Street or up gray tenement steps to the workroom where they waited for me over their piecework. Seeking my immigrant forebears in the only Jewish story ever told to me, I wondered why they failed, for all my expectations, to appear.

  We imagine every immigrant a transplant from the rutted shtetl, his background pious, his experience thin, his hopes fastened on the new land to which he makes his way. But with our gaze on the impecunious greenhorn, with our eyes straining after the rural milkman turned cloak maker, we may miss Tevye ’s more cosmopolitan cousin.

  This is the cousin rendered worldly by centuries of transoceanic commerce.

  A trader in timber or leather or tobacco, an expert in transport, storage, and the ways of officialdom, conversant with land routes from seacoasts to market towns, this cousin has for centuries known the feel of the deck, the bill of lading, the jumble of brokers at the port. Multilingual, versed in legal codes and his father’s wisdom, he attended not cheder but Gymnasium, not yeshiva but the Polytechnic or even the university. He may have hailed from Prague or Memel, Riga or Novgorod, but his German is unaccented. His broadest boast is that he is a man of liberal, enlightened spirit.

  Landing not in New York but quite likely in Baltimore, he lets his liberal spirit be his guide. He gives imaginative answers to certain questions on the immigration form. He was born not in a German land but in Shavli, Lithuania. But he deems such a fact a technicality. To write “Austria” on the form
affords him the pleasure of renouncing an emperor and endorsing the modern in one stroke.

  He grew up in, say, Rostov-on-Don via Brest-Litovsk, and was known round about as Ber, or Berel, or—who knows—even Baruch? But now he is Bernhard, with an h. Where would his native lands have been but for his own ambitious grandsires whose journeys to Danzig, Istanbul, and even Venice brought faraway traders, names, and contacts to river basins long neglected by Cossack horsemen? Would Brest-Litovsk or Rostov-on-Don have prospered had not his grandparents dug the ports and organized the customs houses? Where would Shavli be today had not his father stood patiently in line to buy stamps for the documents to convey goods on their way, thus tying rural depots to the globe ’s more glittering entrepôts?

  To keep track of all the places the family has been, the languages spoken, the secrets for rebounding and succeeding, his family preserves certain artifacts.

  A family tree, elaborately detailed, is written out from time to time, but a tree, mere paper, is easily mislaid when not burned up or destroyed. To be sure, certain generations produce their genealogists, persons attentive to history, who bestow keepsakes eloquent with meaning. But just as often, the generations history treats most generously are those most careless of the past. They leave artifacts less eloquent, objects simply too beautiful to throw away. A flowered dish in the style of Bavaria. A silver cigarette case, deco crosshatch on its lid. A photo, some clippings.

  A cane.

  The cane my family keeps was presented to my great-grandfather, Jacob Levy, in 1928. Today it stands in a closet in Baltimore, cushioned by the wall-to-wall carpet. Somewhere between cherished and disregarded, it has leaned against that wall for decades, the proud initials on it tarnishing. I have given years of my life to understanding this cane, to tracing its journeys, but the truth is: I was lucky to have been shown it at all. Only an accidental turn in the conversation gave it into my hands.

  However accidental, I nevertheless know it was the weight of that cane on my palms, the raised touch of its carved initials under my fingertips that sent me looking for the Jewish civilization that had produced it. The proud, unmistakable elegance of that cane, its foreign appearance, its careful design, its Germanness, required me to throw out much of what I’d read and assumed about the Jewish world that produced me. But it was also something familiar, something of my past, closer to me than I would grasp for years, that required me to pay the strictest respect, if not the strictest credence, to everything my three aunts had told me long ago.

  Nothing I’ve ever read revealed to me my Jewish civilization as this cane did. Nothing I’ve ever tried to write so taxed and worked me and filled me with a sense of tender obligation as did the story of this cane. For the true story of the cane could not be told through the mere gathering of facts and stories or through research, however ambitious or remote, through drafts and redrafts, new discoveries and their corrections. The true story of the cane depended, had to depend, on how truth looked, how it felt and sounded, to those who had to bear it. The story began, naturally, with my aunts.

  The author’s great-aunts (from left to right), Jean, Myrtle, and Fanny.

  ONE

  Initials

  When I was a little girl growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, my great-aunts, Jean, Myrtle, and Fanny, would share stories of their father, Jacob Levy, and of his once bosom friend but later nemesis, the fabled London cigarette magnate Bernhard Baron. They called him “Uncle Baron” due to the multiple marriages he had engineered with the Levys.

  Aunt Jean, the eldest of the sisters, would recount with pride the glory that her brothers Eddie, Paul, and Theodore Levy had achieved with Baron in London, and she would tell about how Baron had invited her young sons, Jerry and Earle, only ten and twelve years old, to come live with him. “Send me your sons and I will make them great men!” he told Jean. So she did. By 1928, when Baron’s great Carreras cigarette factory was built, five of Jacob Levy’s male progeny were living in London. There, Aunt Jean let it be known, they enjoyed a sort of Masterpiece Theatre version of Jewish success.

  On the other hand, when Jean’s younger sisters, Myrtle and Fanny, told of their brothers’ (and then their nephews’) defection to England, their foreheads contracted over their large powdered noses. They remembered their father’s fearsome anger and still felt the effects of his sadness. Although they were cowed—who wasn’t?—by their sister Jean, they also disapproved of her for letting their brother Eddie ’s uppity wife, Bertha (Baron’s granddaughter), raise Jean’s two sons while she moved on to her next, but not her last, husband.

  I remember that when the subject of Jean’s sons came up, my aunts would turn to look at each other, their heads shaking slightly and the silver and copper hairdos trembling in their coronets of spray. What but selfishness, their pursed mouths showed, could have moved Jean to send two young boys so far from home? Anyone who heard Jean’s son Jerry tell the story knew that, even at seventy, eighty, or ninety years old, the memory brought him to tears.

  Despite Myrtle and Fanny’s ambivalence about the family’s London adventure, when I was about six or seven the family albums they kept in their closets convinced me that the glamorous life their brothers and nephews had lived in England was far more interesting than anything else my relatives talked about. What other Jewish family could boast relatives who might really be called “aristocrats,” an Uncle Eddie who had actually been knighted, or, as the aunts tended to say, “knighted-by-the-Queen,” forgetting that Eddie ’s investiture took place eleven years before young Princess Elizabeth turned into a queen.

  Sent off to play, I would go into the hall closet. I ignored the spinning top and the coloring books. Instead, I would drag out the heavy photo albums that were hidden under my aunts’ furs and stacked against the card shuffler. Time had lent the photos and postcards a brown and satiny patina, the very texture of the high life my uncles had enjoyed.

  Here was a photo of Baron’s imposing Carreras cigarette factory as it looked in 1928, when it opened to lively architectural interest and much local acclaim. Immense, extending a long city block wide and one just as deep, with flags flying over its massive iron gate and two eight-foot black cats guarding the door, the building looked more like government offices, or even a museum, than a factory.

  The Carreras factory shortly after its opening in 1928. Gift to the author from Fred Rosenstein.

  Here too were my great-uncles in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. First, Uncle Paul at Monaco or Biarritz, standing in front of an impossibly long roadster, a squiggle of palms in the background. And then a shot of Uncle Theo’s wife before her presentation at Court, along with Dorothy Marks, of the Marks and Spencer department store dynasty, and then a panorama of Uncle Eddie ’s estate, Fulmer Chase, in Buckinghamshire, with its rolling lawns and large dogs. Yellowed clippings from the years after World War II showed Uncle Eddie just after he ’d been knighted, and Aunt Bertha smiling as she hosted Mrs. Winston Churchill at the Fulmer Chase hospital. And there was a sheaf of letters, rubber-banded, bearing the return address “Ruthin Castle, Wales.”

  Just how we acquired relatives who had titles and wrote letters from castles, in addition to owning town houses, country houses, and racehorses, puzzled me. I was also intrigued by my uncles, so suave in the carte postales sent from Europe ’s pleasure capitals. And most interesting of all was our mysterious Uncle Baron, who had somehow started out in Baltimore with the rest of us but ended up in London as our benefactor—though, of course, only in some people ’s eyes.

  Invariably, after closing the album, if I asked Myrtle or Fanny a question about the brothers, or Bertha, or even Bernhard Baron, whatever answer I got began with the story of Jacob Levy’s curse, often relayed in that delighted tone one keeps for events so utterly unlikely one cannot but love their coming to pass. The curse—pronounced by Jacob on the three sons who were leaving him—was “May you never have sons!” The tone an aunt used to pronounce the curse allowed that, as we were a modern family, we
naturally did not believe in curses. Still one had to admire, the aunt ’s tone said, the splendid nerve, the grand sweep of this one. Especially since it stuck.

  Jacob’s sons Eddie, Paul, and Theo, who changed their name to Baron and broke their father’s heart, had daughters only. For nought Eddie ’s careful provision in his London Times announcement of his change of name so that his sons, too, would become Barons. Not only were the prodigals denied “any lawfully begotten heirs to be known or distinguished by the name Baron,” but also, by the mid-1960s, the great cigarette empire they had inherited was gone too. By the time I turned the pages of those albums, the fire sale of Carreras, arranged by Eddie, had already happened. According to Myrtle and Fanny, Eddie had revealed himself to be a person of compromised character, dealing behind his brothers’ backs to unload the company quickly before some combination of the U.S. surgeon general’s report, plus his own weakness for racehorses and fine wine, threatened to leave him not the head of a cigarette empire but someone with a cigarette millstone around his neck.

  Later family discussions put the albums I found so alluring in an even dimmer light. I began to understand that the pictures of the young brothers grinning ear to ear must have brought distress to their father, Jacob. And I sensed that the brothers might not have turned out as well as Uncle Baron hoped when he invited Jean to send them to him. “Send me your sons and I will make them great men!”

  One photo in the album shows Uncle Baron looking weary on his day of triumph in 1928, when the new factory was dedicated. Stoop-shouldered, wearing a top hat, he stands on the steps of “the largest factory in the metropolis” and looks somehow bereft. He seems to be bending one shoulder down to take the whole factory onto his back.