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

  As I grew up, finished college and graduate school, and started teaching American literature, the uncles and all their glittering trappings continued to fascinate me. I grew curious about the great hopes and great disappointments of the generation before—of Jacob Levy and Bernhard Baron, Jewish immigrants from the Baltic States who had met in Baltimore, become friends, mingled their families through marriage, but ended their lives bitterly divided.

  I wondered how these two young men had made their start in the new country that was so very different from their homeland. Who was this Bernhard Baron, called Uncle by Jacob Levy’s family? Who indeed was my great-grandfather, the man who cursed so magnificently?

  My interest in these characters was probably stimulated by the subjects I was teaching—early American settlement, regional literature, and Jewish literature of the city. I was especially fascinated by my home state—Maryland. Along with its slaveholding history and agricultural origins, Maryland also had an old and large Jewish population and a large city, Baltimore, that became a sort of cemetery for an earlier industrial boom.

  Driving to the beach on the Delaware shore, my father, mother, brother, and I used to pass alongside tobacco lands and signs indicating these lands had once been farmed by slaves. On the way to the newly built Harborplace in Baltimore, we would go along avenues of six- and seven-story square brick buildings, now lofts and office suites but once factories, the Jewish or German names of their long-ago proprietors still sometimes visible in faded paint on the brick.

  It was not easy for me, even by asking my aunts direct questions, to get a story of our origins that made sense, but in the years before they died, I tried to find out what I could about the family’s early days in the city they called Balt-ee-mewer.

  Aunt Jean, the sharpest of the aunts by far, was also the most motivated to help me understand. The three sons and two grandsons who had abandoned their father and grandfather for Bernhard Baron were a favorite topic of hers. Jean never tired of repeating the siren call he issued across the Atlantic, nor was she reluctant to share her own archives, more complete than her sisters’, about Baron.

  For one thing, Jean kept in her possession a sheaf of obituaries written about Baron in 1929, his death coming just months after the opening of the great factory and of the settlement house to which he gave his name as well as his money. Reading through these obituaries, I could tell that the narrative of Uncle Baron’s life was quite a story, if corrupted (as I suspected) by mystifications both private and public. For instance, one obituary began by asserting that “no more romantic career can be imagined” than Bernhard Baron’s, and it traced his rise from poverty in Brest-Litovsk. Another said he ’d begun penniless in Rostov-on-Don.

  Something about the hyphenation of both of these place-names inclined me to be skeptical of them, and to believe instead what turned out to be a fallacious account that traced the Barons, like the Levys, to Riga, in Latvia. Other extravagant claims in the obituaries also made me wonder.

  All the accounts agreed, for instance, that Bernhard Baron had been a “benchmate of Samuel Gompers” in New York, and one went so far as to claim that “the association doubtless accounts for the sympathy with the Labour Cause the deceased so markedly showed in this country” before relocating to Baltimore and eventually London, where he became, according to the various obituaries and glowing encomia, that city ’s greatest philanthropist and most progressive employer.

  The public record not only credited Uncle Baron with outstanding success but also marveled at his great humility. One obituary emphasized that he had refused a title, saying if “Mister” was good enough for his workers it was good enough for him. He ordered medals struck to celebrate the opening of the factory, stamped on one side “London’s Most Hygienic Tobacco Factory” and on the other, to his workers, “My Thanks For ALL YOUR HELP.” The rhapsodic accounts of his philanthropy went on and on. One paper called him a “Prince of Benefactors,” bankrolling London’s largest Jewish settlement house, building public tennis courts in Regents Park, funding North London hospitals, contributing to the cause of Palestine. The factory had apparently been a showplace for progressivism, a sort of laboratory for worker protection with vacation and retirement benefits, free education for the young, relocation for workers, subsidized meals, and theatrical societies.

  It was in a reckless moment, therefore, that I queried Myrtle and Fanny whether any ambitious young man in his right mind wouldn’t have followed Bernhard Baron. One had to realize, after reading the obituaries, that Uncle Baron had a career that our poor sire, Jacob, could hardly match. Still, pity the hapless grandniece incautious enough to say such a thing to Aunts Myrtle and Fanny.

  Their steely, sorrowful, and baffled looks made clear to me that Bernhard Baron owed much to the brilliance, the vision, the generosity, the refinement of their father, who had arrived in Baltimore in 1886 while Baron was still in New York. For was not their father, as Fanny often pointed out, a brilliant inventor of machines, a holder of patents, who by 1900 had established himself in his own grand home on Baltimore ’s fashionable West Lombard Street?

  Moreover—as Aunt Myrtle somewhat grimly informed me—didn’t she, Myrtle, know better than the others? Wasn’t it she who kept house for her father, Jacob, after her young husband died and her mother was sent to the place only Fanny would name—the “inst-ee-tution”? Jean may have worked with him at the plant and kept the family together early on, but hadn’t she, Myrtle, dusted and straightened his “library,” typed his frequent letters to the editor, and prepared his meals? She didn’t need anyone to remind her of her father’s books books books, papers papers papers, and of his many opinions on social questions or the fact that he was a Socialist.

  That ’s just what he was, she said with emphasis, as if her discomfort were best managed with defiance: not just a member of the Socialist Party but its candidate for Congress in 1914. I’m grateful for the discomfort she let herself show, for the tone in her voice that let me see how the newspapers, typescripts, petition pads, and other paraphernalia of his public meddling must have weighed on her, a widow with two sons in knee pants and an irascible, glowering, chain-smoking, ink-spilling radical father.

  Jean’s perspective was different from Myrtle ’s, more worldly. But how did it happen, I asked Jean, that your father named his two factories—the first in Baltimore and the later one in Philadelphia—Levy’s International Shrinking Company? Wasn’t this a bit grandiose for two brick buildings—one on Front Street in Philadelphia, one on Redwood Street in Baltimore—and the latter only a few minutes walk from the original plant, which had been some dunking tubs and drying rods in a Lombard Street basement?

  With that, Aunt Jean looked her sternest and sought the strength to show patience. Why indeed had her father called his company Levy’s International Shrinking Company? Not just to be grand, she had me understand, not to put on airs. Rather, as he ’d explained to her, it was to express those internationalist principles that were once the hope of the world. Like Uncle Baron, her father had been an inventor, a holder of patents, an industrialist of the most enlightened kind. He invented machines that did easy as pie, quick as can be, what used to take hours of handwork, and he did it to advance a cause—socialism you could call it—he did—but she called it just living decently, comfortably. Jacob, and Uncle Baron too, understood that machines—sponging and drying machines or machines to make cigarettes—were things that would free working people, help them live more civilized lives. But of course it had all been ruined, and her father’s heart broken, when the unions pushed their way in.

  Her father was a Socialist, yes, and so was his brother Paul, but this, in Jean’s opinion, had nothing to do with unions—a bunch of thugs, that ’s just what they were. Same in America as in Europe.

  And if I didn’t believe her, I could ask my cousin Moshe, in Israel, to tell the story of his own father, Isaac, Jacob’s older brother, and what he endured from the local thugs over there. Get Cousin Mosh
e to describe how back in Europe, as in America, the enlightened men, the intelligent Jews, struggled. Get him to tell me how his father had been sent to Germany by Frankel, the biggest industrialist in Shavli—their hometown—to learn modern techniques with leather, and how he came home only to be blackballed by the local tanners and their guild—just unions really, led by the gentiles, keeping the Jews out. When the Nazis came in, as Moshe could also tell me, the locals thought they’d have their chance to take over—except that none of them understood the machines or the modern techniques.

  Nazis? I wondered. But Jean was now finished with that part of the story.

  For years and years my aunts seemed no more affected by age than were the gloves and handkerchiefs they kept nested in original tissue in their bureau drawers. Born in 1894, 1896, and 1897, married and, in my Aunt Jean’s case, already widowed before the end of World War I, from the 1960s into the first few years of the 1990s my aunts seemed almost to grow, if not younger, at least more freshly, luxuriantly, themselves.

  At sixty-five, Jean had still to acquire the magisterial sinew she would show at seventy-five. At seventy, Myrtle was just giving bud to her most bountiful role, still learning the play of her fairy god-mother’s wand. And at eighty, Fanny was just coming into a waggishness, a drollery, that had been repressed—who knew how long? Their three brothers in London all died in the 1970s, as did their youngest brother, Emil, my grandfather. But Aunt Fanny lived until 1996, and her sisters Myrtle and Jean to just a year or two before.

  Each within a year or two of turning one hundred, they gave out, and we went three times in as many years to the cemetery and then back to sit shiva, children and grandchildren, all squeezed into the aunts’ jewel box-like apartments, eating off their crystal and sterling and trying not to cry at the end of an era.

  By the time they all died I was glad that I, at least, had done my due diligence. I had interviewed each aunt, tape recorder running, and had asked intelligent questions of all concerned, demonstrating interests not merely sentimental but historical and intellectual. I had written up what they told me in a college paper and stored my notes in a manila file.

  In addition, I traveled to Israel in the 1980s and went to Givat Ram to meet the distant Israeli cousin, Moshe, born in 1907. I took careful notes of his account of my great-grandfather Jacob’s departure from the Baltics. Truth be told, I rather enjoyed how Moshe ’s version of events seemed to put certain matters straight, and after returning to the United States I wrote up a version of the family story that emphasized his “corrections.”

  No one was anything less than completely tactful and gracious about what I’d learned from Moshe. Even though what he told me contradicted family lore and my great-grandfather’s naturalization papers of 1891, which had been framed on the wall of the factory, no one argued. The naturalization papers said that Jacob M. Levy was a native of Austria, and that, moreover, he utterly and completely refused all allegiance to the emperor of Austria. Moshe assured me, on the contrary, that Jacob was born not in Austria but in northern Lithuania, near the Latvian border. As proof, Moshe showed me some of the same pictures I had seen in my aunts’ albums, pictures documenting the trip that Jacob took in 1928 back to the land of his birth, taking with him my grandfather, Emil. Moshe had pointed out that these pictures were marked at the bottom with the names of towns—Riga, Siauliai, and Raseinai—and these towns were on the east, not the west, shores of the Baltic.

  Moshe genteelly refused to enter into the question of whether Jacob had falsified the place of his birth or the relatives were wrong. His politeness and so much else about him reminded me of my aunts, who were his cousins not only in blood but in a certain horror of vulgar disputation. Back at home, they politely refused to enter into a silly argument with a relative so far away and over matters long past. For my part I’d have preferred them to insinuate that, even if Moshe did have the pictures, he must, somehow, be mistaken. But they didn’t.

  It was not until I held in my hand the elaborately inscribed cane, my great-grandfather Jacob’s cane, that all the hints and feints, the conundra and contradictions of our family saga, began to compose this story. From the very first morning I saw it and turned its pale engraved script into the November light, I knew this cane would exert a stronger, more persistent influence over my imagination than any one object ever had.

  I first saw it on a bright morning in Baltimore shortly after the last of my aunts had died. I had just finished eating brunch with my mother, my daughter Yael, then just twelve years old, and our cousins Buddy and Anita, children of great-grandsire Jacob’s son Robert. During breakfast, Buddy, bright-faced, amiable, had been talking about the old days of fabric shrinking in Baltimore, describing in detail the method of inspecting and treating the fabrics to be used in rainwear and umbrellas and fine haberdashery, and remembering too the labor struggles of the first half of the twentieth century, before he had finally closed the Baltimore plant. It was then, just as Buddy’s wife stood up to clear away the plates of lox and bagels, onions and tomatoes on the sideboard, that Buddy mentioned, quite offhandedly, that he actually still had, if I wanted to see it, my great-grandfather Jacob’s cane.

  It was in his den.

  Of course I remembered the cane as soon as Buddy mentioned it. I had noticed it many times in one particular heirloom photograph, beautifully mounted versions of which I’d seen in albums in Baltimore and London, Philadelphia and Washington, and also in cousin Moshe ’s apartment near Tel Aviv. The picture had been taken in 1928 when Jacob made his only trip back to Riga to visit the Levy family members still resident there, and then had visited for a few weeks in London. This had occurred, I understood, the same spring that Buddy’s father, Robert, or Bob, had taken Aunt Jean’s sons to England to be formed into “great men.” There Jacob had visited with his grandsons and perhaps even had a reunion with his own sons, now bearing the name Baron, at the magnificent new Carreras factory on Mornington Crescent.

  The photograph showed Jacob sitting among a large group of his relatives still living in the Baltics: his brother Max and his children and grandchildren. In the picture, Jacob’s hands are folded over the cane ’s ebony crook, his vest front recedes lustrous behind the cane ’s scroll of filigree. Jacob looks like a man who’d waited long to come back to his homeland and had done so in the proper style. And yet, in the midst of this whole gravely dignified clan—tots soft-limbed on the foreground carpet; elders in chairs; the heirs apparent standing at the back—Jacob looks not the patriarch but the prodigal, the curser cursed. Among the unfamiliar relatives, his face clean-shaven, his eyebrows lifted, lips tight, he sits alone. No son, of five, stands by him.

  Sadness leaks from the image. Like Bernhard Baron bearing the weight of his factory on his back, at the moment immortalized in this photo my great-grandfather Jacob, leaning on his cane, seemed to bear the sorrows of the world.

  And now, here in a Baltimore ranch house, I was looking at the cane itself.

  Leaned up against the wooden louvers of the den closet, it had a leggy, lounging gentlemanly look. Of elegant design, it conjured up topcoats and the flare of silk through a hotel door. Close up it looked like a mezuzah.

  Putting on my glasses and walking the cane into the living room, I made out the beginning of the conventional German inscription, Zur Erinnerung, “in memory of,” from, and then our brother from your brothers. And then this longish italic line followed by characters I could read, even without German: 1928, the date; Siluva, its place of purchase; Loewensohn, its maker; and then another city name, Riga.

  Studying the cane further, I was nagged by questions. For instance, why was it that one set of initials, MPL, was larger than the others? This MPL, donor of the cane, might be evincing a certain modesty by placing his own initials second, a third of the way down the shaft. But contradicting this was the fact that the letters of his own initials were a good deal larger than the others. While the metal used in crafting the other brothers’ initials was silver,
this monogram, the second, had been executed in a brassy gold. Each set of initials presented itself in a dramatic twist of metalwork, and under each set a small metal frame, shaped like a shield, enclosed the name of a town.

  PSL, the first twist of initials, was from Riga.

  MPL, the second, from Raseinai.

  And the last two brothers, YRL and JML, from Shavli.

  But why this order? Why these particular towns? I noted that the cane confirmed Moshe ’s version of our family origins, not my aunts’. Not from Austria after all, I wanted to shout, but from Siauliai, the town the Jews called Shavli, Lithuania, not far from Riga! I felt tempted to grasp the cane like a baton, to lift its head and cheer for veracity’s triumph over family legend. Not just a matter of invention and story, not made merely of feeling, history was a thing that happened. It could be known, discovered.

  Yet this vindicating token had other cryptic, baffling intelligences to share, and these fractured what certainty my Moshe-stamped story provided. In seconds I found myself plunged into speculation, my thoughts scattered in all directions.

  This PSL, Jacob’s older brother Paul, who emigrated to America some years before Jacob, why was he first on the stock, and why identified with the city of Riga? Moshe had left little doubt that all the brothers were born in the town he called Shavli. What spell had the larger city cast that this man who’d emigrated in his early twenties to Baltimore might be called a man of Riga?

  Similarly, MPL, the shield under which Raseinai was proclaimed. The eldest brother Max, Moshe had assured me, also started out in this Shavli. What version of belonging earned him the honor or duty to name Raseinai as his place?