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

  Finally, what of the third town name written on the cane? It was the one Moshe had named as the family home, and yet it seemed odd that both his own father’s initials—YRL—and those of my great-grandfather, Jacob, should have that name, Shavli, written underneath. Isaac had, I knew from his son Moshe, stayed in Shavli his whole life, dying there well before the Nazis came and killed most of his children. But Jacob had left Shavli as a boy of sixteen or seventeen. His life was spent in Baltimore and Philadelphia, not in Shavli.

  From its German inscription—wrapping the grip like a silver cuff—down to the thick silver heel capping its straightness, the cane declared its bearer a person of parts, no Tevye at all, but someone more traveled, more sure—even cocksure. As I stood admiring it, swinging it down from under my arm, I caught the cane ’s tip where the carpet edge met the kitchen tile.

  I felt the very plates of history shift.

  Up the cane ’s length I seemed to feel the tremors of my great-grandfather’s footfall and the thrum of machines. I sensed the din and buzz of parade grounds, the blue plume of smoke, and the seaside smell of wharves. Speeches rang out. Guns. Sound of stately music. Photographers’ shutters opening, umbrellas opening, doors to a jitney opening.

  How wonderfully suitable, I thought, to the study of a family’s history was this symbol of a cane.

  Supple in shape, sinuous in form, coming to hand in the form of a question, a cane is shaped like an inquiry—and puts its foot down with caution. Who knows the common yet divergent routes of history and story better than a cane? Accoutrement of a journey, and useful too as a probe or a pointer, a cane embodies the urge to go and find out.

  Tool of tact, symbol of deliberateness, the cane bids slow going, bids faith, while the tale uncurls as it will.

  TWO

  From Shavli, in Lita

  Civilization! Progress! Enlightenment! Such were the terms my great-grandfather, Jacob Levy, and my great-great-uncle, Bernhard Baron, used to invoke the world they’d come from, the ethos they had shared and brought with them from far-off eastern Europe to Baltimore in America.

  “May you be to the world,” my great-grandfather wrote in a letter to his infant grandson in 1915, “a leading figure of Civilization.” Along the same lines, an entry in Baltimore’s Leading Businesses of 1899 described Bernhard Baron and his manager, Kraus, as “liberal, progressive and enlightened men.”

  Could it be that my great-grandfather Jacob’s highly decorated cane would lead me to this civilization? From the stately German dedication Zur Erinnerung to its delicate silver engravings of names and cities, the cane hinted at a liberal spirit, a confidence in achievement, and a hope that, as I would learn, had nowhere been nurtured so carefully as in the lands along the western edges of the Russian empire, once called the Four Lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

  And of course, nowhere so fully traduced and destroyed.

  Holding the cane in my cousin Buddy’s living room, I already knew that the place-names on its shaft, along with the persons, were all names on the map of the Holocaust. My cousin Moshe had told me this long ago. Still, I’d not anticipated the impact of discovering my forebears’ civilization through visiting the grave pits where it ended. Nor what it would feel like to make that discovery with my own child.

  The first time I visited my family’s town, Shavli, in Lita (Lithuania), was on the eve of Passover 1999, five months after I had held the cane in my hands. I was with my daughter Yael, who was three weeks shy of her bat mitzvah.

  After our plane landed in Riga, Yael and I had made our way by train to Kaunas (the Jewish Kovno), where we hired a car and driver and a guide named Chaim. On our approach to Shavli, I saw fields on either side where men on tractors were cutting hay. Among the fields, boxy stucco houses, their shutters faded green, sat sidewise to the road. Twenty minutes ago we had come to a T at a slight rise. There a honey-toned sign, hand carved, pointed left to Shavli and right to Raseinai. Two names on the cane. And there was a third: Riga.

  I looked down at Yael, her pale face turned to the light, and saw again how well, with her tilted chin and defined cheekbones, her wide-spaced eyes, light brown hair in a ponytail, she blended into crowds here. With her fine-boned, slightly Slavic features, she didn’t look Jewish to me. But she was, of course, and we had both been aware of this since arriving—especially on the train from Riga, where we had met Chaim in the town with a famous ghetto, more famous than Shavli’s. We ’d scarcely slept on this leg of the trip, what with the train’s spooky whistle and the fright of being awakened at the Latvian border by a conductor demanding “papers.” And so I’d been all too glad to see Yael do as she ’d done since babyhood—fall asleep twenty minutes into the ride, her knees drawn up, her shoes off. Who knew what we would see when she awoke. Now, though, I let myself breathe, taking in the passing scene, muddy slopes showing patches of green, the clouds piled in massive formations, cows browsing.

  I felt a lift in my heart and remembered the first time I had heard the town’s name as the Jews pronounced it—Shav-lee—fifteen years ago, by my cousin Moshe.

  I had been visiting with Moshe and his wife, Tanya, at their flat in Givat Ram, Israel, following through on my promise to Aunt Jean. Across a damask tablecloth, the plates with the fishes, the cheese, and little rounds of tomatoes pushed to one side, Moshe slid a familiar photo across the table toward me.

  Here, so far from my aunts’ apartments in Philadelphia, were some of the same photographs the aunts had kept in a hall closet. Here was the photo with the cane, the one I’d looked at so many times before. My great-grandfather Jacob, among a group of unnamed persons in what looked to be an elegant setting, with the word “Raseinai” at the photo’s bottom. Then Moshe handed me another photo, with a date and a place, Riga, and then another, in the corner a white scratch: Siauliai (Shavli). Again Jacob, seated, with his brother—“Yitzchak, my father,” Moshe offered—while at each man’s shoulder stands his tall son. And in the picture too, Moshe ’s brother Shlomo’s family.

  “That ’s Fanja, Shlomo’s wife,” Tanya says in English. Moshe nods and points to the woman with her feet in satin shoes, her ankles in silk stockings, one young daughter standing to the side and another at her mother’s knee. “So beautiful, wasn’t she?” Moshe tries in English.

  “Kol ne-elam, hutz me Shlomo.” (All gone, except Shlomo.) Moshe looks up at me, oddly smiling, but in the quick, anxious way people do when something remains unexplained: “Disappeared.” Tanya gently translates, furrowing her brow with the effort of English. “Vanished—all except Shlomo, Moshe ’s brother, and Max’s granddaughter Riva, who lived with the partisans in the forest.”

  “Kol n’hargru,” Moshe says, letting his hands drop open, palms up.

  “All killed,” I say, looking at Moshe and then nodding to Tanya that I understand.

  “Moshe wrote letter after letter,” Tanya explains, “to get them to leave, to come to Israel, to Palestine, but they didn’t believe they were not safe and wouldn’t come. They had built so much in Shavli, had been there so long.”

  M’zman . . . M’zman . . .

  “For a long time,” Moshe adds again in English, and his tone takes on a slight formality, or the sound of gentle ceremony.

  Earlier, Moshe had smiled indulgently and shrugged, as Israelis do, at hardships, looking—despite the short-sleeved polo shirt with the crease ironed down to his elbows—every bit the halutz, the rugged pioneer, who’d done what he had to do and expected others to do the same. Earlier, he had let his face register delight at the sheer nerve of Jacob—who told the American authorities that he was from one country, Austria, when he was in fact from another. Moshe didn’t mind Jacob’s creative genealogy. Who was to stop him, Moshe ’s look had said. What did it matter what he told them? The audacity of it made him happy.

  But now Moshe ’s tone delicately shifted. Pointing at the picture of Jacob, Moshe said, “He was, we all were, from Shavli, in Lita.”

  When Mosh
e looked back at the photo, squinting over the pale white scrawl that spelled out the name of Jacob’s hometown, his blue eyes looked fond. And when Moshe spoke the name, Shavli, he gave it a lyrical and lilting sound, drawing out the long vowel, the ee, as if he loved to hear it. Pronouncing Lita, he closed his palate gently over the t, as one closes a door, firmly but gently, on the past.

  I woke up Yael just as we were entering Shavli. The town was not what I had expected, for it reminded me immediately and unmistakably of Madison, Wisconsin. With a heartland feel, like Madison or other such towns between woods and pastures, Shavli had the look of a nice place to live. There was a large lake, the center deep blue and flecked with little frisking waves. Shavli’s more noisome factories—leather, machine tools, dairy—were, along with the Soviet era apartment blocks, pushed out to the edge of town. My sense of Shavli’s pleasantness increased as our car, now leaving the industrial edge, probed along the smaller side streets. Shoemakers and small stationery shops still opened in the old-fashioned way, through a door around to the side of the house. The sun shone brightly through large low clouds. I had been prepared for a place in black and gray, grim, muddy, a setting for tragedy, and I was surprised.

  Gaining the heart of town, Chaim made straight for the Jewish Community Center, leaving the car and then returning to say that, perhaps owing to the holiday, Leibe, the man who’d said he would meet us there, had been detained. “Back after two,” Chaim said, and urged a visit now to the ghetto sites—Traku or Vauclausko—before we went with Leibe to the mass graves at Kuzhai and Bubai.

  This, we were quickly discovering, was the Jewish visitors’ Shavli. Chaim, who had been born in the Kovno ghetto, and this Leibe worked together to shepherd “roots” tourists to the sites of their families’ destruction. We were that. I couldn’t deny it. But as I tried to signal Chaim, we had not come just to see the sites of carnage. I had a child with me, and besides, our family had lived in Shavli, this town, for generations.

  I suggested a stroll through the streets, putting off both ghettos until after lunch. We walked along the cobbled alleys in Shavli and heard the sound of clothespins pinging in the air and, a way off, bicycles clicking on the gentle hills. Women in small backyards hung out the wash on wire lines. Passing tiny walled gardens, we caught the yeast and cucumber smell of lunch—whiff of pancakes frying, pungency of onions—and noted bowls of fuchsia beets on windowsills, cooling in sugared vinegar. I steered Yael and Chaim into a restaurant and we ordered lunch.

  Whatever else you find in the Baltics, you will never find better cucumbers, nor sweeter peppers, nor better tomatoes, fat and lozenged with seeds like pomegranates, than you find in Lithuania and Latvia. That first lunch taught me that my great-grandfather’s homeland is a veritable Provence of milk and salad.

  You will not find more varieties of pancakes, lacy-edged or bulging with chopped filling or conserves, tart with a touch of honey, than in such towns as Shavli.

  In the New World, a Jewish dairy meal—the “dairy” supplied by Breakstone or Land-O-Lakes—is improvised of supermarket tomatoes, waxed cucumbers, or maybe a frozen blintz. Half the savor is nostalgia.

  But in the land of Jacob Levy’s birth, the humblest breakfast board offers sweet and sour creams more fresh and varied than the traveler has ever eaten. Spooning them out, you taste a complex dairy culture, varietal, where cheeses bear the flavor of individual meadows, loams, and salt licks; where butter, rinsed in lake water, chills in hand-carved birch thimbles shaped like flowerpots. What New Yorkers call “Jewish rye” is in the Baltics just bread; one slice is jagged with caraway, its new crust so tough it tugs the bones in the jaw, the next nearly cakelike, like a rye brioche.

  Lunch came. Chaim piled good things onto his plate with relish and explained that in Shavli, Jews made do with smoked fish while the gentiles heaped their plates with sausages. But both Jews and gentiles enjoyed the beets and dill and the delicious breads. Or they used to, Chaim remarked darkly, until . . . well, we would see for ourselves.

  So we did.

  After lunch, sun suddenly gone, wind blowing in from the lake in sharp gusts, we picked up Leibe Lifshitz. He confirmed Chaim’s point. White hair blowing back from his hollow temples, Leibe pointed to the shacks of the Traku and Vauclausko ghettos. “They got our nice things and we got their shmatehs.”

  “Their rags,” Chaim translated, not knowing shmatehs has entered English. Those who stayed alive in these hovels—as Leibe himself had done—were those with the skills to keep Frankel Leatherworks running. Shoes for the Wehrmacht, belts for industry, whips for horses.

  And then, two or three miles out of town, Chaim and Leibe unloading us from the car and looking tired, we stood at a rutted site: just tractor prints and a farmhouse in a copse of birches where—Leibe shrugged—the Jews were made to leave their clothes.

  It was August, Leibe said, and the women had walked in the fading light with their children. After they left their clothes in the barn, they walked to the edge of the pit that the men, now dead, had dug, and then fell in the rain of bullets.

  With its stand of birches, white, delicate against the darker trees, the place was oddly beautiful. The fenced-in grave: Was it awful? Peaceful? I didn’t know. Should I make my voice stumble through a kaddish, as Leibe and Chaim seemed to expect? I tried, and forgot some of the words.

  Was our family buried here? Yael asked me. Were the people in the picture killed here?

  What kind of journey was this for a child? I was having second thoughts.

  Three nights before, climbing down from my hard-cushioned bunk on the train, I had perched on the edge of Yael’s sleeper and watched the woods fly past, so dark, with ghostly birches at their edge. Every river bend, every copse of trees marked a pit. Yael was sleeping, the small plastic butterfly clip she and her friends wore dangling from a lock of hair, her lashes quiet on her cheeks.

  As night had fallen and we ’d approached Kaunas, the Jews’ Kovno, she ’d stared out the window at the grasses burning on either side of the road, smoke licking in black curls from little pyres as the farmers prepared their fields in the old way. Kovno, its name more famous, or infamous, than Shavli’s, was eerie, our hotel high-beamed, dark, empty of other guests. We ’d taken a cab to find some dinner but found the town even more depressing than the hotel—its high walls flush to the streets, the dark roofs, scarred balustrades, gaping courtyards.

  I’d grabbed Yael’s hand and we ’d run, forcing a laugh as we made for an open Bierstube, its cheery sign and simple square of light pulling us in like an assurance that, for tonight anyway, Jewish history was in abeyance. Yet earlier, at the first mass grave of the day, I had not prevented Chaim, stopping the car near Raseinai, from rolling the window down to ask a man on a tractor where they’d shot the Jews. Jacob’s brother Max and his family, from the picture with the cane, were lying there.

  Gray-stubbled, hunched in a windbreaker, the man pulled his gear and backed out of a dry rut. Shrugged. He wasn’t sure. Over by the airstrip, he thought. And indeed, over near the airstrip we found a small new sign, post-Soviet, pointing in from the road to where a larger sign—in Hebrew and Lithuanian—declared that 1,100 souls, zhidim, had watered this spot with their blood.

  Back at the Jewish Community Center, Leibe Lifshitz opened the ghetto register. Ah. Here. As his eyes followed his finger down the page, he nodded, yes, Salamonas Levy, Moshe ’s brother Shlomo, was still alive and listed as “metalworker” in 1942. This was in the Vauclausko ghetto.

  And yes, here too in 1942 was Salamonas Levy ’s wife, Fanja, their daughters Tauba, 20, and Sarah, 17, and son Isaakos, just 11. Also alive in the Traku ghetto were Dora Levy, 16, Alisa, 8, Sora, 6, and Rocha, 2, presumably the children of some other Levys, already killed. They would have remained there in the ghetto until—and Leibe now took out a piece of paper—the Kinderaktion. After the Kinderaktion (he looked up at me, and at Yael), November 5, 1943, he wrote slowly, then all the younger children were gone too. And then
next to the name Isaakos, he drew a symbol and then wrote: Auschwitz. I remembered then that Moshe had told me all about this, had told me that his brother Shlomo never forgave himself for going to work that day. Like all the parents, he was gone when the trucks came for the children.

  Well, Leibe said, looking stern, impatient, all the parents were gone that day and none of those who lived forgave themselves. But—and Leibe looked at me directly now, not with sympathy but with something like respect—he, your relative, must have had some skill, some special training, to have stayed alive through 1944. And—hadn’t he said?—kept well enough to have made it to Stutthoff and then to Dachau. A lucky one, Leibe said with a bitter smile, he himself being another lucky one. But then he grew more animated, straightening with a pride that took us in, that he would share with us, for we qualified.

  Who else but the Jews in the region knew the science, the engineering? Leibe asked. The local workers, Lithuanians, couldn’t run Frankel’s machines. The German soldiers, having seized the largest leather factory in the old Russian empire after being ordered to keep the Wehrmacht in boots, were helpless. Who knew how and where to get the special extracts that made the leather from Frankel Leatherworks so famous? As it had always been in these parts, it was the Jews who kept the Jewish factory, seized by the Nazis, in business. The Jews like your relative—Leibe gave me that—knew how to manage.

  I remembered, at that moment, the way Moshe had said m’zman, m’zman and had emphasized, looking at Tanya for confirmation, that what had saved Salamonas, now Shlomo, was not luck at all, and not just that he was good with tools. It was, Moshe had implied with the same pride, that he had come from people who were modern, enlightened; who had done their part to improve, to civilize their town. I remembered Moshe ’s look of pride as he explained this to me. And I visualized Shavli’s own prepossessing look. No muddy shtetl this but a place large enough for a chamber of commerce.