Tablets Shattered

1

Up From Rivington Street

I.

In the small town of Lyuban, which was itself an appendage to the larger town of Slutsk, in what is today the country of Belarus, Europe's last dictatorship, a young woman named Bessie Levine awoke one morning, in or around 1912, knowing that when she left her home that day, she would never come back. That day, for one last time, she would have gazed up at the dark fir and spruce trees in the old forest that extended far into the distance and looked out across the shallow green bogs that surrounded the town. As she alighted the wagon that would take her and her sister very far away from Lyuban, she would have glanced down at the hard black dirt on which the fragile town stood. Lyuban's life was nearing its end. It would barely survive another two decades. But Bessie's was just beginning.

Perhaps she packed the night before. Maybe a siddur, or a book of psalms; almost certainly, clothes for the journey, which would lead her across the borders of the crumbling czarist empire, through the fragmented territories of Poland, and into imperial Germany. What I know for sure is that she packed a set of copper pots, a pair of bronze Shabbat candlesticks, and a mortar and pestle stamped with the year 1909 on the bottom. I know this because Bessie was my great-grandmother, and for much of my childhood the mortar and pestle sat on a shelf above my bed. It was given to me by her daughter, my grandmother Charlotte, not long before she died.

Most American Jews have a story like this. It is the opening act of the American Jewish century. The narrative of flight from the shtetl and successful settlement in the United States recalls our historical victimhood and celebrates our subsequent prosperity. The tale of exile and arrival allows us to revel at once in our former foreignness and contemporary at-homeness. Most of all, the Jewish immigrant story as it developed has cast America in the role of savior. Through this idealization of our country of refuge, the Americanism of American Jews-the belief in America's exceptional goodness as confirmed by its treatment of its Jews-was born.

Out of Lyuban

Lyuban in the early twentieth century was a village suspended in time, sunken deep in the grooves of tradition. It was "a forgotten corner on the edge of Slutsk," the Lyuban native and writer Rachel Feigenberg remembered years later. Into the twentieth century, Lyuban had no train station; it was connected to Slutsk only by a dirt road. To the extent that there was industry, aside from the reproduction of pious Jews, there were timber mills that drew from the surrounding woods and a carpentry workshop, allegedly famous for its chairs. There was also a primitive factory that made candlesticks for the Jewish Sabbath.

Lyuban's main export was people. For the most part it sent its young working-age people, specifically its young women, to serve as maids in the homes of the wealthier Jewish families in nearby cities like Babruysk, one of the oldest in present-day Belarus.

Yet by the 1890s, Slutsk and its better-off environs ceased to be the primary destination for the young and in search of work. Now it was America. "The town began to move, torn from its place," Feigenberg recalled. "Every worker and artisan instantly became raw materials for export. The American sweatshops ate the village whole." The sweatshops would eat Bessie and her sisters, Ida and Nesha, too.

The Levine family was devout. Most Jews from this part of the world during this time tended to be. Bessie's father, Akiva, had no trade. He was a rabbi, a teacher, in a culture where the study of Torah was the most exalted activity a man could do. In some parts of the Jewish world, it still is. Growing up, my ultra-Orthodox aunt would often speak with pride about the man who she said was Bessie's uncle, a great rabbi named Yeruchom Levovitz, who served as the mashgiach ruchani, the chief moral instructor, of the Mir Yeshiva, one of the few of the storied eastern European yeshivas whose members would mostly survive World War II as refugees in Shanghai, among them some of Bessie's cousins.

It was important to my aunt that we were related, however distantly, to this man because it was our only claim to yichus, a term which literally means "relation," but which in the Orthodox world refers more specifically to the connection via blood to a figure or family with a claim to great learning, deep wisdom, and spiritual grandeur. It formed a tie between her and the traditional Orthodoxy that she had rediscovered. It also reflected a much more widespread American Jewish form of wishful thinking, the desire to imagine one's origins as more noble than they were; or, as rabbi and historian Arthur Hertzberg put it, "to describe grandfather or great-grandfather not as a tailor whose greatest achievement was to read the daily paper in Yiddish but as a man who learned Hebrew texts."

Bessie's uncle, Rav Yeruchom, as he is still known, owed his reputation for great learning, deep wisdom, and spiritual grandeur to his role as a leading figure of the mussar movement, an exacting form of moral education that emerged in the world of Lithuanian yeshivas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A response to the crisis of the traditional way of life, which was cracking under the pressure of modern secular ideologies and the political chaos of the czarist empire's waning days, mussar-its closest English cognate is "instruction"-sought to recommit young Jewish men to the theory and practice of spiritual and ethical perfectionism. It combined both the study of texts and acts of self-cultivation that would enhance one's midos, or virtues. One particularly radical school of mussar teaching associated with the Novardok Yeshiva, a rival to Rav Yeruchom's, would have its students enter a hardware store to ask for bread, to eradicate pridefulness and inculcate humility.

In the best-known picture of Rav Yeruchom, he looks very much like my father, and even more like my grandmother's brother, my great-uncle Ken. They have the same proud nose, the same strong brow, the same big, soft, dark eyes. At the risk of indulging in the fantasy against which Hertzberg warned, I find not only the physical resemblance to have been passed down through the generations but also some vestigial form of the sensibility and culture of the larger world of mussar, even after several generations of secularization.

There is, for instance, a well-known story about Rav Yeruchom. One year he rebuked a student who thanked him for lending him money to visit his parents because this diminished the kindness of the charitable act. The next year, when the student again borrowed money, Rav Yeruchom rebuked him again, this time because the student failed to offer his thanks. To the confused student, he explained that while it was technically forbidden to express verbal gratitude, "the feeling of gratitude inside you should have been so strong that it would have been hard for you to remain silent." It's the familiar, humorous Jewish double bind: Don't thank me; thank me. I have had similar conversations with my father many times.

Personally, I connect just as much to the Rav Yeruchom, who once said in a sermon that God razed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because they had failed to welcome the stranger from foreign lands. As fascism began to engulf Europe, and America closed its doors to the desperate, Rav Yeruchom likened the new world of militarized borders and draconian restrictions, where "without a passport or visa it's impossible to go anywhere," to those cities infamous for their sin. His death in 1936 meant that he did not live to see the extent to which this world would be destroyed.

The Great Migration

Like most Jews from their part of eastern Europe, the Levine family was also poor. Even worse, they were short on luck. When Bessie was still a child, her mother, Tchira, fell ill and died on the way to the doctor in Minsk. Her father, Akiva, died not long after. Bessie and her sisters, Ida and Nesha, now orphans, fell into the care of the network of relatives, which had just begun to extend beyond the shtetls of Greater Slutsk to the boroughs of New York City. The Levine family was being pulled apart by the same forces that had begun to shake the ground beneath the small towns and shtetls like Lyuban.

The turmoil that preceded the First World War produced a Jewish refugee crisis, which the war later exacerbated exponentially. The inhabitants of the shtetls fell under the brutal hands of advancing and retreating imperial armies and attempted to flee. They were the Ostjuden, whom right-wing nationalist and antisemitic political movements in Germany sought to keep out and expel.

It was, in other words, a time very much like our own: the vulnerable, the stateless, the poor, forsaken by empires, trapped by borders, forced into treacherous seas, hated for their wretchedness. In 1912, after arriving in Bremen, Germany, from the East, Bessie and Ida would board a ship named the SS Neckar-later, in 1917, commissioned by the U.S. Navy and renamed USS Antigone-which would take them to New York.

They were part of a great migration. Between 1880 and 1924, more than 2 million Jews left Europe, departing mainly from the cities and shtetls of the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. During the years between 1881 and 1918, the period when Bessie and her younger sister Ida left Lyuban, one-third of eastern European Jews left their homes behind, primarily for United States, the goldene medine (golden land). It was, wrote Irving Howe, "a migration comparable in modern Jewish history only to the flight from the Spanish Inquisition." Bessie and Ida were among the "numberless ordinary Jews, the folksmasn," whose path Howe chronicled in his classic World of Our Fathers, those who left behind everything they had known for the chance at a new life.

But not just any kind of new life. Even as the Zionist movement had begun to gather strength, these Jewish masses sought out neither pioneering toil in the nascent Jewish settlements of the Galilee nor pious devotion of Jerusalem's Old Yishuv. Instead, they sought the promise of physical security, political stability, and material comfort in the world's emerging capitalist superpower. They did not come to America "to create a base for a rebirth of their religion, or to become the other front for Israel," Arthur Hertzberg wrote. "They came to succeed." The overwhelming majority of American Jews today are the descendants of these Jews. We are their success.

Departure

My forebears left eastern Europe at an opportune time, a necessary time, more so than they could have known. In the wake of the 1905 revolution, political violence, pogroms, and police repression convulsed the czarist empire. The Russian imperial prime minister, a man named Pyotr Stolypin, first tried to quell peasant unrest through land reform, then brutally attempted to reimpose order by martial law. Stolypin was assassinated in 1911 by Dmitri Bogrov, a Jewish revolutionary (who was, vexingly, also a czarist secret police informant). During these years, as pogroms engulfed the territories of what are now Ukraine and Belarus, the Jews of Slutsk and its environs organized self-defense committees and prepared for the worst. In 1917 the Bolsheviks overthrew the Romanov monarchy. Within less than a year, the old czarist territory would be engulfed in a vicious, multifront civil war.

The pogroms over the first decade of the century turned out to have been but a prelude to those of the second. In 1920, the ominously named anti-Bolshevik general Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz besieged Slutsk and the surrounding shtetls as part of a campaign to establish a counterrevolutionary "White Russian" state in the Western periphery of the collapsing Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks had promised the Jews of the former czarist empire full political freedom. In the eyes of the White forces, this made all Jews obvious Bolshevik sympathizers.

As they saw it, Bułak-Bałachowicz's forces sought to put the Jews back in their place. The plan, the general announced, was "to murder the Jews, to take their property, and to erase them from the earth." In the early morning hours of May 26, 1921, according to an eyewitness account later published in the Jewish Daily Forward, Bułak-Bałachowicz's men entered Lyuban and raided the shtetl, shooting at the Jews who came across their path. Those who failed to flee in time, roughly two hundred Lyuban Jews, were herded into the synagogue by the attackers. "Then they picked out the prettier and younger girls, 17- and 18-year-olds, dragged them to the women's section in the balcony of the synagogue, and in the most vicious manner raped them." Bułak-Bałachowicz's troops demanded an exorbitant ransom for the girls, which the Jews of Lyuban obviously could not pay, and it was only with the intervention of a nearby village priest that the prisoners in the synagogue were spared. Twenty-eight people were left dead. The town was pillaged: homes, synagogues, and businesses destroyed. Many who fled would never return.

It was likely not long after Bułak-Bałachowicz's attack that Nesha, Bessie's youngest sister, left Lyuban and made her own journey through the newly independent country of Poland into Germany, and then onto a transatlantic ship. In the years since her sisters' departure, Nesha-Aunt Nettie, as my father would call her as a child-had married Leyzer Kustanowitz, himself a member of a large, well-respected, and pious family.

I have often wondered why they left so late into the catastrophic events that followed the end of the Great War. Perhaps they could not see the dangers posed to them by the collapse of empires, revolution, and reaction. Perhaps they did, but stayed put because they believed that God would keep watch over his people. Perhaps they feared, as the rabbis of Slutsk and Lyuban and countless shtetls across the Pale of Settlement preached, that even if life in Europe was one of arduous survival and certain suffering, America guaranteed spiritual death.

Even up until the Nazi invasion of what historian Timothy Snyder has called Europe's "bloodlands," many of the leading eastern European Orthodox rabbis trumpeted the dangers of moving to America and stridently denounced those who left. Rabbi Jacob David Wilovsky, the chief rabbi of Slutsk, known as the "Ridbaz," declaimed that "anyone who emigrated to America was a sinner, since, in America, the Oral law is trodden under foot." Bessie and Ida, Nesha and Leyer, surely heard such lines. But their affliction in this world was too great to worry about what it might be in the next. Wilovsky himself would eventually leave, first to New York, then to Palestine.