The Family (5 page)

Itel swore too. She had always been headstrong, outspoken, impatient, entitled. She had always lashed out against injustice. Now, the Bund gave her a way to channel her energy and ego into something larger than defying her parents and lording it over her brothers and sisters. With the Bund she had an ideology and a platform for organized resistance. She was a party member. She was a comrade. She was a fighter in the revolution. By a
strange twist, history gave Itel, the born revolutionary, a revolution to join just as she crossed the threshold into maturity. Not merely talk of a revolution—but an inchoate mass struggle that was escalating, coalescing, and spreading through the Russian Empire. The Bund, from its founding in Vilna in 1897, had pledged to overthrow “those who rob and kill the poor.” Now, in the aftermath of Kishinev, the Bund leadership passed a resolution calling for members to “
organize armed resistance.” Itel swore the oath of blood and bullets. When she left Warsaw to return to Rakov, she was a committed Bundist prepared to take up arms against the tsar and his reactionary henchmen.

The return home cannot have been easy. Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore wanted only security and piety for their children—the boys should be scholars and scribes; the girls should be plump happy wives. And now they were harboring a bomb thrower under their roof. How could the scribe of God have sired a daughter who never set foot in shul except to attend a Bund meeting? The parents were not blind. No Hebrew prayer was ever on the child's lips; no sign of respect ever dimmed her wicked eyes. She smoked cigarettes—a daughter of a Kohain, smoking in public. And soon there was talk of a young man, an admirer, a revolutionary no less, who followed her to meetings and hung on her every word. Where would it end?

It was true. Itel was in love. Wolf Rosenthal was five years older, strapping (at least compared with her), dark-haired, clean-featured, not quite handsome but certainly striking, with the intense black burning eyes of a fanatic or madman. The piercing gaze and gruff barking voice were deceptive: though he looked like a Jewish Rasputin, Wolf had a kind heart, a healthy young man's appetites, and the undying fidelity of a born husband. Wolf gazed adoringly as Itel, all four feet eleven inches of her, stood up at Bund meetings and thundered to the rafters about the overthrow of the tsar, the rights of all working people, the bourgeois self-delusions of Zionism (the Jewish faction that the Bund opposed most fiercely in this period), the liberation of women from the shackles of tradition. He was smitten. She was smitten. The revolution had come. Desire, like the will of the people, was irresistible. What were they waiting for? It would have been a crime against nature not to act on their feelings—and a crime against freedom to
hide or lie about their relationship. Their mothers could only pray that the neighbors didn't ask too many questions.

—

On Friday, February 12, 1904, Itel's grandmother, Beyle, died in Volozhin at the age of sixty-three. Beyle (she shared the name with her daughter-in-law, Shalom Tvi's wife) had been lovely in her youth, with pale sad eyes that sloped down at the corners, high cheekbones, and a full finely chiseled mouth—and as an older woman she carried herself with serenity and pious resignation. A good wife for Shimon Dov, a good mother to her sons and daughter, a member in good standing of the Volozhin synagogue. With Beyle's passing, the scribe had only a son and a daughter left in Volozhin—the rest of the family was either in Rakov or the United States.

The day after Beyle's death was the Shabbat of Mishpatim—the Sabbath of the laws—when the faithful gather to read the section of Exodus (chapters 21 to 24) devoted to Jewish law.
If a man come presumptuously upon his neighbor, to slay him with guile; thou shalt take him from Mine altar, that he may die. . . . I will send my terror before thee, and will discomfit the people to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee.

At the appointed moment before the service ended, Shimon Dov stood and keened and recited the mourner's kaddish for his wife.

—

That same month Russia went to war with Japan and the world of bearded scribes and wooden synagogues was shoved another step closer to the brink. The Russo-Japanese war was a classic imperialist face-off—senseless, blundering, impelled not by opposing ideologies or ethnic rancor but by the naked greed of neighboring powers competing over resources. Russia provoked; Japan reacted; obstinacy on both sides prevailed; and a year and a half of bloodshed ensued. For Russia, it was a disaster, and the herald of worse disasters to come. The tsar, deluded by the vastness of his empire and the swagger of his army, promised his people a swift shining victory and instead handed them military disgrace, diplomatic embarrassment, economic slump, and political chaos. Japan astounded the world by taking out more than half the Russian naval fleet at the start of hostilities—and went on to inflict a series of military humiliations on land and sea. With the
tsar's forces crumpling, popular opinion in Russia swung rapidly from patriotic fervor to disillusionment to revolutionary ferment. Workers grew restive as the military drained off manpower and deprived families of much-needed seasonal income. The assassination of the minister of internal affairs in July 1904 threw the government into turmoil. With every setback on the battlefield and policy zigzag at home, the autocracy appeared shakier.

All of this was pure oxygen for radicals. By the late summer of 1904, Russian cities and towns were astir with meetings, rallies, political banquets, and proclamations. Could the end of the empire be at hand at last? Bundists, socialists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks prayed devoutly at their godless shrines and organized feverishly.

For Itel and Wolf, it was a moment when everything blissful seemed to converge—power, youth, love, sex, new knowledge, revolution. Cramped at home, Itel escaped to the Rosenthals' house where the atmosphere was freer and the views more liberal. The Rosenthals displayed a portrait of Moses Mendelssohn, leading light of the Haskalah, in their parlor, and beneath the philosopher's humane, clean-shaven gaze, Itel and Wolf endlessly discussed and argued, plotted and exulted. Wolf's father was a great Talmudic scholar, a teacher, and a
maskil
(a proponent of the Haskalah) who read widely in both Hebrew and secular literature, collected books on a range of subjects, professed liberal political views, and, to the disgust of his Bundist offspring, embraced Zionism. With the Rosenthal library at her disposal, Itel embarked on an ambitious course of study—not in the Talmud but in the works of the towering figures of world literature: Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky in Russian; I. L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, and Mendele Mocher Sforim in Yiddish; and foreign authors like Jules Verne, Zola, and James Fenimore Cooper in Yiddish translation. (Years later Wolf's youngest brother, Moe, then living in America, was amazed to find
Twenty Leagues Under the Sea
in an English “translation”: he had read the book in his father's library and assumed it was a Yiddish classic.) Chaim Yasef, Itel's younger brother, though only eleven years old, got wind of the riches of the Rosenthals' library and began tagging along to borrow books and eavesdrop.

As the war with Japan dragged on and the revolutionary fervor mounted, Itel and Wolf and their fellow Bundists began stockpiling
weapons in preparation for the uprising they knew was imminent. Caches of knives, clubs, and guns were hidden away under beds and at the back of closets. Trips were made to Minsk to proselytize Jewish workers. Wolf's oldest brother and the brother's fiancée lived in Minsk and kept a printing press on which they ran off revolutionary pamphlets and broadsides. The young people were playing a dangerous game and they knew it. Police spies were everywhere, and
Bundists were being arrested in droves—4,467 of them rounded up and imprisoned between June 1903 and July 1904. Wolf's brother and his fiancée were arrested when their landlord falsely told the police that they were using the press to print counterfeit bills. Sentenced to three years in Siberia, the couple married hastily in prison so they could remain together.

Danger “only raised the level of enthusiasm,” Wolf recalled half a century later. Being “persecuted, suppressed, and hunted down by the authorities” gave the endeavor “
the halo of heroism.” Besides, the political crisis was coming to a head. All over Russia, revolutionaries, Jewish and gentile alike, but overwhelmingly gentile, were on the move. Intellectuals and workers were banding together in unions.
Students took to the streets in Moscow, Kharkov, Odessa, Kiev, and St. Petersburg to call for an end to the war and to demand free elections open to all. In the capital, a shadowy charismatic priest named Father Gapon was gathering support from oppressed factory workers, common laborers, and rootless peasants. Father Gapon was something of an enigma. Some whispered that he was in the pay of the tsar's secret police. Others dismissed him as a charlatan. But his heroic stature among the disaffected masses grew steadily. That summer and autumn,
the Rakov Bundists held secret meetings in houses at the edge of town and in the surrounding woods where they could talk without being overheard and practice firing their weapons without accidentally killing someone. “A forest of pine trees, green and fragrant, a clear brook, the chirping of the birds on the treetops—here was the cradle of the Bund in Rakov,” one comrade recollected. “Here we held our meetings, and here the young men of Rakov first heard about the revolution and about socialism. Here, also, were our first loves.” Itel learned how to shoot a gun. Wolf's oldest sister did too. Even if revolution never came, the knowledge of weapons would be useful in the event of a pogrom.

This was something unheard of in the Russian Pale. Not since classical antiquity had
Jews taken up arms to combat oppression and change the world they had been born into.

—

Then disaster struck:
Wolf was drafted. Having suffered defeat after defeat during 1904, the Russian army was hungry for manpower, and young Jewish men, though unworthy of every other civil right, were deemed good enough to swell the ranks of the doomed defenders of Port Arthur in Manchuria. Wolf knew what happened to Jews in the tsar's army. Like every Jewish child in Russia, he had grown up hearing stories of the “military martyrdom” inflicted on his kind: boys as young as twelve called up for terms that stretched to twenty-five years (since then reduced), brutalization at the hands of gentile recruits and sadistic Russian officers, censorship and confiscation of letters from home, religious observance and identity beaten out of them, promotion into the officer corps strictly barred. Bund leaders, fearful that Jews would be accused of treason if they resisted or deserted en masse, called on its members to report for duty when they were drafted and then
to agitate from within the ranks. But Wolf had other ideas.

Wolf duly reported to training camp, bringing with him a trunk and a few spare rubles. When the time was right, he distributed the rubles where they would be most useful, grabbed his trunk, and quietly strolled through the camp gates. At the first opportunity, he stripped off the soldier's tunic and trousers, unpacked the civilian clothes that he and Itel had carefully folded into the trunk, made the change, and continued on his way—his brief stint in the tsar's army over. Wolf had arranged for a final rendezvous with Itel—hastily and in secret. After promising his undying love and extracting her promise of the same, he slipped across the border and made his way west to Rotterdam. Young Jewish draftees were doing the same all over the empire. A few coins in the right hands, a word whispered by a comrade in a border town, and many a deserting Jewish soldier was tucked into a load of hay or bundled on the back of a peasant's cart. By the start of the new year, 1905, Wolf, along with 2,350 other passengers, was on board the
Rotterdam
bound for New York.

But by then, the situation in Russia had changed dramatically. At the end of December, a massive strike at a St. Petersburg munitions plant had
triggered a chain reaction of sympathy strikes and by the first week of January the capital was without electricity or newspapers. Father Gapon chose this moment to stage a mass demonstration. On the morning of January 9, 1905, which
happened to be Itel's nineteenth birthday, Father Gapon led a march of the oppressed through the streets of the capital. The plan was for six columns of protesters—striking factory workers and their families, students, peasants—to converge on the vast cobbled square before the Winter Palace, where the priest hoped to present a petition to the tsar. The demonstrators began assembling in the city outskirts around dawn. Checkpoints were set up to screen for weapons, and the presence of women and children carrying icons and chanting the mournful hymns of the Orthodox church added a calming note. To the poor of Russia, at least the non-Jews, the tsar was still a revered figure—more father than king—and they had turned out on this winter Sunday to beg for his mercy in the presence of God. When Father Gapon and his column reached the Narva Arch—a Roman-style monument that commemorates Alexander I's victory over Napoléon with an arch straddling a major arterial south of the Winter Palace—they paused. Facing them were ranks of soldiers, mounted and on foot, with rifles loaded and cocked. The officer in charge gave the order and a bugle was sounded—the command to open fire—but none of the protesters heard it over the singing and chanting and shuffling of feet. In any case, the shots rang out before the crowd could possibly have dispersed. Thirty fell dead in the first volley, including members of Gapon's guard, though the priest himself escaped unharmed. The slaughter continued all afternoon as marchers en route to the Winter Palace were stomped, shot, and bayoneted by the tsar's army, then trampled by their fleeing comrades.

By conservative estimates, some 1,000 people were killed or wounded on Bloody Sunday (
the official government count was 130 dead and some 300 wounded, but journalists put the number of casualties at 4,600). The bullets, hooves, and blades of the tsar's protectors had also killed his people's faith. Their father had betrayed them. Their petition was unread; their demands were ignored; their grievances dismissed. Russia's Jews had never had any illusions about the benevolence of their ruler, but the empire's vast gentile population had always held the tsar blameless for their suffering. No longer. From the blood of Bloody Sunday rose the Revolution of 1905—and
from 1905 came the Revolution of 1917. The fate of an empire was sealed in an afternoon.