How does a family survive and grow in the midst of bad times? If members are struck down by cudgels, fire, poison gas, and guns can the family tree continue to blossom? Author David Laskin, in his new book, "The Family: Three Journeys into the Heart of the Twentieth Century", takes a family - his own extended one - from the shtetels of what is today's Belarus to the United States and Israel. But "three" journeys? That third "journey" ended in the killing pits at Ponar and the ghetto at Vilna and a fire pit at Klooga in Estonia.
David Laskin's family on his mother's side began in the shtetel of Rakov and the yeshiva center of Volozhin, both in current-day Belarus. Their family name was Kagan or Kaganovich, which is a derivative of the priestly name of "Cohen". Many of the men were scholars and torah scribes and the women either kept the house or made the coin. Hard times in then-Russia - pogroms and government suppression and economic failures - made the idea of emigrating to "der Goldene Medina" - the United States - a very attractive one. Several members of the family went to New York City in the early 1900's. Hard work and luck turned their lives into increasingly prosperous ones. By the 1920's one branch of the US family had found success in the wholesale metals business, which the other branch became "Maidenform", an early creator of bras and girdles. Remember the old ads, "I dreamed I rode a merry-go-round in my Maidenform bra" or some-such? Well, they were the creation of Itel Kagan Rosenthal who was a fiery socialist back in Rakov til she became a sterling capitalist here in the US. But with assimilation also came a lessening of the faith - the Orthodox Jewish faith that kept the family together back in Russia - and the US branch of the family became less and less religiously observant as the generations passed along.
Other members of the Rakov family emigrated to Palestine in the same time, after years of Zionist fervor back in Russia. Most worked the land and founded developments and, eventually, one grandson died in defense of Israel in the 1973 war. The family prospered in Israel and that branch of the tree grew strong. But it was the final branch, that of those family members who stayed in Poland in the darkening days of the 1930's into the years of final destruction in the early 1940's as the Germans invaded what was then Poland (the borders had changed after WW1) and killed the 15 or so members of the family unable to escape to...anywhere "safe".
And that part of the story - the prosperous American branch of the family unable to help those left behind in Rakov and Vilna - is one of the most interesting. Unable to help...or unwilling? Or simply unknowing about the increasingly horrifying conditions of Jews in that widely disputed area between Germany and the Soviet Union? Those left behind sent letters to loved ones abroad asking for help in emigrating but while money was sent by the American branch, little or no real help was given to their trapped family members. All met death in the German occupation of the area, after being confined to ghettos or sent to work camps and concentration camps.
David Laskin brings the book up-to-date after WW2. Family members who had separated in the early 1900's managed to find each other and relationships were established by both branches who survived - those in Israel and the United States. His book is an epic journey - both physically and religiously - of a family who survived through the horrors of war.
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- Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2013
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Top reviews from other countries
- Moira YaalaouiReviewed in Canada on August 9, 2015
This is fantastic book, so well written
