Free The Family by David Laskin

Chaim—
life
—after Shimon Dov’s father. But Arie died before his new son was a week old. Chaim’s bris took place during his father’s shiva—an inauspicious way for a Jewish son to come into the world.
    â€”
    â€œRepairing watches or clocks is fascinating and interesting, to those who love the work,” Chaim Yasef wrote of his apprenticeship in Smargon. “You get to revive a dead watch or clock by adjusting and replacing worn or broken parts (which part you had to make yourself). There was no such thing in those days or in that town as replacements parts, so when you finishedyour work and brought the watch back to normal, useful life, you got a great feeling of professional pride.” However gratifying, dead clocks were not enough to keep Chaim Yasef’s brother Hersch in Smargon very long. In June 1907, the oldest Kaganovich son put apprenticeship behind him and made his way to Antwerp, where he boarded the Red Star Line’s
Samland
and set sail for New York. His older sister Itel, now Mrs. Ida Rosenthal, paid the fare, and she and Wolf, now William, were on hand to meet Hersch when he arrived at Ellis Island on June 28. Harry Cohen, as Hersch Kaganovich promptly restyled himself, was eighteen years old and five feet three inches tall, with dark hair and brown eyes. Bent on becoming an American as quickly as he could, he moved in with his relatives and went to work.
    That left fourteen-year-old Chaim Yasef alone in Smargon, the last of Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore’s sons in the Russian Pale. To save money, Chaim Yasef gave up the room in the freight carrier’s house and set up a folding cot in the watch repair shop. “I became my own chambermaid. As companions I had the repaired clocks that struck the hour and half hour and the repaired alarm clocks that would go off at all hours of the night. The shop was located in the building where the owner lived so I was given the privilege of heating water on his stove to make breakfast usually consisting of a roll and tea.”
    Chaim Yasef was a proud, lonely, brooding teenager in Smargon. He took umbrage at the snobbish aunt who offered to pay him to stay away lest her pampered children be contaminated by a poor watchmaker’s apprentice who slept in the shop. He dreamed of landing a job at a fancy clock shop in Moscow or Petersburg. Preoccupied with his own sensitive feelings and glittering prospects, the boy failed to notice that all thinking people in the Pale were plunged in blank despair that year. By 1907 it was apparent that the revolution had failed utterly: after the Days of Freedom came the Years of Reaction, when hope of reform was crushed, pogroms raged, the Bund withered, and the net of surveillance tightened. Though the tsar had agreed in 1906 to an elected assembly—the Duma—it was dissolved after a few months of mostly ineffective debate and toothless investigation of official corruption. Freedom withdrawn is worse than no freedom at all. Now, in the aftermath of revolt, a drizzle of ash settled over the land. Hooligans of the Black Hundreds prowled city streets like wolves. The economystagnated. Those who suffered and those responsible for the suffering blamed the Jews for everything—the incitement to revolution, its failure, the sour revulsion that followed. Infected by the general virus, Rakov sweated, shivered, and cracked its aching joints. “The economic situation in our town is bad,” wrote one of the Botwiniks. “Poverty is on the increase, and emigration is getting stronger from day to day.” New Catholic churches were built in the neighboring villages—seemingly a matter of indifference to Jews, but in fact it hit the Kaganovich family hard. As Polish and Belarusian peasants flocked to churches closer to their farms, attendance at Rakov’s church fell off—with the result that there was less traffic at Gishe Sore’s general store. A Catholic merchant