Free The Family by David Laskin Page A

opened up a competing store in town—and priests urged their parishioners to boycott Jewish shops and buy only from their fellow Catholics. Business declined further.
    Avram Akiva and Gishe Sore agonized about joining the exodus to America. Itel, Ettel, Hersch, and Shmuel—now calling themselves Ida, Ethel, Harry, and Sam—were already in New Jersey and urging them to sell out, pack up, and get out of Russia. The American children did the math—they had become very skilled with numbers: if the parents sold out in Rakov, if the sisters and brothers pooled their earnings, if the younger ones got jobs, if they all worked hard, if God smiled on them and gave them health, then they could live comfortably in America. They could live free—and they could live together.
    Concern for their next-to-youngest daughter also factored in. Chana had developed an alarming cough—possibly a reaction to the damp atmosphere near the lake. The Rakov doctor thought a change of climate would do her good, and maybe there were better doctors in the New World.
    The parents turned to Chaim Yasef, the oldest child still at home, for advice. “I see no future here,” the boy intoned with the wisdom of his seventeen years. “If I stay, it will not be in this town. One thing Rakov does not need is another watchmaker.”
    By the spring of 1909, they had made up their minds. Gishe Sore and Avram Akiva found a buyer for the house by the lake, the cow, the calf, the garden. Rubles changed hands and the store that had fed the family for so many years passed to another shopkeeper. Avram Akiva assembled all the bits of parchment he had on hand—tiny scrolls for the mezuzot, pages forthe Passover Haggadoth and Purim megillahs, beautifully lettered prayers—and sold them to pious friends. The family went to Volozhin to say farewell to Shimon Dov. They found the patriarch hale but wizened and more alone than ever after Arie’s death. Avram Akiva asked for and received his father’s blessing. The men prayed together for the souls of the dead and the health of the living. Father and son must have known that they would never see each other again.
    Before their departure, Rakov’s mayor, who lived on the same street, made a state visit to wish them Godspeed and to announce solemnly that he had never seen a more upstanding shopkeeper or finer homemaker than Gishe Sore (he had clearly never tasted her cooking). Most painful was the parting with Shalom Tvi. The brothers had become inseparable during their decade together in Rakov, and despite their differences, they were alike in the ways that mattered. Once Avram Akiva and his family left, Shalom Tvi, Beyle, and their two daughters (Doba was six and the baby, Etl, was two) would have to keep the Kaganovich name alive in Rakov on their own. Shalom Tvi promised to visit one day. Avram Akiva promised him a clean bed and a place to say his prayers in New York.
    The end was a rapid blur. The last walk to synagogue. The last reading from the Torah. The last tears shed at the graves of the two babies Gishe Sore had lost and buried in the Rakov cemetery. The last meal in the creaking wooden house by the lake. The last breath of the blue and white lilacs that bloomed in profusion all over town. Finally the day of departure was upon them. A horse and wagon dragged them through green meadows and dark pine woods to the rail station at Olechnowicze. A train took them northwest toward the coast. There was a fifteen-minute stop at the Smargon station, and the uncle (but not the aunt) came to the platform to bid them farewell and praise young Chaim Yasef for his hard work and ambition. Like everyone, the uncle said he hoped to visit them one day. In America.
    The train rattled through Vilna with its many magnificent synagogues and narrow streets teeming with Jewish workers, teachers, beggars, and revolutionaries. Through Kaunas crouched behind its immense brick fortresses. Through