Chapter One from Agent Link: The Spy Erased from History by Raymond Batvinis
Chapter 1
Lies
The Weisband story began in Russia. Israel Weisband, Bill’s father, was a watchmaker, born in 1874 in the Russian Black Sea port city of Odessa.
Sarah, his wife, three years younger than her husband, came from Kishinev, a city of 150,000, in what is now Moldava, part of the Pale of Settlement known as Bessarabia.
The young couple had already settled in Odessa when one of the most infamous pogroms in Russian history erupted in Kishinev on Easter Sunday April 9, 1903.
For three days rampaging mobs carrying makeshift weapons randomly attacked Jews in the street destroying their homes and businesses. When it ended, fifty were dead and hundreds more were injured among a Jewish population of 50,000.
Adding to this debasement was “Bloody Sunday,” a crisis that began early in the morning of January 9, 1905, as a peaceful march by workers and peasants demanding political rights descended on the czar’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg. As the surging throng grew rowdier terrified security troops began shooting indiscriminately leaving forty people dead and wounded.
The killings were a watershed in Russian history. Suddenly the centuries old compact between a distant, remote, Russian ruler and his millions of increasingly restless subjects was fractured.
The ancient wall, one historian noted, that had protected the autocracy had been irrevocably “breached by the defeat in war” and by the blow rendered to the czar’s personal prestige”
Over the next year as further riots erupted across the empire the scent of revolution began seeping into the military as well. The most notorious being the mutiny aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin later dramatized in a Sergei Eizenstadt film of the same name.
Desperate to ease the growing turmoil and regain some control, the hapless czar issued a series of reforms that only further enflamed matters.
Known as the October Manifesto, the new royal decree granted, for the first time, fundamental civil rights, and political liberties to the masses along with a promise of constitutional freedoms and an elected parliament.
Instead of easing pressures, the order unleashed new violence as centuries of seething ethnic and racial hatreds reemerged in what became known as the Revolution of 1905.
Waves of savagery again broke out against Jews, students, intellectuals and other national minorities in hundreds of cities, towns, and villages across Russia.
The port city Odessa, the country’s fourth largest metropolis, was not spared. It was an ancient city once occupied by the Ottomans and later founded by Catherine the Great as a Russian city in the eighteenth century. Known as the “Pearl of the Black Sea” it evolved over the years into a major Russian transportation and seaport hub.
The principal languages of its more than four hundred thousand residents were Russian and Yiddish with Jews composing about thirty-five percent of the population.
More than a century later the city’s death toll and destruction from these pogroms still remains unclear.
What is certain is that more than four hundred Jews and non-Jews were murdered with another three hundred injured. Looters laid waste to sixteen hundred Jewish businesses, homes, and apartments as well.
No other city in the Russian Empire in 1905 experienced a pogrom comparable to the one unleashed against the Jews of Odessa. One study called it a “primordial violence” that continued through to the Russian civil war.1
In the wake of this nightmare, Russian Jews desperate to escape the violence began fleeing the country in droves. For Jews it was illegal to emigrate from Russia as most had no passport and rarely traveled far from their villages.
The journey was long and treacherous for families carrying little money and leaving everything behind.
For most refuges heading west on foot was the best bet in the hope of crossing the Russian border into Austro-Hungary and on to the more peaceful environs of Western Europe.
If they were lucky and could afford it, they headed for an Atlantic port city where they could arrange passage to America.
Sometime around 1906 Israel and Sarah joined this exodus.
Instead of heading west, however, their odyssey took them south. The record is blank on their route of travel or whether they used the services of a smuggler along the way.
What we can surmise, however, is that after boarding a ship at Odessa they crossed the Black Sea to Istanbul where they arranged for passage through the Levant into Syria and on to Egypt eventually settling in the tiny Jewish settlement into the port city of Alexandria.
It was there that Wolfe Weisband was born on August 28, 1908.
He started his education at the St Andrews School of Scotland, a school founded to both educate and convert Jewish youngsters to Christianity.
Such conversions were rare, but the school did provide a good education for a much cheaper price than the English boys schools in Alexandria – British Boys School {BBS} and the expensive and exclusive Victoria College.
Wolfe remained there until graduation in 1923. For two years he attended Ecole Baron de Monasce.
. . .
After two decades living in Egypt, Israel decided to emigrate to America.
While whole families could leave as a group this was rarely the case. The cost of ship passage for an entire family was prohibitive. Instead, one family member, typically of working age, would leave for America in the hope of finding employment.
This laborious and time-consuming strategy, known as “chain migration” required the newcomer to work long, exhausting hours at some unskilled job for tiny wages in an effort to save enough funds to finance the next family member’s ticket.
It was a process that repeated itself over the years, sometimes decades, until an entire family was finally reunited in the United States.
Israel, Sarah, and Wolfe, sixteen, sailed from Alexandria aboard the RMS Adriatic arriving in New York on February 25, 1925.
In the case of the Weisband family, an illegal hybrid of the chain migration principle was adopted.
Wolfe’s two older brothers Shalom Alexander, who had changed his name to “Harold,” born on November 8, 1902, and Mark born on May 24, 1904, came ahead of their parents.
Both boys first tried to enter the United States at New York as stowaways in November 1920. The attempt failed when they were discovered and sent back to Egypt.
A second effort was a charm as they slipped off the ship at New York (probably with a bribe) and quickly disappeared into the city’s sea of humanity. Both soon found work with Harold employed as a dental assistant and Mark at a local hotel.
The problem, however, was the brothers’ illegal status which made it impossible for them to sponsor the family without throwing up red flags for immigration authorities. The easiest solution was to lie.
Jacob Weisband, born in 1893 in Odessa, Russia and a “nephew” of Israel came to America eighteen years earlier. Jacob, who had arrived legally, was working with the Brooklyn and North River Road Transit System in 1925 while living in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
In his application for entry, Israel Weisband falsely claimed that the family was sponsored by his “son,” Jacob Weisband. When they arrived in New York, Jacob took them into his home offering financial support while they looked for a place to live.
When interviewed years later by the FBI, Jacob still felt a lingering sting of resentment over the shabby way Israel and Sarah treated him while guests in his home. They were always ungrateful for his daring and illegal act, he remembered.
When they finally did find their own home and had no more use for him, he rarely ever heard from them again.
He wryly told an agent that despite their own marginal circumstances during those early years they still looked down their nose at him as the “poor relative.”
. . .
The New York of the so-called “Roaring 20s” that Wolfe entered was a shock to his system in many ways. He was now in a world that was light years ahead of the life he left behind in Egypt. Leaving a Muslim land governed by strict codes and rigid social mores must have felt like Alice falling through the rabbit hole and suddenly entering Wonderland.
On the eve of the First World War, America was the world’s leading debtor nation owing more than $3.8 billion. Five years later it had the world’s number one economy with New York City replacing London as the center of global finance.
This dramatic transfer of wealth was due to American industrial power and military sales and loans to her allies making it a creditor of Europe to the staggering extent of $12.9 billion.
Interest rates on borrowed funds were at an all-time low making loans easy to get and igniting a spirit of corporate and civic optimism that pervaded the country with a mythical sense that growth would continue forever.
Over the seven-year period starting in 1922, American exports rose 26 percent while imports climbed only by 16 percent setting a peacetime export record of $5.24 billion worth of goods—the same year the nation imported $4.4 billion in goods—a figure that was less than 1926’s $4.43 billion and below the pre-war levels. By 1929 America’s gross national product had hit $104 billion and the per-capita income was $857.
Meanwhile American business began expanding with new infusions of investment totaling $100 billion in capital equipment and bank loans of another $100 billion to foreign countries.
Automobile production, a cottage industry at the turn of the century, exploded over the next three decades. By 1925 completely assembled Model T Ford cars, accounting for ten percent of the nation’s income and employing nearly four million workers, rolled off the assembly line at Henry Ford’s Highland Park plant every ten seconds.
Investing in stocks and bonds, long the exclusive preserve of brokers and sophisticated experts, soon drew mainstream Americans who began purchasing shares on margins as low as ten percent of the cost of the stock. The mid-1920s became known as the “Coolidge Prosperity” era with President Coolidge touting “the chief business of the American people is business.”
The 1920s was also a decade of “consumerism.” Before the First World War, purchasing on credit was discouraged. Most Americans believed in saving the full amount needed to buy that new appliance or home improvement.
After the war, advertisers challenged this dogma with a new chant that buying on time was the right and moral thing to do for any knowledgeable consumer. Stores began to link large scale purchases to long-term credit. By 1927, two years after Wolfe Weisband landed in the US, 15 percent of all goods totaling $6 billion in value were bought on an installment plan.
One scholar wrote years later that the tripling of household income after the war made millions of Americans members of the broad middle class. They now drove
“Chevrolets purchased on time, wore clothes bought on credit and had radios, cigarette lighters, appliances, and medical care on easy payment plans. Should they die, their funerals could be provided with so much down and so much per month.”
Advertising also spawned a new magazine industry. Time published its first edition in 1923. H.L Mencken’s American Mercury appeared in 1924 followed a year later by the upscale New Yorker which catered to so-called “caviar sophisticates.”
Consumerism even made its way into the world of popular culture. Motion pictures were the vogue with firms like Famous-Players–Lasky, RKO, and Paramount dominating the industry. Hollywood producers sold the American dream to Bill and millions of other eager movie goers with handsome actors and their glamorous leading ladies draped in the latest fashions living in fabulous homes filled with expensive objects with no real explanation as to how they were acquired.
For young men like Wolfe, fashion icons of the period like Rudolph Valentino, Al Jolson, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin filled the silver screen setting new standards for what a well kitted gentleman should wear.
The sixteen-year-old Wolfe was wild-eyed by New York’s new libertine lifestyle. It was the “Age of Excess” with nothing but “wonderful nonsense of all kinds.” Lois Long summed up the decade with “tomorrow we may die, so let’s get drunk and make love.”
Coco Chanel was fond of saying that fashion is not something that exists in dresses alone. “Fashion is in the sky …. fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.” The embodiment of this notion were the “Flappers” – women wearing long men-like pants or, even more shocking, dresses that ended at the knees revealing bare legs and lovely well-turned ankles.
Because women now worked outside the home, dress hemlines rose first to mid-calf and then to the knee creating a swank look that made it easier to hop in and out of the cars, or simply walk around. The new “Empire” waist dropped below the bustline between the breasts and the natural waist. By 1922 the plunge had dropped even further to the hips. Gone forever were formal tight-fitting corsets and crinoline.
Along with dated dress wear, the new woman shed her tiresome long hair choosing instead a smart-looking short bob for easy treatment and fashionable look of the famous “Cloche Hat” which was all the rage. Wolfe witnessed another shattered taboo as women strolled arm and arm with men (or women) down crowded New York avenues while smoking a cigarette. At local beaches Bill’s young head swiveled at the thousands of women lounging and swimming in one-piece bathing suits that exposed their legs and arms and shoulders.
New fashion meant new musical sounds and dances. It was the “Jazz Age” with songs like “Ain’t Misbehavin” with Johnny Guarnieri on the piano and “I Love my Baby and My Baby Loves Me” a 1925 hit performed by George Bruns and his Rag-A-Muffins. What began as a uniquely New Orleans African-American sound quickly spread taking root in jazz clubs across the country most particularly New York City.
The new sound spawned the careers of famed trumpeter Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and the legendary Duke Ellington who starred at the opening in 1927 of Harlem’s famed Cotton Club. Wolfe and the youth of the 1920s rebelled against the traditional mores of previous generations which many saw as a breakdown of traditional morality. It was the “devil’s music,” critics charged, with sounds and rhythms that promoted promiscuity.
The 20s also ushered in “café society.” They were the so-called beautiful people with ambition and money to burn who became regulars at the city’s posh haunts and restaurants—all in the interest of seeing and being seen. Nightclubs like New York’s El Morocco and the Stork Club became hangouts for the in-crowd. Elegantly dressed couples performing ballroom routines on hotel dance floors were replaced by highly charged and sexually suggestive dances. The new craze had strange names like the “Fox Trot,” “Charleston” and “Texas Tommy.”
Wolfe loved to dance and could often be found at local community centers for an evening of taxi dancing. “Taxi Dances” were egalitarian, and anyone could participate. By 1931 there were more than a hundred such dance halls in New York City alone, drawing between 35,000 and 50,000 customers per week. Taxi dancers were usually women between the ages of 15 and 28 from a poor or broken family, or a divorcee trying to support her children. Customers bought a ticket for a dime which entitled him to dance with the woman for the length of a song and again and again as long as he bought more tickets.
One study profiling typical customers in the early 1930s found them to be primarily Caucasian males who had immigrated from European countries like Italy, Poland and Greece with Jews tending to predominate the scene. They were generally skilled or semi-skilled workers from the lower middle classes.
Prohibition, the great social experiment starting in 1919 with the passage of Volstead Act, outlawed the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of alcohol across America. But Wolfe Weisband could still get a drink if he knew where to look. There was “bathtub gin” and “bootleg liquor” sold at “Speakeasys” or gentlemen’s clubs throughout the city, hangouts out of sight of the police where patrons spoke only in whispers. These were usually small operations with little more than a bar, a few chairs, and tables and rarely any entertainment. They operated with names like “O’Leary’s,” the “Bath Club,” in the Bowery and one of the most famous, the “21” Club, which still stands today.
Again, women were stepping out in the world with ownership of many of these places. One of them, Texas Guinan, a former screen and stage performer, and owner of the 300 Club and the El Fey could be found nightly in one of her places greeting patrons with her famed line “Hey Suckers.” Her two biggest competitors, also women, were Belle Livingston and Helen Morgan.
Just blocks from where Bill would spend the next decade and a half stood the Ziegfeld Theater, a 1600-seat palace, built on Sixth Avenue at 54th by the famed New York empresario, Florenz Ziegfeld. “Flo” as everyone called him was a larger-than-life figure from Germany who made a fortune with his Ziegfeld Follies, a spectacular stage revue modeled on the Follies Bergere of Paris.
When Bill peeked in, he watched extravaganzas filled with lavish settings, sketches and huge production numbers performed by a large ensemble of actors and actresses. The evening’s signature moment was always Ziegfeld’s finale, the famed Tableau Vivant, a full-stage spectacle with gorgeous vaguely undressed girls simply standing and sitting in statuesque poses in front of ogling audiences. They were the “best money could buy” Flo would tell everyone.
For the newly arrived teenager, New York City was the place to be. And it wasn’t long before he began putting his past behind him. First by shedding the name “Wolfe” and reinventing himself as “William” Weisband.”
He was in the magic kingdom – a place where anything seemed possible, and he wasted no time going after it.
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