CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Adventures in Romania

Can you believe that there was once a city where no Jew went hungry or went about poorly clothed? A pauper need only apply at the shul and there he would find matrons clamoring to take him home to share the dinners they had cooked. A beggar was treated as the most honored guest. After he had been filled with delicious food and wine, if there was an extra bed he was invited to stay—and if not, he could return to the shul and sleep on one of its benches.

It is true such a city existed. And its name was Kishinev.

—From The Journeys of David Toback^I

1920–1921

When first arriving in Kishinev in November 1920, some thirty years after David Toback’s described visit to the city in 1890, the new refugees were taken aback by the sight of long lines of desperate people waiting for food. Soup, which had been prepared in large buckets, was being doled out to the poor Jewish immigrants. This most heavily populated city and capital of Bessarabia could no longer afford to offer the special treatment that former visitors used to enjoy from the once-prosperous Jewish community. The Jews from Russia and Ukraine who flocked to Romania were all stranded there without permission; likewise, most were destined for America.

Though many called this land “Romania,” just two years earlier it was known to the world as Bessarabia, a historical region of southeastern Europe that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire and to Moldavia. It has been a long-disputed territory between Russia and Romania. This area is physically bordered by the Dniester River on the north and east, the Prut River on the west, the Black Sea on the southeast, and the Kiliya arm of the Danube delta on the south.

Bessarabia remained an integral part of the Russian Empire until 1917. After the Russian Revolution, a national council (Sfatul Tarei), composed largely of Moldavians, was formed. The council, in fear of terror and disorder, appealed to Romania for protection. Little did the council members know that the government of Romania wasn’t much more stable than its neighboring country.

In 1918, the council proclaimed that Bessarabia was an Independent Moldavian Republic; in the fall of that year, it voted to unite with Romania. The Soviet government did not recognize this land as part of Romania. The Romanians, on the other hand, argued that like the people of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Moldavians had the right to choose their own fate. However, all negotiations between the two countries soon fell apart.

Meanwhile, on October 28, 1920, just days before the caravan group illegally crossed over Bessarabia’s northern border, the Treaty of Paris confirmed this union. Many of the world’s great powers recognized Bessarabia as a part of Romania. In 1940, however, Bessarabia reverted back to Russia.

There were tearful goodbyes as Itzie, Molly, and their children, as well as Bessie, prepared to leave for the next chapter of their journey to the Goldene Medina. Like many other members of Barney’s group who had traveled together from Belaya Tserkov, they had their passports and the funds necessary to immigrate to America. The Caprove family, however, did not, and Channa’s two aunts and uncle parted with the promise that when they reached America, they would send for the rest of them.

With Barney Stumacher heading the group to the United States, they continued on to Galatz, Romania, where they resided for a few months. Barney’s closer family members received preferential treatment and were accommodated in hotel rooms across Bucharest. While delayed in Bucharest, Barney ran into a familiar face: the American he had met on board the ship on his way to Europe who had showed him the map of Bessarabia, was now also in Romania. His friend eagerly recounted to Barney the colorful details of his run of good fortune: he had “come into possession” of Romanian money plates and was printing what looked like legitimate bills at random. He gave Barney a private demonstration of how he printed the new Romanian tender and then lined his pockets full of cash. Finally, he extended a dinner invitation to Barney and the members of his family to be his guests for a meal at an upscale café in Bucharest.

While the Stumacher family feasted on dinner and wine, their new American friend disappeared to the back of the café to speak with its owners. Barney sat himself down on the bench at the café’s piano. Although he had never learned to read music, he could play by ear as well as any seasoned pianist. Minutes later, his friend returned to the dinner table and announced grandly that he had just bought the café—piano included. Barney could now enter the establishment at will and eat, drink, and play tunes on the piano as often as he desired. This was not the first café Barney’s friend had purchased—he had bought many throughout Bucharest and in different cities across Romania with cash that he himself had printed.

Barney and Bossie’s Arrest: Bucharest, March 1921

While Itzie Stumacher had his own family’s passports provided to him by his brother Julius, a wealthy plumber from Brooklyn, Barney was still waiting to receive about twenty passports that he needed in order to get the rest of the group out of Romania. Tired of wading through five months of red tape, Barney heard of a forger selling false Romanian passports in Galatz. Wasting no time, he provided the forger with the twenty names, ages, and photographs of the refugees from Belaya Tserkov and falsified their country of birth as Romania. With the new passports in his hand, Barney was about to travel back to Bucharest when he heard a female voice behind him call out his name. He turned around and was taken aback to see his twenty-year-old sister, Bossie.^II

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

“They sent me to carry the passports into Bucharest.”

“I don’t need anyone to carry the passports for me. I travel all over Romania; nobody knows my business. They know I’m an American, and you didn’t have to come here.”

Of course, it was obvious why the family had chosen to send Bossie, a glamorous singer with the Kiev Opera Company, to help her older brother smuggle the passports out of Galatz. Her physical attributes would surely throw off any suspicion of wrongdoing, and her calm demeanor under pressure could only assist Barney on his travels.

Bossie was a strong and resourceful woman who had known a lot of pain and heartache in her short life. Just eighteen months earlier, her husband, Boris Weinschel, a well-known Jewish writer, poet, and actor, had died from pneumonia.^III Just nine months before her husband’s death, Bossie had given birth to the couple’s daughter, Blossom, who was also traveling with the family under the Stumacher name.

Barney’s striking sister took the twenty passports and hid them in her brassiere. The siblings then boarded an all-night train back to Bucharest with standing room only. There was a small compartment on the train where six men were seated in first class. When they eyed Barney’s stunning sister standing on the train in her fashionable dress and hat—and now very well endowed—the men offered to move over and make room for her to sit with them. The young woman smiled as she walked confidently toward the cabin, but as she bent down to take a seat, the passports moved around and began to stick out of her clothing. A few of them fell out onto the floor.

Unfortunately for Bossie, seated directly across from her were two police agents who had noticed the passports sticking out of the bosom of her dress. She cried out to her brother, who was still standing outside the compartment, “They want to see my passport, but I don’t have one for myself.”

Barney peered in and saw that the passports had been gathered and spread out on a table; he knew that he and his sister were in deep trouble and quickly emptied his pockets. The policemen told Bossie, in German, that they were arresting her for having false passports in her possession. Barney tried to bribe the agents, but it was useless: holding false passports in Romania was a serious matter. Bossie began to cry as she and her brother were arrested, taken off the train, and brought to a prison.

In the Bucharest jail, Barney called upon an old family friend named Gross^IV to help them out of their difficult predicament. Mr. Gross was apparently a powerful ally to have in Romania. He was the type of man to have connections all over Bucharest: he knew the police, jailors, the chief, judges, and officials—everyone of importance in the city. Gross came to Barney’s jail cell and asked him, “What do you want me to do?”

“Gross, you see I am in trouble—what do you mean what do I want you to do? I want you to get us out of here!” Barney told him.

“I can get you both out now without the passports. But if you wait until the morning, I can get you, your sister, and the passports out, too. I can have them validated legally as official Romanian passports. So now I’ll ask you again: What do you want me to do?”

Barney looked at his younger sister, who was determined not to leave the jail without those twenty official passports. “Look, we need the passports; it is better that we stay overnight,” she said to him. Barney and Bossie endured a dreadful and sleepless night in jail, in the unsavory company of pickpockets and burglars.

At ten o’clock the following morning, just as Gross had predicted, Barney and Bossie were led upstairs to a room where they faced the police chief of Bucharest. In German, the police chief questioned Barney.

“You didn’t make these passports, did you?”

“No.”

“You just wanted to take them?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know that these passports were false?”

“No.”

“Suppose that I make them good for you; how soon will you all leave Romania?” the chief asked.

“As soon as we get our visas, we’re going to leave Romania,” Barney assured him.

The police chief took the passports out of a drawer and began stamping them one by one with an official seal, making each one legitimate. He placed them back inside the newspaper that had been used to carry them into the station and handed them over to Barney. The two men shook hands, and the chief wished him luck.

Barney Stumacher and his sister Bossie left the police station that morning along with Mr. Gross and twenty official Romanian passports.^V

Unfortunately, Barney’s misfortune did not end with his arrest. When he returned with the passports, Barney was disappointed to learn that, in his absence, the American consulate had discovered that he had entered into the country illegally while holding his American passport. There was a law at the time that one had to leave their passport with the nearest consulate when entering the country. Barney was unaware of this law, and while he was in Belaya Tserkov, his passport had been handled by others and blue ink was splattered all over the stamp.

The consulate in Bucharest repossessed Barney’s passport, forcing him, on March 10, 1921, to apply for an emergency United States passport from Washington, DC. Since Barney needed a new passport before he could reenter the United States, the group’s departure was delayed in Bucharest for a few more weeks.

The refugees from the small shtetl in Ukraine gathered together in Bucharest for a historical photograph taken on March 25, 1921, just before they departed the country to set sail to the Golden Land.

With visas and passports in hand,^VI Barney Stumacher’s group of refugees from the village of Belaya Tserkov left Romania in their wagon caravans. By April, the group—which included Itzie, Molly, the couple’s three young children, Bessie, and Itzie’s three much younger half-siblings—was diverted to Germany via Poland. Somewhere along the journey, they abandoned their wagons and boarded a train to Hamburg, Germany.

On April 21, 1921, the Jewish refugees set sail from the Port of Hamburg on a 1,300-seat passenger steamship called the Mount Clay.^VII It was the day before the eve of Passover (Erev Pesach), a Jewish holiday commemorating the deliverance of Jews from slavery in Egypt three thousand years earlier. Adhering to the strict dietary tradition of this festival that marks both the physical and spiritual freedom of their ancestors, the group ate only eggs and matzah during the next eight days of their journey.

Meanwhile, back in Kishinev, Isaac, Rebecca, and their daughters faced an indefinite waiting period for their passports. They were, however, in good company: stranded with them in Kishinev were Esther and Yunkel Cutler and their four children. Avrum Cutler, his pregnant wife, Slova, and their baby daughter, as well as his in-laws, the Ova Denkas, had also remained behind.

On May 3, 1921, Barney’s group of Jewish refugees, who had risked their lives to pursue the American dream, sailed (with legitimate stamps on their passports) into the free waters of the New York Harbor, docking at Ellis Island.^VIII

Barney and Uncle Itzie’s eighty-year-old aunt, Frieda Ravicher, who was blind in both eyes, had miraculously survived the entire ordeal. From the anchored ship, she was excited to speak with her two sons, whom she had not seen since they had arrived in America more than fifteen years earlier. Frieda hollered down to her beloved sons in Yiddish, “My only wish is to look at your faces once more before I die.”^IX

1. I. Malkin, Carole. The Journeys of David Toback (as retold by his granddaughter). New York: Schocken Books, 1981, page 71.

2. II. Bossie was identified as the sister of Barney who assisted him with the passports by Allen Avery in a letter to the author in 2004, after he confirmed it with Filia Holtzman. Barney did not mention which sister accompanied him on this mission. Much of the dialogue regarding Barney and the passports is from his own recollections.

3. III. In an interview with the author, Bossie’s daughter, Blossom, stated that she believed her father, Boris Weinschel (Weinshell), had died from pneumonia. However, according to her grandfather Nechame’s letter to Barney, Bossie’s husband, a Jewish stage actor, was murdered (probably during a pogrom).

4. IV. On their Ellis Island passenger manifest, eleven of Barney’s close family members, including his parents, listed a David Gross as their closest family member or friend left in Europe. One entry has David Gross living on Maria Street in Galatz; the other entry has him listed as living in Czernowitz. It is possible (but unconfirmed) that the man whom Barney refers to as “Gross” in his story is David Gross. We do know, however, that Barney bought cigarettes in Czernowitz before arriving in Belaya Tserkov, an indication that he may have stopped there first for assistance.

5. V. The author discovered that on the outside cover of a passport belonging to a close relative of Barney’s, the name “Gross” was scribbled in ink in an upper corner. In the opposite upper corner, a letter G was written and underlined in pencil. This would seem to confirm Barney’s story that Gross paid off the court and had the passports stamped.

6. VI. Barney’s parents met privately with the vice counselor at the American embassy in Bucharest, who issued them their visas.

7. VII. Less than three months before their journey, a deadly outbreak of typhus cases resulted in voyages of the Mount Clay to be diverted to the Boston Harbor.

8. VIII. Source: Ellis Island Passenger Records.

9. IX. Frieda’s sons soon rushed her to a New York City ophthalmologist, who removed a cataract from one of her eyes, restoring her vision. (She is seen in photos taken in America wearing eyeglasses). For the first time in a decade, she not only saw the faces of her two sons but also the faces of her many grandchildren. She then went on to live for another ten years with her daughter and son-in-law in Tulsa, Oklahoma!