Havana, 1939

My uncle Leo, my father’s older brother, who changed the family name from Lebedich to Liebe, lived in Havana for a year after clearing out of Italy in 1938. Two years earlier, when the Nuremberg race laws stripped Jews of their rights as citizens, Leo left his native Germany for Italy, while my father, two years younger but fluent in French and blessed with great good luck, followed an unusual itinerary that took him to London during the war years and ultimately to Montreal. Elsewhere I’ve written about my father’s journey. Today Leo is on my mind.

Leo liked his time in Milan and at Lake Como; he had the Teutonic love of Italy—the easygoing pace, the girls who liked to laugh, the “warm south.” But Axis fascism had spread across Western Europe with the relentless speed of a medieval plague, and Milan under Mussolini did not promise safe harbor. Neither did Paris, where cousin Leah (his mother’s sister’s daughter) lived with her husband and where he had spent the first few months of his self-exile. Antisemitism, a crouching tiger waiting to pounce ever since the Dreyfus affair, had sprung, its teeth gnashing in the forest of the night, turning Europe into a fearful cemetery.

For Jews who wanted to escape and had the means and the smarts to pay for or otherwise acquire passage, plus exit and entry visas and other bribes as needed, Havana made sense as a destination, or at least a halfway house if you hoped ultimately to reach the United States. In Cuba the Jews enjoyed freedom of worship and had ever since the U.S. occupation of the island in 1902. The route from Hamburg to Havana was the route to freedom.

In May 1939 the SS St. Louis, a passenger ship carrying 937 Jewish refugees, set sail from Hamburg. The voyage to Havana would take two weeks. The German captain, a decent sort, let the passengers take down the portrait of Adolf Hitler from the ship’s dining room on Friday evenings. On the 27th of the month, the St. Louis reached Havana, where, to the everlasting shame of the world, the ship was turned away. The passengers held the proper credentials. At the Cuban Embassy in Berlin, they had paid hard cash for entry visas. Nevertheless, the Jews were denied entry. It was the ship of refugees nobody wanted, and it sailed back to the blood-drenched grounds of Europe. Some survived.

Leo had arrived in Havana a year earlier. He was 25 years old, blond, of medium height, a middleweight with a taste for cholesterol-heavy foods, the novels of Thomas Mann and the poetry of Christian Morgenstern. When, in the old country, goyim ganged up on him, he was usually outnumbered but always fought back. He was a serious man and he took his religion very seriously. He was not ostentatious about it; he dressed like everyone else, in a suit and tie, with a fedora; but he put on tefillin in the morning and wore a tallis in shul on the Sabbath. He was a man who knew he would die without ever getting old. And just as he thought, he had a New York heart and died at 48 when I was 10 years old.

In Havana, Leo found adequate living quarters in a rooming house within walking distance of the Yisroel Adar synagogue in Picota. By good fortune the congregants were congenial Ashkenazim, Orthodox confreres, mostly from Germany, who even davened with the same German melodies that Leo knew and liked from the first 23 years of his life in Fürth, a city in Bavaria that once had a vibrant Jewish community.

Leo had a low-income job with the Havana Electric Railway, which governed the city’s tramways; he translated correspondence from the German to the Spanish. Leah’s younger sister Miriam, his one relation in Havana, made even less money as a typist, clerk, and jill-of-all-trades at a Jewish refugee agency. With her mane of curly brown hair and almond eyes, Miriam made a striking first impression. Like Leo, she observed every jot and title of the Orthodox law, faithfully but not fanatically. The comely young woman with the big smile, the pearl earrings, and the sapphire ring had the foresight to abandon Frankfurt for Havana in March 1938. Shy and diffident, she was the pupil who knew the right answer but had the discretion to keep the knowledge to herself rather than embarrass her classmates. Like her sister Leah in Paris, she had grown up in Frankfurt on the Rhine far from Leo’s Fürth on the outskirts of Nuremberg. Because of the distance between them, Leo had not met his cousin very often, but she stole the show at his bar mitzvah dinner. Defying custom that girls should stay in the background, Miriam toasted the bar mitzvah boy by reciting verses from Heine subtly twisted to suit the jolly occasion.

Capable of high spirits, Miriam also had a melancholic side. At the refugee agency, she heard the most alarming stories of what her co-religionists in Europe faced. Work camps; deportation; property expropriated by the state or sold at fire-sale prices to Aryans; Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, a pogrom endorsed by the state; the “Jewish problem.” A year younger than Leo, Miriam had a similar premonition about her fate. She was convinced that she would die before her prime in some conflagration of such historic importance that her death would be a statistical footnote. She told Leo she could understand what a prescient passenger on the Titanic felt a day before the ship collided with the iceberg.

Miriam lived frugally and there was always money enough for the festive Friday night dinners and Sabbath lunches that she and Leo shared. It was understood that Leo would pay for the food and that Miriam would prepare the meals. It was also understood that their alliance in Havana was bound to be a brief one, if only because they both wanted out of the place. They were first cousins, and romance was out of the question. If anything, this limitation made it easier for them to exchange views and to confide in each other. Both subscribed to the American dream. Now that a major war was inevitable, there were sure to be better job opportunities in the States if only they could get in.

On Sundays he and she would sometimes stroll together down the Paseo del Prad, the tree-lined avenida designed for walkers. They compared notes on what progress they had made in mastering English and Spanish, with the emphasis on the former. At the movies they enjoyed comedies with Irene Dunne and Cary Grant. Always they dined together on the Sabbath.

Came Purim, with the custom of drinking so much in joy that you fail to be able to distinguish between the hero and villain of the Book of Esther. For lunch that day Leo went to Moishe Pipik’s, the only kosher Jewish American restaurant in all of Havana. Moishe Pipik’s had six kinds of chicken soup: with noodles (fideos), potato (papa), matzo balls (bola con galleta Americano), creplach, mandelach, and rice. They also served arroz con pollo. The regulars were a voluble bunch. A well-dressed little fellow captured Leo’s ear for the length of a tongue sandwich. With a thick New York accent, he extolled the virtues of a tongue sandwich on rye bread, ideally served with an assortment of pickles. It was the tongue sandwich on Leo’s plate that attracted him to his table. When he asked Leo how he felt about the situation of the Jew in a Europe divided among Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Stalin, he didn’t wait for an answer. He slapped the table. “A Jew is a Jew, not a victim,” he said. “He can be a patriot. I am a patriot. Never let a man hit you first. Always hit him first. The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been absent.”

After the man left, the restaurant’s major domo motioned Leo over. “Do you know who that was?” “No idea.” “Meyer Lansky.” So this was Meyer Lansky, the casino king, Lucky Luciano’s closest associate. It was in 1938 that Batista, the Cuban dictator, turned to Lansky to eliminate the cheap hoods, freeloaders, chiselers and cheats from the Havana casinos that had fallen on hard times.

Lansky, a strategist, made the places tourist-friendly. It was his ambition to turn Havana into the Monte Carlo of the Caribbean. Appearances matter, and if he couldn’t yet afford a topiary garden outside with fountains and marble statues, there would come the day when he could, and in the meantime, he could make the place safe for visitors—he could get rid of the small-time swindlers, the crooked croupiers, the “razzle-dazzle” and blackjack specialists who fleeced all suckers. An impropriety of any kind led to the employee’s instant dismissal. Lansky gave the casinos the veneer of professionalism. He put down plush carpets with vibrant colors and busy designs. He served good food and treated big spenders to free daiquiris. The casinos were carpet joints, not clip joints.

As a result of Lansky’s management, wild night-club entertainment began to flourish in Cuba’s capital. Lansky oversaw the Gran Casino Nacional, the only Havana carpet joint where the gambling was honest, the mood was merry, and the musicians clad in white tuxedos played rumbas and sambas for the intoxicated to dance to.

Lansky had big plans, and he was halfway home. On the second to last day of 1939, the Tropicana would open its doors to the public. Over the course of the next few decades, his casinos—untouched by war—would attract jet-set celebrities from the States, notables on the order of Greta Garbo, Ernest Hemingway, Errol Flynn, Rita Hayworth, Marlon Brando, and John F. Kennedy. Nat King Cole, who sang at the Tropicana, said, “I love going to Cuba, because they treat me like a white man.”

According to my father, Leo saw Lansky two or three other times at Moishe Pipik’s. Soft-spoken but bearing a certain authority, Meyer looked like an accountant. His face was thin, sallow, angular. He dressed well: dark suit, tie, fedora. A champion chain-smoker, he blew out smoke rings when he was in a good mood. Under all conditions he looked as imperturbable as a tax collector. He never raised his voice or lost his temper. He was considered a wizard with numbers. “He can do it all in his head,” Leo said. “He can multiply four-figure numbers and then divide them 12 ways. All in his head! I saw him do it.” On the other hand, you didn’t have to spend a lot of time in Meyer’s vicinity to notice that he was always accompanied by heavyweight bodyguards with somber faces in double-breasted suits.

Did Leo tell Miriam about this big shot from New York? I’ve no doubt. On Purim they listened to the reading of the megillah, the story of how Queen Esther saved the Jews of Persia, a happy-ending comedy rare in the Bible. Afterward they drank wine and got a little giddy when Leo told his cousin about the well-dressed Jewish gangster from New York he had met at Moishe Pipik’s.

On a Friday evening in April, Leo attended Friday night services greeting the Sabbath, bride of the Lord. The congregants sang "L’cha Dodi,” the 16th-century hymn that begins with a line from the Song of Songs (“Let us go, my beloved, to meet the bride”). The metaphor is intensely erotic: The maiden stands for the worshipers, the lover for God.

After the ceremonies, Leo headed to Miriam’s apartment a mile or so from where he roomed.

Wearing his customary dark blue suit and gray fedora, white shirt, and tie, in the humid Havana night where rum and cigar smoke meet, Leo turned left at the usual corner, a badly illuminated street where two working stiffs who had had too much to drink were hollering at each other. It looked as though they were ready to trade blows when they became aware of Leo’s advancing footsteps.

Almost instantly the drunkards ceased their combat to focus on him, the stranger in their midst, and Leo walked up to them, maintaining his pace by an act of will, wondering: How did they know? What tipped them off that here was a Jew ripe for the plucking?

The goons shouted taunts at Leo. He understood the profanities for what they were and prepared himself for the fight that would follow. He was shorter and as many as 30 pounds lighter than either of his antagonists. He’d been here before. Sale juif in Paris, judische Schweinhund in Nuremberg. Outnumbered. The shorter one pulled a knife.

Suddenly, a woman dressed in black with a multicolored shawl appeared in the doorway of the house in front of which the quarreling goons stood. She scolded the tontos borrachos, silencing them, and rattled off some sentences as fast as the rapid-fire Spanish language allows. Leo didn’t catch all of it, but he was sure he heard her say he was “a man of importance in the organization”—“un caballero de importancia para la organización.”

When she finished speaking, the thugs stood there quietly, as if they’d been slapped hard in the face. They fell all over themselves begging Leo’s pardon. They hadn’t known who he was. If only they had known. They stood hemming, hawing, beseeching. The shorter man, whose name was Jose, even took out a wad of bills from his wallet and tried to put the money in Leo’s jacket pocket, but he put his hand up and shook his head, because you weren’t allowed to exchange money for goods or services or anything else on the Sabbath.

This gesture of refusal seemed to stun the men.

Leo, not a man given to exaggeration, spoke with some wonderment recollecting the episode. He said—it made a big impression on my father when Leo told him about it many years later—that the faces of his foes at that moment looked as astonished as the diners at Emmaus, who had an epiphany concerning the third at the supper table in the Rembrandt painting Leo had seen at the Louvre.

After the fracas Leo arrived at Miriam’s house. She had already lighted the candles and blessed the Sabbath at nightfall and now she set out two braided loaves of bread covered with a white linen cloth and a silver cup full of sweet red wine for the kiddish. Miriam wore black silk and pearls. Leo replaced his fedora with a blue velvet kepel, and both washed their hands without saying a word, as custom dictated. They blessed the fruit of the vine, and they sipped. They blessed the Lord, who brings forth bread from the earth, and they broke bread. Leo always admired the handcrafted silver cup with filigree design, one of the few things Miriam had been able to save from the old country.

After the sacraments, Miriam said: “Was hat passiert?” Not only had Leo arrived uncharacteristically late but he looked shaken up and in a strange state of excitation, even exaltation.

Leo explained what happened.

“Have you heard of this so called organización?”

“No, unless it has something to with the gambling operations Batista is behind.”

“Like what your friend Lansky is involved with?”

Leo smiled. “I don’t know, but it’s an open secret that gangsters operate in Havana. Batista lets them.”

“But what made the old lady think you were involved with gangsters?” Miriam wondered.

Leo said. “Who knows?”

“God must have plans for you,” Miram said. “If he didn’t, chas v’shalom, you’d have been lying in the street.”

Leo said “Baruch ha’Shem,” the all-purpose phrase suitable to any situation, adding, “Everything happens for a reason.”

I’m ashamed to say I know so little about what errands, if any, Leo might have run for Lansky. There are some taboos that do not enter the general conversation of an Orthodox Jewish family that observes the commandments, keeps the Sabbath, and adheres to strict dietary rules. I know what I know only because my father, a reticent man, told me the broad outlines of the story. Like Leo, my father died young. I never had the chance to quiz him about how my uncle Leo got out of Cuba. Yes, I’d heard the name Meyer bandied about, but remember, when Leo died, I was just 10 years old. Not until much later did it become widely known that the Meyer who figured in the story was Meyer Lansky, the real-life mobster who was the inspiration for Hyman Roth in The Godfather. Roth is quoting Lansky when he tells Michael Corleone, “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.”

The subject of Meyer Lansky was verboten at our Sabbath table, as was the subject of Havana in general. But Leo did write down some of the things he heard Lansky say. I discovered the notebook last year in an old suitcase that belonged to my father and that hadn’t been opened in maybe 50 years. I read and learned the secret nobody wanted me to know.

Of these entries from the notebook, some seem to be direct quotes or paraphrases.

“Spinoza said the Jews were once the chosen people, but not anymore. I say: chosen for what?”

When I asked him about the situation in Europe, he said, “I am a Jew in my heart and the Jews in Europe are my brothers.”

What line of work was he in? “Business.” “What business?” “My business.”

“Whatever the first rule of economics is, the first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics. Always hit the other guy first. Don’t be a schmuck. Guns are always a last result. A Jew should stand up for his rights. Surprise is the ace of diamonds in the dead man’s hand.”

“The Vanderbilts and Astors were the biggest thieves, and now look at them. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Don’t gamble. You will lose. Gambling is for the suckers.”

“They call it vice. But who are they to say so? Not even Plato knew.”

“Maintain a high-class, clean operation, that’s the most important thing. Don’t be greedy.”

“The secret of running a good casino is integrity.”

“What makes the customers happy? They want to have a good time, and if they lose money at the casino let it be because the odds favor the house and not because dishonest people work for you. They know they will lose and that is part of the enjoyment. Money means something else to them.”

“Customers want to be treated like ladies and gentlemen even if it’s only for a week. And what they do in the bedroom is what people do in the bedroom, and none of my concern.”

“Always pay your income tax ahead of time. That way you get a refund.” (Everyone laughed, as if they knew that he meant something else.)

B.G., evidently the group intellectual, brought up Bentham: “The ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’ is the essence of Capitalism,” he said. To which M. responded, “Can you think of anything that caters more to the wishes of the multitude than a casino with twenty-four-hour bar service, room service, painted women, beautiful and willing, cigars and a swimming pool in the sun?”

“A casino is a shrine to desire, not to the fulfillment of that desire, but to the desire itself. And desire is what motivates people. Desire is life itself to them.”

“A casino is timeless. There are no clocks in a well-run casino, and the interiors should be pleasing because you don’t want windows. You want time to stop while you live out your fantasy, and the most seductive of all fantasies is to have your recklessness rewarded with money, lights, booze, and sex. Or to have failed—but gloriously.”

The notebook also included a list of the respectable citizens and institutions that needed to be reassured that gambling in Havana was in everybody’s interest. Hospitals topped the list, followed by fraternal associations of police and fire fighters. Havana’s Franciscan church, La Casa de la Obra Pía (House of Charitable Works) was a worthy recipient of charitable donations, and money was needed to maintain the Hotel Nacional’s garden, royal palms, and terraces overlooking the Bay of Havana.

There was also, among other papers, a sonnet, in Leo’s handwriting, in the manner of Heine, declaring his love for Miriam. “Not in the sky but in the lights of your eyes / I believe.”

They had begun with no amatory interest in each other. Gradually it happened. There came a day when each walked faster to reach the other and it was spring and the flowers had blossomed. People who saw them together assumed they were man and wife. They walked together hand in hand under the palm trees and felt the power of the attraction. It pleased them to be a couple. Was it kosher for first cousins to marry? They decided to postpone the decision until they both were settled in America and preferably New York, where an Orthodox community had established itself in Washington Heights.

Meanwhile, they couldn’t deny what had happened between them. It happened by accident—it had happened not because anyone wanted it to happen, but because, in moments of decision, neither of them wanted to stop. Like a murder, a love affair needs a means, a motive, and an opportunity. Exile and isolation in Havana provided all three. Desperation and danger enhance a romantic attraction, and maybe this contributed to the intensity of their passion. The sonnet was called “Secret Love.” The love the poem celebrated was erotic, forbidden, and holy, and could no more be visualized than the mating of Ronald Colman and Greer Garson in Random Harvest.

I have often tried to imagine what Leo and Miriam may have said to each other about Lansky and the gambling “organization” in Havana. He would have had a hard time persuading Miram that Meyer Lansky was, to use a word he favored, a man of “integrity.” But I have a hunch he made the effort.

“Let us remember the time we live in. Isn’t it as if all laws have been suspended, and we have been expelled from Europe as were our ancestors in Spain in 1492 the year Columbus happened upon America?”

“Reb Nachman of Bratslav, a great grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov, said ‘it is a great mitzvah to be happy always,’ and also ‘if you can do the damage, you can fix it.’

“Think of that.

“Also, who is the greatest expert on the laws of kinyan, or ownership?”

Leo, who had studied the Talmudic tractate of Bava Batra, waited a beat before saying “Reb Gamliel,” according to whom property obtained in unholy ways, by gambling or cheating for example, may be a subservient concern of a larger ethical problem, in which case there are times the possession of the goods tends to confer ownership. With regard to gambling, Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah argued that the ones who lose the money do so willingly. If the money is the result of cheating, then it’s more complicated, of course. But regardless of the origin of the criminal funds, possession is justified when the ends they can secure are virtuous and secure the greater good.

“The greater good,” said Miriam, who had not been required (or allowed) to study the Talmud and was therefore perhaps unduly impressed by the reference to Bava Batra. She adopted a speculative cast of mind, trying to calculate the ratio of safety to risk in the equation.

Never mind that. What are the ends?—that is the question in any means-and-ends argument.

There was just one thing worth taking a risk for. America.

To get into America.

In her mind as in Leo’s, America in 1939 was endowed with mythic status. Getting an exit visa was the objective, and then you had to persuade the American authorities that you weren’t a deadbeat.

Everything was subject to chance, though people said you improved your prospects if you learned English and tried to understand the crazy American character that veered in a minute from “Jeepers Creepers” to “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, and England and France declared war. There was no fighting on the western front, but the need to reach America felt more urgent than ever.

Whether Lansky helped or not, I have no way of knowing, but Leo was issued the necessary documents on the second to last day of 1939, and if he could get into the States and make a go of it, he’d be able to welcome Miriam to join him. For multiple reasons it seemed wisest for the two of them to approach the United States separately. Above all, it would have been indiscreet to travel together.

The hardest thing was saying goodbye. It was a long night, the last night. She cried.

Leo had been turned back once before, but this time he succeeded in entering the States. In Miami, he impressed the border control official with his command of English.

“I have only one question for you,” the man in the naval uniform said. “Are you able-bodied? Can you work?”

“You bet,” Leo said, and the man chuckled at his use of the idiom and waived him in. “I could have hugged him,” Leo said.

With his languages—English, German, Spanish, and enough Italian to get by—Leo quickly landed a job with an import-export trading firm. He sent money to Havana and couldn’t wait to make arrangements for Miriam to join him in New York.

The mail from Havana to New York always took an unpredictably long time, and Leo was anxious when he didn’t hear from Miriam for two full weeks. As the winter of 1939 overcame the false spring of 1940, a letter from her arrived. It was dated Feb. 27. It had taken 16 days to reach him.

“I miss you, my dearest, and am happy your move to New York is going well. Thank you for the letters and, of course, the money. You were always so generous.

“You are wondering why I haven’t written. The truth is, I didn’t want to write this letter just as neither of us wanted to become lovers. I love you. I don’t know if I could love anyone else. What we have done is pure. But it is also a sin. It is our sin now, our secret, known only to us and to God. Let it live in the glory of our history, though no one may notice, and it is right that no one should know. War excuses much, but someday this war will be over, and if we stop now, we will leave no evidence of our crime.

“Havana is the farthest thing from Eden, but our escape is also our expulsion. The Masaccio you love in the church in Florence—that is a picture of us, after the fact of our sin. I don’t think I will ever fall in love again. So be it.

“I wish this wasn’t so hard for me to say. Reason has a difficult time overcoming passion. But reason tells me this is the best thing to do.

“Don’t worry, my dearest. I won’t be doing anything foolish. A woman I met through the agency has found a job for me in Montreal, and it’s there that I will go.

“Please, please don’t try to dissuade me. You would win the argument. You were always a better arguer than I.

“Please know that I have cried many tears.

“P.S. Goes without saying you burn this at once.”

Leo was devastated. He drank. It was the first time he got drunk on whiskey rather than wine, and now he knew the difference between a mean drunk and an intoxication of joy. But he had barely had time to digest the information—and to contemplate how he might respond—when he learned that he would never see her again.

Purim was just around the corner. On Purim eve, a fast day in the Hebrew calendar in honor of Queen Esther, a speeding car hit Miriam and sped off, leaving her to die in the street near the newly built police station that looks like an old Spanish fortress in the Habana Vieja district of Havana. Havana drivers were notoriously reckless.