A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [140]
Dwora and Hershl Silberman were of that more modest wartime generation. Although he was strictly religious, Hershl Silberman shaved every morning and dressed like any other Belgian man. But his son Mechilim, named after Dwora's father, started wearing Ha-sidic clothes as a child in the late 1950s, even before it became fashionable. Mechilim did not approve of the way his father appeared to hide his Jewishness. If a gentile even knocked on the door, he noticed his father would quickly remove his hat. That was not the kind of Jew he wanted to be. Where had that attitude gotten his parents’ generation? Mechilim wore black and peots and hats, and when he could, he would grow a beard for everyone to see. At first, he was thought a little odd, but by the time he was an adult, this was the normal look for Antwerp Jews.
THE MEN IN ANTWERP started their weekdays at seven-thirty in the various synagogues, where they wrapped tefillin so tightly that their arms turned red, and they said their morning prayers. Then they had breakfast together—coffee, herring, eggs. A few deals were made. A broken watch could be shown to the jeweler, some silver might be discussed with the silver dealer. And there were family matters—matches to be made, marriages to be arranged. By nine o'clock, they were all off to work. It was all in Yiddish, and some older immigrants, finding that Yiddish was all that they needed, never learned Flemish.
They intermarried with the world's other traditional communities. Antwerp, New York, Jerusalem, and London were places where traditional Jews searched for marriage partners. Young people were constantly marrying in and out of Antwerp. The families had four and five children, and with some leaving and others marrying in, the population remained fairly stable at a little more than twenty thousand.
A typical new arrival was Levy Kohane. His family were Bobover Hasidim who had fled Poland in the 1930s and settled in Antwerp. At the beginning of the occupation, all but the father had been shot during a Nazi roundup of Jews. After the war the father had settled in Paris where, though he said he had lost his beliefs, he raised his four children according to Hasidic tradition. Levy was allowed no contact with girls until he was 20. Then a marriage was arranged with an Antwerp girl. A contract was signed, and the two were brought together. Levy's first impression: “What could I think? It was one of my first meetings with a girl. Her first with a boy.” They settled in Antwerp and started having children.
SLOWLY DURING THE 1970S the diamond industry changed. Before the war most of the world's diamonds had been made in Antwerp. It was the only center that handled large quantities. But now, as in all manual labor industries, there was competition from impoverished countries. Sawing, cleaving, and polishing could all be done cheaper in India. In Antwerp, when cleaving was done at all, it no longer involved much labor since it was generally executed with amazing speed with the use of laser beams. Antwerp's diamond district gradually began moving away from the manufacturing of diamonds, but it remained prosperous as the world's great diamond trading center. Brokers peddling rough stones to manufacturers and dealers trading in finished diamonds remained. About three-fourths of the rough diamonds in the world still passed through Antwerp. But fewer of them were being cut there.
Sam Perl closed his sawing factory. After the war there had been about 250 sawers in Antwerp, but by 1980 only some twenty-five remained.