The Habit of Labor: Lessons from a Life of Struggle and Success
272
The Habit of Labor: Lessons from a Life of Struggle and Success
272eBook
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Overview
Forced to flee Nazi Germany with his family at age ten, Stef Wertheimer came to British Palestine in the late 1930s. He promptly dropped out of school, learned a trade through apprenticeship, and played a meaningful role in Israel’s War of Independence. He also started a company—ISCAR—that began in a shed and ultimately made him one of the world’s great self-made industrialists. In The Habit of Labor, Wertheimer shares the lessons he learned from a life of hardship and struggle in one of the world’s newest industrial powers. Both a pragmatist and a visionary, Wertheimer has devoted much of his life to promoting Jewish and Arab economic development through innovative educational and vocational programs, along with the establishment of a series of thriving industrial parks in Israel and in Turkey. The future of Israel, he believes, is not in military might or diplomatic alliances but in its growing economic clout.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781468313222 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
CHILDHOOD
What is the first sight etched in a person's memory?
The road to the train station was long, and our maid held my hand and hurriedly dragged me there on foot, in the mud, probably to meet her boyfriend. I was about three years old then. Later, at home, my mother scolded the young woman for taking me with her. Maybe I just recall what they told me years later. But the image of the long road endures — perhaps because I never let anyone drag me along again.
Kippenheim: a tranquil village, surrounded by fields and forests. It lies in the Black Forest region of Germany, ten kilometers from the Rhine River and Alsace, the French border, and one hundred kilometers from the Swiss border. Albert Einstein and Kurt Weill were born not far away. White lace curtains in the windows, and lots of flowers. Courtyards immersed in shadows. The residents are deep-rooted farmers, some of whom have switched to commerce and small industry. Cuckoo clocks are produced in the region.
I was born in Kippenheim at 1:45 on the afternoon of July 16, 1926, in the house where my father was born. It is a stone house with three floors, a small courtyard and thick climbing plants on the back wall.
My aunt, Dr. Selma Wertheimer, delivered me, with the help of three assistants. I lived there until the age of ten. We were three children at home: me; my brother Zvi (Peter), two years younger than I; and Doris, four years younger than I. Both of them were good kids. On the other hand, I was a rebellious child, a troublemaker.
Twenty years after I left this home, I reluctantly returned to it, alone, and then again years later, with friends. The house has hardly changed at all; only the plum and apple trees are gone from the yard.
On this street, Bahnhofstrasse, which leads to the train station, every sixth house was the home of Jews during my childhood. At the end of our house, where the minimarket is today, there was a grocery store that belonged to my family and was sold to a German named Dorner. Aunt Erna lived at the end of the street. On the main street, adjacent, was the home of Uncle Hermann, and across from him was the home of Uncle Richard, which stood next to the Rathaus, the town hall. A minute's walk from there, across from the synagogue, lived Aunt Fanne and Uncle Max. Max and Richard worked in the tobacco business. In the records of the Jews of Baden, eight members of the Wertheimer family appear as business owners in Kippenheim: the butchers Abraham Wertheimer, Hermann Wertheimer, and Julius Wertheimer; Leopold Wertheimer and David Wertheimer, in the livestock business; another Hermann Wertheimer, who operated a market for metal materials; Poldy Wertheimer, who ran a textile store; and my father Eugen Wertheimer, who operated a market for grain, flour, and animal feed.
Uncle Jonas lived in a house opposite the well-tended Rathaus. He was chronically ill and usually sat at the window, looking out. The next building, the home of Aunt Fanne, which now houses a local lottery agency, is where my parents would send me when I misbehaved too much. My cousin Erich would help me with my math and French lessons during my last school year in Germany.
On my second trip here, fifty-three years later, my friends urged me to go in as we stood next to the three-story house where I was born. Reluctantly, I knocked on the door of our home, where the Allen family now lives. I answered the voice that emerged from the intercom at the entrance. I said: "It's Wertheimer. I was born here." The man recognized my connection to the place. On the old wooden steps, whose carpet absorbs every creak, I went up to the second floor. The owner — about forty years old, mustached and pleasant — welcomed me. He had heard the name Wertheimer from his parents, who had purchased the home. "Your brother from the United States already visited us here," he said to me — as if it were obvious that we would all return sooner or later. Everyone in Kippenheim and the surrounding villages — Schmieheim, Ettenheim, Lahr — knows the name Wertheimer and the other Jewish names; they cannot free themselves from these names. I looked around; everything remained as it was, almost, except that the furniture had changed. A typical residence of a typical German family in a typical German village. I mumbled a few words of farewell and hurried to leave the house.
My friends were surprised that the village and my boyhood house left me completely apathetic, indifferent to the sights, the beauty, the warm welcome, and the childhood memories. I do not like this village. I do not feel any sense of belonging to it, and I have no pleasant memories associated with it.
In the street where we once walked in the snow to the nearby school, a plump and red-faced man came up to me and asked politely what I was looking for and who I am. When I told him "Wertheimer," his face lit up like someone who had found a long-lost brother.
"Stefan?" he called excitedly, gripping my hand tightly and shaking it relentlessly. "You don't remember me? He said his name, which did not ring a bell, and said that we had learned in the same classroom for three years. I felt none of the same excitement, but he did not notice as he enthusiastically told me about our schoolmates. "You know," he said with a pained expression, "so many good friends from the class were killed on the Russian front during the war ..." Mother's parents lived farther down the street, on the third floor, above their inn, the Badischen Hof on Poststrasse 7, which still bears its original name. Celebrations and wedding receptions were held in the inn's restaurant. Mother's brother Hermann managed the hotel with the restaurant and the butcher shop below. They continue to kill the livestock in the paved courtyard — though it is no longer kosher slaughter as it was then — and the snorting of the pigs can be heard in the air.
Nearby lived Hilde Wachenheimer, who was a few years younger than me. She and her parents did not escape, went through the concentration camps, and survived. In America, she became a poet. She sent me her poems, which all deal with the Holocaust. I wrote back to her, "I don't occupy myself with the past."
But, in fact, there is no way I can avoid addressing the past.
Kippenheim had about two thousand people when I was a child. The village's population has more than doubled today, but now there are no Jews. Jews were permitted to settle in Kippenheim in the mid-seventeenth century after the Thirty Years' War as "protected Jews." The first documented Jew was Jud Lowe, who came in 1654. Other Jewish families followed, and by 1793 there is a record of one of my ancestors, Hirschel Wertheimer. In 1871 the Jewish population reached its peak with a total of 323.
During my boyhood, about ten large extended Jewish families made up about 15 percent of the population. They were engaged in the usual occupations of Jews — butchers, merchants, bankers. There were no farmers among them, as the laws prevented Jews from owning land.
My family's roots may go back to Meir of Rothenburg, who was also known as Rabbi Meir Ben Baruch (ca. 1215–93) and Maharam of Rothenburg. The name Maharam is an acronym for the Hebrew words Morenu ha Rav Rabbi M ... and was used for many rabbis. "Our" particular maharam was a commentator, rabbinic authority, and spiritual leader of German Jewry. He was well known for his school at Rothenberg ob der Tauber, which he maintained at his own expense. He was also famous for his protest against Kaiser Rudolph I, who imposed heavy taxes on the Jews. The maharam was imprisoned for his stance and apparently refused to be released in exchange for the high ransom the kaiser demanded so as not to encourage additional arrests. After seven years of captivity, he died in his cell.
My paternal grandfather was a flour and grain merchant, like his father and grandfather before him, and he was known as the Baron of Flour. My own father continued in this business. For three years he studied the grain business in Mannheim with the father of Dr. Reuven Hecht, who later built the Dagon granaries in Haifa. He met my mother Karolina, or Lina, in the village; he was about three and a half years her senior. Mother, who was also from the Wertheimer "tribe" but not a direct blood relation, studied music at the nearby Freiburg Conservatory for several years and continued teaching piano after marrying my father. I remember her playing and singing songs by Franz Schubert with Father. The home was full of books, which I explored with great curiosity as a child.
Her family, and Father's family, like all the Jewish families in the village, were not assimilated and strictly observed kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws, though they were not particularly religious. On every Sabbath or for every Jewish festival, everyone would go to the village synagogue, which was the center of the Jewish community. The synagogue was built in 1850, a large, elegant building with reddish bricks. Above its doors the inscription "This is none other than the house of God" was carved in large Hebrew letters. The children would play in the paved courtyard and in the narrow lane that climbed the shoulder of the grassy hill. In the house behind the synagogue lived the local hazan (cantor), Schwab, who taught me and the other children a bit of Hebrew. On Friday nights we would all congregate there, adults and young people alike. After Saturday morning prayers the entire family would come to Uncle Hermann's home for a second breakfast.
I first returned to the village only in 1956, twenty years after leaving it as a child. And when I returned it was not because of nostalgia; I felt nothing but anger. I wandered around the streets; I saw my parents' home, and the homes of my uncles, but I did not go inside. I did not speak with anyone. Later, in 1963, when I lived for over a year with my family in the Netherlands, where I started the first Israeli factory overseas, we would sometimes travel for a ski weekend in Switzerland and pass by Kippenheim. My wife Miriam did not understand my aversion for the place. She was also born in Germany, but her attitude toward Germany was more tolerant. I would exit highway 5 toward Basel, stop near the village, and say, "Wait for me in the car. I'll be back in half an hour."
I would enter Kippenheim by myself, now a place devoid of Jews. Those who did not leave in time died in the camps. Only in the local Jewish cemetery, in Schmieheim, can you find many familiar names. With 2,500 graves it is the largest Jewish cemetery in southern Baden. Established in 1682 by the Jewish community of Ettenheim, today the cemetery is a forgotten site. But a sign at its entrance states that it was not overlooked by the Nazis. According to the sign, it suffered massive damages during the "pogrom days of 1938," including the burning of its mortuary.
Some of the tombstones are from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries; many are dark with age. Time has erased the names from many of them. On some gravestones, names are carved in Hebrew letters only. You find there a lot of Weil, and Auerbacher, Dreyfus, Durlacher, Wachenheimer, and Wertheimer. There lie both of my grandfathers and grandmothers, my Uncle Siegfried, my father's brother who was killed as a soldier in World War I, and other relatives: Benno Wertheimer, Leopold Wertheimer, Paulina Wertheimer, Samuel Wertheimer, Siegfried Wertheimer, and Sophie Wertheimer.
The gravestones attest to generations of Jews — physicians, merchants, and intellectuals — who were part of the heart and soul of the region for centuries, until one day their neighbors sought to erase them. A tombstone erected in memory of the Jews who fell fighting in World War I calls out in Hebrew letters, "Peace, peace to the near and far."
Another vestige of the Jewish community in Kippenheim, the old synagogue, was also pillaged by the Nazis, and local residents before the war, and it was turned into a granary for animal feed. I have never been a religious person — but here, angrily, I decided to embark on what became a protracted battle. As a member of the Knesset, in dozens of long letters to members of parliament in what was then West Germany and with the help of Erich Lehman (one of my longtime employees), I called upon the village council of Kippenheim to renovate the building so that it could reclaim its honor. I also provided some money for the initial restoration work. The authorities in the region and the Kippenheim village council were not enthusiastic; they even became angry. But the persistent pressure — twelve years of heated correspondence and numerous trips — finally paid off.
My demand received publicity in the local media, and the pressures there intensified — especially among young Germans, who felt driven by their sense of shame. In the end, the authorities acquired the building and renovated its exterior with typical German precision. It is now recognized as a preserved memorial.
Father was a tough and hardy man. He lost his older brother, Siegfried, in World War I, and he himself lost a leg in the fighting near Verdun in France and was decorated with the Iron Cross for bravery in the German Army.
Years after his death, we found Father's diary outlining his experiences in the war: the march to France via Belgium, his injury and the amputation of his leg while in French captivity. He wrote most of the diary at the military field hospital in Ettlingen. My daughter Ruti and my grandson Erez translated it into Hebrew. Father wrote,
Many around me are wounded, one has his whole left cheek hanging down in rags, another has a stomach wound, everyone is shouting but only the medic can help because the crisis of the attack had arrived! Our company commander pops up, praises us for holding out so bravely, since the 12th Company next to us had already retreated! ... Here was the enemy break-in point, and this was to be held if we were to hold the section of the trench. ... It went on like this for some time longer, our ammunition was used up and only 2 men were left unwounded, one of them [being] myself.
It might have been 5 o'clock already, we could no longer count on reinforcements, we were surrounded on all sides and attacked with hand grenades when we both retired to the nearby medical shelter, where our comrades were lying with a few medics. It still took some time before the Frenchman dared to come near, his hand grenades were already crashing in front of the shelter, suddenly one falls down the trench steps and explodes with unspeakable noise! ... Soon there is a second — a third — I drop to my knees and feel the warm blood dripping down my left knee! I gather my utmost willpower and nimbly hurry up the steps, straight into the arms of the furious Frenchman!
Three [to] four hold a pistol to my head, direct me from one end to the other ... then an older French officer ran up ... and I beg him to save me for my dear parents. He ... handed me over to another, who finally brought me through the German barrage back into the valley to the French battalion shelter. And now began for me the hardest time of my life so far! In captivity!
Ten days later a French doctor recommended amputating Father's wounded leg. Father relates that the thought put him through "a terribly hard mental struggle," but that after the surgery was performed he was "happy to feel a weakening of the unspeakable pains."
For the rest of his life Father walked with a wooden leg, which did not deter him from conducting himself as a regular person, without demanding anything of others because of his disability. He was good at riding a bicycle with his one leg, even during his old age. If he had pains, he did not talk about them. He always kept everything inside him. All of the extended family greatly admired Father as a man of integrity. He was intelligent, an autodidact, a lover of books, someone who was interested in all subjects, and a person of uncompromising principles.
But he and I did not get along very well. I was stubborn and spiteful. He was strict and punishing, and I would respond by doing the opposite of what he asked. When Mother baked a cake for my eighth birthday, I ate a piece of it before the birthday party. I received a spanking and a severe scolding. Thereafter, prior to each of my birthday parties, the traditional cake would vanish from the table as if by magic. Everyone knew who did this — but no one said a word to me. If they punished me, I would punish them back — for example, refusing to go with them on a visit. There were constant clashes between Father and me. Mother, who was softer, always tried to mediate. "You have a stupid face, child," she affectionately told me once. "Protect it."
When the trouble I made for my parents would become intolerable, they would send me to Aunt Fanne, my mother's sister. Mother had five sisters and four brothers; most of them lived nearby.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Habit of Labor"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Stef Wertheimer.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
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Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT,
DEDICATION,
EPIGRAPH,
EDITOR'S FOREWORD,
PREFACE,
AUTHOR'S NOTE,
1. Childhood,
2. Adolescence, Bahrain, and the Palmach,
3. Independence,
4. A Vision for Education,
5. Branching Out to Turbine Blades,
6. Home,
7. Public Service,
8. Founding a Village,
9. The Great Breakthrough,
10. Industrial Parks: A Way to Ensure the Future,
11. On Entrepreneurship,
12. Life's Unexpected Turns,
13. Expanding Markets,
14. A New Kind of Export: The Tefen Model,
15. A New Marshall Plan for Industrialization of the Middle East,
16. The Deal,
17. Summing Up, and a Look to the Future,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
TIMELINE,
LIST OF PRIZES, AWARDS, AND HONORARY DEGREES,
INDEX,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR,
What People are Saying About This
“There’s no better way to explain the miracle of Israel than to examine the amazing life of Stef Wertheimer.” —Warren Buffett