In 1920, 17-year-old Abba Shoubin set out from Riga, Latvia, and headed toward Palestine. He crossed Russia and Romania and Bulgaria and Turkey. Then he headed south into Syria and Lebanon. Counting all distance, including wandering here and there along the way, the journey was about 3,000 miles. Most of it, Shoubin walked.
He was Shoshana Cardin’s father. He must have passed along some of his strength and tenacity to his daughter. She is one of the Baltimore Jewish community’s great ladies, and one of the world’s.
In her brand new autobiography, “Shoshana: Memoirs of Shoshana Shoubin Cardin,” there are photographs of her with a few fellow travelers on her life’s journey: Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, Pope John Paul and Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, Margaret Thatcher and Henry Kissinger, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, Ronald Reagan and Elie Wiesel.
There’s also a dramatic shot of Cardin donning a gas mask as Israel came under attack at the outbreak of the 1991 Gulf War.
She’s gone much further than the 3,000 miles her father traveled, though it hasn’t been on foot. And her new book, modest, candid, understated, charts a steady course from Palestine, where she was born, to Baltimore, where she was raised and made her name over the past eight decades, to the far reaches of the world.
Across those years, Cardin has been a political activist and philanthropist and feminist. She was the first woman to head numerous international service organizations. She helped convince Mikhail Gorbachev to denounce Russian anti-Semitism. She’s been a champion of Soviet Jewry, and of human rights around the globe.
She is remarkably modest and matter-of-fact in her recounting of such a remarkable life.
She wasn’t supposed to come here. Cardin’s parents were determined to live in Palestine, but her mother needed medical care. They came to Baltimore for “a temporary trip” that lasted the rest of their lives, and started in a modest apartment in the 1700 block of East Baltimore Street, while her father taught Hebrew school in the neighborhood and “tried selling cheese-slicing machines” on the side.
Later, when he made a little money, he was able to buy the Pic move theater, in Southwest Baltimore. “Whenever receipts grew thin,” Cardin writes, “and we needed to sell more tickets, we ran ‘King Kong,’ and people lined up around the block.”
With her mother frequently sick – illnesses probably traced to malnourishment during her childhood years – and with another child arriving, it fell to Shoshana while still in elementary school to “develop a precocious maturity. My father would say to me, ‘It’s up to the two of us.’
“I had to help run our household,” Cardin writes. “I learned important things, developing a sense of independence and to treat everyone with respect. That was drummed into me: respect. I was taught that no matter what other adults said, no matter what they asked, I could not lose my calm.”
The lesson stayed with her as she met with some of the world’s great leaders, not all of whom viewed the world the way she did.
But Cardin evokes more than strict lessons learned in her years in East Baltimore. There’s considerable “nurturing warmth” and good cheer.
“We lived in a neighborhood of immigrant families,” she writes. “All of us were adjusting to America; all of us were struggling to make ends meet.”
She remembers the old Jewish Educational Alliance and Hendler’s Creamery and Smelkinson’s Dairy, all in her neighborhood. She remembers “the pungent aroma of baking rye bread filling the air, and the delicatessens were always packed with people, and market stalls with big wooden barrels of pickles floating in brine, and crates piled high with vividly colored fruits and vegetables, and fresh fish.”
But, most of all, she remembers the mix of people: some still clinging to the fashions of the old world, some eagerly embracing the new. And all of them “haggling, chatting, gossiping, and debating – and I came to understand that not everybody acts the same way, and not everybody believes the same things.”
Again, the lessons served her well.
When she was 13, new neighbors arrived: Two boys from Germany whose parents “wanted to keep their children safe but were themselves unable to leave.” Hitler’s night of terror had begun. Cardin remembers evenings on the front porch, hearing horror stories.
By now, she belonged to a Zionist youth group, Habonim. She and another member were chosen to do Sunday morning broadcasts about the troubles in Europe, and the need for a Jewish state. It was the beginning of a lifelong Cardin crusade for human rights.
Edited by Karen Falk, curator of the Jewish Museum of Maryland (and available through the museum), Cardin’s memoir should inspire a new generation of those committed to human rights.
