Michtom was born Moshe Charmatz, in a shtetl in what is now Belarus. To help him dodge conscription by the Russian Army, his family announced that he had died of typhoid and pretended to bury him while he sneaked out of the village to start a new life. He trained as a rabbi and, more practically, as a machinist before coming to the United States, in 1888, at the age of eighteen. Berryman’s cartoon struck a chord with him. Apparently, the President of his adopted country treated wild beasts better than the tsar treated the Jews. It seems to have been patriotic, not commercial, instinct that led him to ask his wife, Rose, to sew a version of what he called Teddy’s Bear, which she did using scraps of mohair and wood shavings from the candy shop’s basement.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter