The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (6 page)

I must admit that I never got beyond
parashat Vayeira
in my Jewish home-schooling program. But of course I know the ending of the five books I started to read, twenty years ago: how Joseph, the favored descendant of Abram, was rejected by his brothers, was abandoned and ultimately led off into Egypt, where, eventually, his tribe prospered—although Egypt was, in the end, to become the land from which this family, that tribe, would make its long, arduous, unimaginable journey back to a “home” that, since none of them actually knew it, must not have felt like home at all.

As I have said, the first thing that happens in
parashat Bereishit
is not, as many think, that God created the heavens and the earth, but rather that at the
beginning
of his creation of the heavens and the earth, when everything had been a stupefying void, he said, “Let there be light.” This is, in fact, the first act of creation that we hear about in
Bereishit
. But what is interesting to me is that every creative act that follows—light and dark, night and day, dry land and oceans, plants and animals, and finally man from
dust—is described as an act of separation. What did God do when he saw that the light was “good”? He separated it from the darkness, and then proceeded to go on separating until the component parts of the cosmos assumed their pleasing and rightful order.

Rashi devotes relatively little space to this fact, and his concerns are essentially the moral ramifications of this initial separation of light from darkness: “According to its simple meaning,” he writes of God’s separation of light from darkness, “explain it as follows: He saw that it is good, and it is not proper for it and the darkness to be functioning in a jumble, so He assigned to this one its sphere during the day, and to this one its sphere during the night.” And why does God do this? Because light, as Rashi says, “does not deserve that the wicked use it, and He set it aside for the righteous, to [be used by them in] the future.” The moral implications of being able to “separate” in this way come to a narratively satisfying conclusion, of course, at the end of Genesis, chapter 3, which is the culmination of the story of Creation: the story of Adam and Eve and their eating of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The story begins with Creation, which as we’ve seen is the story of acts of distinguishing one thing from another; it ends by alluding to the most crucial distinction of all, the distinction between Good and Bad, a distinction that becomes apprehensible to humans only by eating of the Tree of Knowledge, a tree about which the Torah tells us that it was (like light) “good,” that it was a “delight to the eyes” of Eve, and that it was “desirable for comprehension,” and it was because of this goodness, this delightfulness, this desirability that Eve ate of it.

I want to linger for a moment by this strange Tree, whose fruit, though so good, was, as we know, to prove poisonous to mankind; for the eating of it is what, according to
Bereishit
, caused humans to be expelled from Paradise, to be forced, ultimately, to experience death. But it is the pleasure and delight of the Tree of Knowledge that I want to explore briefly, because the connections, in
Bereishit
, between creativity, distinguishing, knowledge, and pleasure are, for me, utterly natural. As a child, I already had an oddly scholarly bent: the desire both to know and to order what I knew. This, I have no doubt, was the by-product, or perhaps I should say the fruit, of my father’s intellectual gifts—he is a scientist—and my mother’s passion for order, the taste for rigorous neatness and organization that she would only half-jokingly attribute to her “German blood.” It’s my German blood, she would say, the once-blond product of families that had fully German—not German-Jewish—names, names like Jäger and Mittelmark (the latter, as I have learned, being the name of a county in Prussia); she would say this, sometimes with a laugh and sometimes not, whenever she remade a sloppy bed or reorganized a shelf full of our schoolbooks or tried to impose order on things that properly belonged to my father’s somewhat sloppier sphere of influence, with sometimes comical results, as for instance when she finally gathered together all of the various broken objects, toys and
light fixtures and small gadgets, that he had laconically promised to fix but had never managed to get around to, and put all these orphaned objects in a box that, using a heavy navy blue Magic Marker, she labeled, in her bold, loping handwriting,
THINGS TO BE FIXED
ALEVAY
—“
alevay
” being the Jewish word that expresses a sort of hopeless, battered optimism: “it should only happen (but it won’t).”

So my father loved knowing things, and my mother loved organizing things, and perhaps this is why I, at an early age, discovered in myself an acute pleasure in organizing knowledge. It wasn’t merely reading about (say) the ancient Egyptians and, later, the Greeks and Romans, about archaeology and the Romanovs and Fabergé eggs that gave me pleasure; the pleasure lay, more specifically, in the organization of the knowledge I was slowly accumulating, in the making and memorizing of lists of numbered dynasties and vocabulary charts and hieroglyphic tables and chronologies of numbered Catherines and Nicholases and Alexanders. This, I now realize, was the first expression of an impulse that is, ultimately, the same as the one that drives a person to write—to impose order on a chaos of facts by assembling them into a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

If an early, though admittedly eccentric, pleasure of mine lay in the ordering of hitherto messy masses of information—a combination of my father’s and my mother’s natures—then it was also true that I felt a kind of pain, a form of anxiety even, when confronted by masses of information that seemed resistant to organization.

I
T WAS MY
bar mitzvah, at any rate, my bar mitzvah that Saturday afternoon when my voice so excruciatingly cracked, the bar mitzvah that was the culmination of the spotty Jewish education I’d had, that made me curious about my Jewish family, made me begin to ask questions. Naturally I’d always been curious: How could I not, I whose face reminded certain people of someone long dead? But the fervent interest in Jewish genealogy, which became a hobby and, much later, almost an obsession, began on that April day. This, I have to add, had nothing to do with the ceremony itself, with the ritual for which I’d been preparing for so long; it was, rather, the reception at my parents’ house that was the beginning of everything. For as I was passed from relative to relative to be kissed and slapped on the back and congratulated, the confused mass of unknown and similar-looking faces bothered me, and I began to wonder how it was I came to be related to all those people, to the Idas and Trudys and Juliuses and Sylvias and Hildas, to the names Sobel and Rechtschaffen and Feit and Stark and Birnbaum and Hench. I began to wonder just who they
were, what their connection to me could possibly be, and it was because I didn’t like being confronted with this undifferentiated mass of relations, was irritated by the mess, that I thereafter devoted hours and weeks and years to researching my family tree, to clarifying the relationships and ordering the branches and sub-branches of genetic connection, to organizing the information I eventually gathered on index cards and charts and in folders. It is of course silly to think that anybody “becomes” a man at the age of thirteen, but it is probably fair to say that, however inadvertently, my bar mitzvah made me more aware of what it was to be Jewish than any comprehension of the words I was saying, that day in April 1973, could have done.

And so the questions I began to ask, immediately following my bar mitzvah, were about not just the mysterious Shmiel, but about all of them. These questions led me, at first, to write letters to the relatives who were, in 1973, still alive—a number that was already far smaller than it had been six or seven or eight years earlier, when I’d go with my family to Miami Beach. I would write to these old relatives in Queens and Miami and Chicago and Haifa, and sometimes the replies frustrated and confused me. (
I’m not telling you the exact date I was born,
my grandfather’s unhappy sister Sylvia told me one afternoon in 1974 over the phone,
because it would have been better if I’d never been born
.) But more often, these elderly people were gratified that someone so young was interested in something so old, and they answered eagerly and told me whatever they knew in reply to my questions. My father’s aunt Pauline, for instance (always “Aunt Pauly”), banged out nearly a hundred letters on her rickety old Underwood between June 1973, when I first shyly wrote to her, and June 1985, when her formidable brain, which had furnished me with so many crisp and critical details about my father’s side of the family (
I also seem to remember someone saying the name of a town called
…), collapsed on itself. By the end, the
a
’s and
o
’s and
e
’s of her ancient manual typewriter were completely indistinguishable, a parallel, maybe, for what was taking place in the confused and hardening tissues to which I owed so much.

Or there was my great-aunt Miriam in Haifa, the wife of my grandfather’s brother Itzhak, the woman who, because of her lusty Zionism, had persuaded her husband that, despite the fact that their butcher business was prospering so greatly, the future of Jewry lay in Palestine, which is why she and he and their two small children escaped the fate that swallowed Shmiel and the others. I came to write often to her, and she had much to say on the subject of Bolechow as it once had been, before she left it. I would wel
come the sight of her flimsy aerograms with their exotic Israeli stamps, the tissue-thin blue paper bearing a distinctive, old-fashioned European script written in blue ballpoint pen and covering every centimeter of each flap of the weightless document. From an English whose syntax and spelling were as difficult for me to decipher as her crabbed handwriting was, I learned a lot, the pleasant life of the old town, the flattering things her father used to say about my great-grandfather, Elkune Jäger; the two men, she wrote, had belonged to the same social club in Bolechow, a detail (club?) that forced me to reassess what I thought I knew about life in little Galician towns at the turn of the century. I was particularly interested to know about my great-grandfather, since by that time I was old enough to understand that family history could be more than just tables and charts, could in fact help explain how people—my grandfather, say—became who they were. About Elkune she wrote:

It took me some time to realize that
cytycions
was
citizens
.
Rachel,
I realized with a thrill, was my grandfather’s older sister, the one who’d died
a week before her wedding,
died because, I later learned, she too had had a bad heart.

Because I knew that Miriam and her husband had remained in Bolechow until the 1930s, I was emboldened to ask her about Shmiel, too. I remember the dark thrill when I wrote the letter in which I asked her what exactly had happened to them, a letter I did not tell my grandfather about. But on this subject Aunt Miriam was more tentative, and could only give me the following, in an aerogram dated January 20, 1975:

If this turned out to be not quite true, as she herself (as I now see) was warning me might be the case, it was hardly her fault. She was only repeating what she had heard.

Somewhat later, when I had learned not to expect too much from the responses, and was beginning to pride myself on being an efficient researcher, on having developed a certain method, I began to write, too, to institutions and agencies, the kind of letters in which you were instructed to enclose “SSAE”s, letters to the New York City archives containing money orders in payment for official copies of birth or death certificates (five dollars each, then), to cemeteries (a favorite) with names like Mount Zion and Mount Judah (“the gravesite reserved for Mina Spieler remains unclaimed at this time”), to places with names like The Hebrew Orphan Asylum, to grim-sounding archives with acronyms like AGAD in countries that were, then, blocked by the Iron Curtain, and from whom you never heard back although you’d enclosed the international postal money order; questions that led me, two decades later, to more sophisticated tools. Now there were Internet searches on genealogy Web sites, on the Social Security Death Index and on genealogy.com and jewishgen.org, on the Ellis Island database, which is where I learned the precise date of Shmiel’s arrival in 1913 in New York City, a place he decided wasn’t lucky for him; now there were FamilyFinder boards; now I had lengthy correspondences with total strangers, unimaginably different from those toil-some aerogram exchanges I’d pursued when I was in my teens, e-mail queries to people in California and Colorado and Wales and Denmark that promised total fluency and complete instantaneity. These, finally, led me to travel, over the course of a year, to a dozen cities from Sydney to Copenhagen to Beer Sheva, to embark on airplanes and ferries and trains packed with Jewish boys and girls in uniforms with guns strapped to their narrow bodies; to go, in the end, to Bolechow itself and there talk to the few remaining people who had seen what had been done.