The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (25 page)

Although he punishes history’s first murder severely, God declares that anyone who kills Cain will be avenged sevenfold. Here again, the medieval and modern commentators offer radically different interpretations of the text. The crux is the nature of the punishment of those who would kill Cain, expressed in the word
shiv’ahthayim
, which literally means “sevenfold.” Rashi once again goes to great lengths to get around the most natural reading of the verse; instead, he wants us to read it as being made up of two discrete elements. The first, he insists, is the half-sentence “Therefore, whoever slays Cain…!” Adducing
syntactical parallels from elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, Rashi insists that this half-sentence be read as an implied but unspecific threat against anyone who might be tempted to harm history’s first murderer: “This is one of the verses which cut short their words,” he argues, “and made an allusion, but did not explain. ‘Therefore, whoever slays Cain’ expresses a threat—‘So shall be done to him!’ ‘Such and such is his punishment!’ But did not specify his punishment.”

This manipulation of the text leaves Rashi with a two-word fragment,
shiv’ahthayim yuqqâm
, “will suffer vengeance sevenfold.” Rashi insists, however, that the implied subject of this statement is not, as we may be tempted to think, whoever might be tempted to slay Cain, but rather Cain himself. What God is saying here, according to Rashi, is, “I do not wish to take vengeance from Cain now. At the end of seven generations I take My vengeance from him, for Lamech will arise from among his children’s children and slay him”—as indeed happens in Genesis 4:23.

Why is Rashi so eager to avoid a reading of the text that would suggest that a killer of Cain would be punished “sevenfold”—would, in other words, suffer seven times as much pain as the pain that he inflicted? (It is a question we are tempted to ask all the more since Friedman calmly accepts the more natural reading of this verse, as his translation indicates [“Therefore: anyone who kills Cain, he’ll be avenged sevenfold”] and, even more, as the lack of any comment on his part seems to suggest.) A footnote to my translation of Rashi’s commentary on this verse tells us why: “[T]he verse does not mean that God will punish him seven times as much as he deserves, for God is just and does not punish unfairly.” As I read this, it occurs to me that perhaps the discrepancy between Rashi’s and Friedman’s approach stems from the difference between the eleventh and the twentieth centuries. I wonder if it is easier for us than it was for Rashi to imagine that maybe, after all, God could punish unfairly.

T
HE SIN BETWEEN
brothers is now burned into our family story permanently, the recurrent theme of the past grafted, now, onto the future. On August 11, 2002, almost exactly a year to the day after we entered Bolechow, and precisely sixty years after the mechanism that would end up destroying my grandfather’s brother and his family was set in motion, my sister, Jennifer, was married. As I have said, she is the only one of my siblings to have married a Jew. It is, of course, purely a coincidence—but a poetic one, nonetheless, one that couldn’t be any more artistic if you’d made it up, had created it as a symbol for the fiction you were writing—that the family name of the man she married is
Abel
.

T
HE STREAM OF
T
IME, IRRESISTIBLE, EVER MOVING, CARRIES OFF AND BEARS AWAY ALL THINGS THAT COME TO BIRTH AND PLUNGES THEM INTO UTTER DARKNESS, BOTH DEEDS OF NO ACCOUNT AND DEEDS WHICH ARE MIGHTY AND WORTHY OF COMMEMORATION….
N
EVERTHELESS, THE SCIENCE OF
H
ISTORY IS A GREAT BULWARK AGAINST THIS STREAM OF
T
IME; IN A WAY IT CHECKS THIS IRRESISTIBLE FLOOD, IT HOLDS IN A TIGHT GRASP WHATEVER IT CAN SEIZE FLOATING ON THE SURFACE AND WILL NOT ALLOW IT TO SLIP AWAY INTO THE DEPTHS OF
O
BLIVION.

     I…

Anna Comnena,
The Alexiad

A peculiar if structurally satisfying aspect of
parashat Bereishit
is that this particular portion of Genesis, which begins with an account of Creation, concludes with God’s decision to destroy much of what he’d invented at the beginning of the story. His dissatisfaction with humankind in particular starts out innocuously enough—the first sign is his decision to drastically limit the span of a human life, from nearly 1,000 years to a mere 120—but ends dramatically, with the deity’s realization that the proliferation of the race itself has led to a proportional increase of vice and sin. “I regret that I made them,” God says; “He regretted that He made them,” the narrative echoes. This decision, taken at the end of
Bereishit
, is what sets the action of the next weekly reading,
parashat Noach
, in motion.
Noach,
the story of the Flood, is among the first sustained attempts in literature to present an image of what the total annihilation of a world might look like.

I say “total annihilation,” although to be strictly accurate the Hebrew word that God uses to describe his plans for mankind and all land-based life-forms—sea creatures are, interestingly, exempt—is more nuanced. What God says he plans to do to his own Creation is that he’ll “dissolve” it:
ehm’cheh
. Rashi anticipates confusion on the part of the reader who, he knows, expects some more conventional verb, such as “destroy” or “annihilate.” (Friedman translates the word as “wipe out” without any comment, but he has much of interest to say about the elaborate and beautiful wordplay on the strong root-letters of Noah’s name, N and H, that is threaded throughout the Flood narrative:
Noah masa’hen
, “Noah found favor”;
wayyinnahem
, “he regretted”;
nihamtî
, “I regret”;
wattanah
, “and the ark rested”; and so forth.) The medieval French commentator
reminds us that since humans were made of earth, God’s act of dissolution, which will take the form of a terrible deluge that pours from the seas and falls from the skies, is akin to pouring water on figures of dried mud. When I read Rashi’s remark, it occurred to me that, as any child who has played in the mud knows, water is necessary to the creation of such figures, too; Rashi’s observation about the watery means of God’s annihilation of mankind thus returns us to the moment of Creation—a nice complementarity.

This subtle linkage between opposites—creation, destruction—recurs throughout
Noach
. For instance, just as the destruction narrated in
Noach
is linked to the prior act of creation described in
Bereishit
by the medium of earth (or, so to speak, mud), a further detail in the Flood narrative suggests, in turn, that we should see a link between the enormous destruction caused by the Flood and the next act of “creation”—that is, the new beginning of life, among the few survivors, that follows the Flood and reestablishes humankind on earth. For we are told in various midrashic commentaries that the waters of the Flood, the torrents that obliterated all living things from the face of Creation, were hot and sulfurous; but we are told in the Torah itself, at the beginning of
Noach
, that the ark, the vehicle of rescue and redemption from those sulfurous torrents, was made of a wood known as
gopher
—a name, Rashi comments, derived from
gaf’riyth
, “sulfur.” There is, therefore, a complex linkage between acts of creation, acts of drestruction, and acts of revival in Genesis, suggesting that these distinct and seemingly opposed acts are, in fact, coiled in an infinite and intricate loop.

This interconnectedness suggests in turn another, larger point that the text wants us to be aware of. For if
Noach
were merely a tale of total annihilation—destruction without any survivors, without any new “creation”—it would soon lose our interest: it’s the existence of those very few survivors that helps us, ironically, to appreciate the scope of destruction. Conversely, to appreciate the preciousness of the lives that were saved, it is necessary to have a thorough appreciation of the horror from which they were so miraculously preserved.

D
EPENDING ON HOW
you want to think about it, on how anxious you are about losing time, the trip from New York City to Australia takes either twenty-two hours or the better part of three days.

The journey is divided into two legs. The first of these, according to the stewardess on the Qantas 747 that took me and Matt to Sydney in March 2003 to meet Jack Greene and the other Bolechowers there, is the “short flight,” although it constitutes what most people would think of as a significant journey in itself. We flew out of New York at 6:45 in the evening on the nineteenth, the day a war began—although, because we were in the air for so long, through the night on which the ultimatum expired and for most of the next day, too, we couldn’t be
sure we were at war until a day and a half later—and then made our way across the continent, to Los Angeles. This took about five and a half hours. Then there was a stopover of about an hour’s duration in L.A., during which the plane had to receive a fresh crew because of, we were told, “industry regulations”: no single crew, a stewardess explained, is permitted to work through both legs of the flight—to work, in other words, for the entire length of time we were going to be flying. This information lent an air of emergency to the proceedings.

Anyway, after we received our fresh crew, we all trundled back onto the plane, groggy and resentful, and then took off again. For the next sixteen hours, there was nothing beneath us but the Pacific Ocean. I had flown many times over the Atlantic, and had never really thought much about the size of oceans until I went around the world, to Australia, to meet five elderly Jews who had once lived in Bolechow and now lived there, five of what turned out to be twelve people still living who had once known Shmiel Jäger and his family, and who could tell me things about them. The Atlantic I had grown used to, and had come, I suppose, to seem manageable. The Pacific is vast.

It is during the second leg of this long flight that you are most likely to become disoriented with respect to time. For the better part of a day there is nothing beneath you but water, indistinct and undifferentiated; the neutral quality of what you are able to see, when you look out of your window, reflects the quality of the time you are passing as you fly, which also is indistinct and undifferentiated. It is time that has no quality at all. If you make this journey, a journey I had not imagined I would ever make, the extremely pleasant Qantas stewards and stewardesses will bring you your meals from time to time and, handing you a tray with some steaming sealed dishes on it, will tell you that it is breakfast, say, or dinner; but after a while it’s difficult to tell whether these evenly spaced mealtimes are meant to correspond to those in the time zone you flew out of, or those over which you are flying, or perhaps some totally abstract, “virtual” time zone that exists in, and is particular to, the plane alone but nowhere else. In the end you must take their word for it, because you have no real sense of what time it really might be.

A
S
I
SAT
in this plane, looking out the window and occasionally flipping through a dire-looking pamphlet about how to avoid something called “vascular thrombosis,” a circulatory crisis that can occur if you spend too long in a commercial jetliner’s pressurized cabin—which, of course, is precisely what Matt and I were doing—as I sat in this plane, hour after hour, I realized that
the way in which the meals on board the plane had made me aware of a certain quality of time (or lack of quality) was reminding me of something from my childhood, something that had similarly connected mealtimes and the agonizing passage of bland hours.

As I have said, my mother grew up in an Orthodox household, ruled over by her grand and domineering father, in whose elaborate observance of all the various holidays his wife, my grandmother Gerty (or, depending on who was addressing her, and under what circumstances,
Golda
), was an expert accomplice, cooking for him the superb and strictly kosher meals for which she was justifiably “famous,” in the tiny world that was her apartment building in the Bronx, even if my grandfather took pleasure in withholding the acclaim that everyone else gave her. (
So, how is it, Aby?
she would anxiously ask him after serving him a bowl of her soup, soups being her specialty; and he would answer,
Soft!
) She made her famous soups, my grandmother did, and her
kneydlach
and
latkes
and, every Hanukkah, her
matzo brei,
crisp on the outside and mushy within, dusted with confectioners’ sugar, and kept a kosher house. Scrupulously, Nana kept the
fleyschadikh
dishes, the dishes reserved for meals of meat, separate from the
milkhadikh
dishes, those that were reserved for dairy meals. Even the dish towels had to be kept strictly apart: one set (my mother has told me) bearing blue stripes, the other red. With equal scrupulousness, she strictly segregated from both of those sets of dishes the
Peysadikh
dishes, the Passover service, an ornate Bavarian service the colors of whose long-discontinued pattern (“Memphis”), even more than the images themselves (a stylized phoenix, perched atop a bower of orientalizing blossoms, grandly lofting one wing heavenward from the rim of each dinner plate, salad plate, bread plate, soup bowl, covered butter dish, soup tureen, creamer, sugar bowl, gravy boat), summon to mind another era entirely. For who now, really, cares to eat off such lavenders, citrines, turquoises, ivories, teals, oranges?

Hence my mother’s family was, as they would have said,
frum,
deeply religious. But my father’s family, as I have also mentioned, was just as profoundly irreligious. It was because my father grew up in a household that was in many ways the diametric opposite of the one in which my mother was raised, a household unbound by traditions, by Judaism, by Europe, that we did not observe the Jewish holidays when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s to the extent that my mother had done when she was growing up in the 1930s and 1940s. Yom Kippur, however, was an exception. This had less to do with the august status of this holiest of holy days on the Jewish calendar than with the fact that it was the only Jewish holiday that had any intellectual or (as I always suspect) aes
thetic appeal to my father, who is after all a scientist, a person who likes the idea of rigor, of absolutes, even of hardship. He enjoyed the self-denial, the abnegation of Yom Kippur. And so it was that every year, although he almost never set foot in the tiny, strange synagogue to which my mother took me and my brothers and sister over the years, the synagogue where, one day as she and I were walking into the Yizkor, or Memorial, service that comes toward the close of the Yom Kippur observances, she told me that her uncle Shmiel had had four beautiful daughters who had been raped before they were all killed by the Nazis—although my father never set foot in this place for Yom Kippur services, he always strictly fasted. He would, in fact, keep a careful eye on the clock to make sure that no one broke fast until precisely twenty-four hours had elapsed.

Most of those anguishingly slow-moving twenty-four hours, I should admit, were not usually spent by any of us, including my mother, in the little synagogue we went to. And yet because of some obscure flavor of uncanniness and, slightly, of scariness that clung to this one day of the year in our family (very likely because of the stories about it that my grandfather liked to tell, such as the one about the woodcutter), the twenty-four hours of fasting were, it was understood, not to be spent doing anything “frivolous.” Playing with toys was considered frivolous; so was watching TV. Go
read,
do something
serious,
my mother would tell us, absentmindedly, as she checked, with supreme self-control (it seemed to me then) the pans of roasting lamb or chicken, the potatoes, the vast, hotel-sized electric coffee urn that everyone pretended to be shocked by but secretly enjoyed, when they saw it churning away (“so many people this year!”), the sweet and savory noodle casseroles or
kugels,
the platters of smoked salmon and sable and whitefish that awaited the onslaught of the thirty or forty or so guests who, each year, would descend on my parents’ small split-level house for the breaking of a fast that most, but not all, of the guests kept. (An aunt whom I loved, petite, redheaded, foulmouthed, and pretty in, everyone used to say, a
goyish
way, would sit on my parents’ living room sofa and say,
I’m just having some coffee, because coffee doesn’t count!
) So we children would go do serious things. But between not being able to eat and not being able to watch our regular after-school TV programs, which were the most reliable markers of time when I was a kid, the day of the fast, that one day of the year, felt impossibly long, without any character at all except a feeling of anticipation, a day stripped of all the recognizable features that on every other day made, and make, the passage of time bearable.