The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (26 page)

It was exactly that feeling, that association between meals and unbearable ennui—brought on, in the case of our trip to Australia, by a surfeit rather than
a dearth of food—that came to mind as I sat on the plane that was taking us to the other side of the world.

The trip from New York to Sydney takes twenty-two featureless hours, then. But of course when you fly to Australia from New York City you are, in a way, making a much longer trip. We left on a Wednesday in the early evening; but because of the change in time zones, because, when you fly from New York to Los Angeles and then across the Pacific, you are crossing the international date line, we arrived late on Friday morning. And so when you make this trip, as Matt and I did, that March of 2003, in order to recuperate a tiny fragment of the past, you are actually, literally, losing time: a Thursday of your life simply disappears. And there is something else, too. When you make this trip, you are flying from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere, and so in a way you lose much vaster stretches of time. We left New York as spring was beginning, and arrived in Sydney at the onset of autumn.

So what did we lose, when we flew to meet Jack Greene, as he insisted we should that day exactly a year earlier when he and I talked about Bolechow, about the day in October 1941 when my mother’s cousin Ruchele had gone for a walk and never come back? What did we lose? It depends: a day, three days, six months.

L
IKE MANY GRANDCHILDREN
of immigrants, I grew up listening to stories of strange and epic journeys.

There was the story of my father’s father, a small, slightly shrunken and taciturn man, bald like my father, who had once been an electrician and who,
every now and then, would cry out, as we ran up and down the stairs of my parents’ house when he and my grandmother Kay were visiting, that we had to
take it easy, fellas!
because we were
bothering the wiring!
; a man who had been (we were always told, so that the phrase resounded in my mind long afterward like a slogan, or a chapter title)
born on the boat,
the boat that had carried the Mendelsohns from Riga to New York at some point in the 1890s. And not only that: my father’s father had always insisted that he had had a twin who’d died in infancy. But precisely when that birth, that voyage had taken place, or what the other twin’s name had been, or what boat it was, no one ever seems to have known, or cared enough about to remember: not my father, not his older brother to whom, for a long time while we were growing up, he was on such friendly terms, not the other brother, with whom, for such a long time, he had nothing to do, but to whom, much later, he once again grew close, before the polio returned, one last time, to end that tortured conversation permanently. My father’s family always seemed to me to be a family of silences, and what little I was able, in time, to learn of them helped to explain why: my grandfather’s father, the violinmaker who, because he could not sell enough violins, made shoes as well, and earned too little from that, too; the mother who would die at thirty-four, exhausted from her ten pregnancies, three of which resulted in twins; the numerous siblings who never grew up, felled in infancy or childhood or adolescence by this or that illness, by tuberculosis, by the great Spanish flu epidemic in 1918, leaving my grandfather alone to grow to adulthood, an adulthood in which he preferred never to talk about that depleted past. A family, then, raised in silences, of which those grim, empty stretches between brothers, silences that lasted decades, were just the most extreme examples.

Because they were so quiet for so long—because they lived in their American present rather than their European past—there are, now, fewer stories to tell about them. It was only by accident that I learned, because I happened to be sitting unnoticed under the willow tree in my parents’ backyard one day in 1972 while my father’s parents were up from Miami Beach on a visit, that my grandfather Al had had a wife before he married my grandmother Kay, and that our family existed only because this first wife had died in the Spanish flu epidemic; and indeed that my father in fact had a much older half brother to whom (for reasons I was successful in excavating only much later, while my grandfather Al was dying) my father had not spoken since this lost half-uncle had left home, decades earlier. Once again I was reminded that our line was the result of an accident, an untimely death; once again I was put in mind of the Hebrew Bible’s preference for second wives, for younger sons. Why, I
thought at the time, had we never heard this dramatic tale before? But then, this same grandfather had never thought to mention to anyone, even after my sister, Jen, was born in 1968, that among his many dead siblings there had been a girl called Jenny.

When I was growing up, I would look at my father’s father, and then look at my mother’s father, and the contrast between them was responsible for forming, in my childish mind, a kind of list. In one column there was this: Jaegers, Jewishness, Europe, languages, stories. In the other there was this: Mendelsohns, atheists, America, English, silence. I would compare and contrast these columns, when I was much younger, and even then I would wonder what kind of present you could possibly have without knowing the stories of your past.

T
HERE WERE OTHER
stories of difficult journeys in my family. My mother’s mother was the only one of my grandparents who was born in the United States, but her mother, my great-grandmother Yetta, was not. Yetta Cushman (or
Kutschmann
or
Kuschman,
depending on which documents you unearth), who in the only extant photograph of her, taken shortly before her untimely death in the summer of 1936—while sewing the neck of a chicken she pricked her finger, and died days later of blood poisoning, which was the source of the terrible emotional shock on which my mother’s father thereafter blamed the onset of his young wife’s diabetes—stares forlornly out at you, an exceedingly plain, almost cross-eyed woman of indeterminate age. Yetta, sometimes Etta, is the relative for whom my brother Eric is named. She was Russian. RUSSIA, it says on her death certificate, under COUNTRY OF ORIGIN, although neither RUSSIA nor COUNTRY OF ORIGIN can, it must be said, suggest the nature of or reasons for her awful emigration, about which I eventually heard from this exhausted and homely woman’s son-in-law, my grandfather, a story that is, for someone of my generation and background, simply impossible to imagine.

What did my grandfather tell me? He told me that his mother-in-law, for whom I gathered he had no particular fondness but no particular antipathy, either (
You know,
he said to me one day with a little shrug,
in-laws!
) had come to America after her entire family had been burned to death in a pogrom in, or near, Odessa, from which fate she was saved only because she happened to be in the outhouse when the Cossacks, or whoever it was, came that day (they had, of course, come many times before); that, utterly alone at the age of fifteen, she walked across Europe to get to the place where the boat was that would take her to America, a place where she had a relative who helped
her, and that upon her arrival early in the 1890s she did what must be done, which was to find a husband immediately, and that in this case the husband she found was a crippled widower with grown children who, after he married this homely traumatized young woman of nineteen or so, would torment their father’s new wife by hiding smelly socks deep, deep under the beds, which she had to make each morning, a story her daughter, my grandmother, would later tell
her
daughter, who would later tell me.

From this pathetic woman my diabetic grandmother whom I loved so much inherited the golden hair that was my mother’s, too, which is why my brother Matt (of whom I, with my kinky, inky adolescent frizz, was once so jealous) had such beautiful white-blond hair when he was a boy; why I have always thought that he looked, with that hair and his slightly Tatar, slanted eyes and the austere planes of his face, both like the figure in an icon and like the Slavs who would have worshipped it. The Slavs, that is to say, who on some unknowable day in the 1880s descended on a town near Odessa and raped, and pillaged, and burned the houses of some insignificant Jews to the ground, which is why my great-grandmother came to America, and which was, indeed, how some of my family had come to have such blond, blond hair in the first place.

B
UT THE BEST
of all the stories were, naturally, the ones told by my mother’s father, since after all he was the only one of my relatives who’d made the remarkable trip to America and had been old enough at the time to have anything to remember about it.
How was the trip to America, you want to know?
my grandfather would repeat, chuckling softly, when I interviewed him about his life.
I couldn’t tell you, because I was in the toilet throwing up the whole time!
But of course this self-deprecating joke, meant to suggest that there was no story to tell, was part of the story of his coming to America, a story, as I knew, that had many chapters. In no particular order, I remember, now, these stories: the one about how he and his sister, my glum Aunt Sylvia, whom he always called
Susha,
and whose name appears on the passenger manifest, now available online through the Ellis Island database, as
Sosi Jäger,
had traveled “for weeks” to get from Lwów to Rotterdam “where the boat was waiting,” he would say, and being a child with little knowledge of the world, I would be impressed, back then, to think that such a big boat would wait for these two young people from Bolechow, a false impression that my grandfather did little to correct; and then how, after the long trip on the train, from Lwów to Warsaw, then Warsaw through Germany to the Netherlands, they almost missed the boat, because the girls had such long hair.

Because the girls had such long hair?! I would exclaim. The first time I heard this story, which was so long ago that I can’t remember when it might have been, I asked this question because I was genuinely perplexed; only now do I understand how sophisticated a storyteller my grandfather was, what a brilliant tease
because the girls had such long hair
was, how it was intended to make me ask just that question, so that he could launch into his story. Later on, I asked it simply because I knew he wanted me to.

Yes, because the girls had such long hair! he would go on, sitting there in the webbed garden chair on the broad stoop outside the front door to my parents’ house, surveying the neighborhood, as he liked to do when he visited, with an expression of lordly satisfaction, as if he were somehow responsible for the split-level houses in their many odd colors, the neat lawns, the spiral topiaries pointing to the clear summer sky, the silence of this weekday noon. And then he would tell me how, before boarding the big boat that took him and my perennially disappointed aunt to America, all the steerage passengers had to be inspected for lice, and because the girls, including my twenty-two-year-old great-aunt Sylvia, had such long hair in those days, these preboarding examinations took a very long time, and at a certain point my grandfather (who today, I suspect, we would describe as suffering from severe anxiety, although in those days people just said he was “meticulous”) panicked.

So what did you do? I would ask, on cue.

And he would say, So I yelled
Fire! Fire!
and in all the confusion, I took your aunt Susha’s hand and we ran up the gangplank and got on the boat! And that’s how we came to America.

He would tell this story with an expression that hovered between self-congratulation and self-deprecation, as if simultaneously pleased and (now) slightly embarrassed by the youthful audacity that, if this story is not a lie, had won him his trip to America.

T
HERE WERE, TO
be sure, other stories about this trip to America, stories I often heard when my grandfather came to visit and I would hang quietly about the house in the hopes that he’d decide to sit down and talk to me, waiting for him to finish reading the paper, maybe the
Times
or, more likely,
The Jewish Week
(to which, after my mother married my father, he had bought them a subscription because, he said, he was afraid she’d
forget how to be Jewish
). He would read his paper slowly, letting his large head move down the left side and then jerking it up and to the right as he took in the
print on the opposite side. Silently watching him read—for you never, ever interrupted my grandfather, no matter what he was doing—I would wait for him to finish and hope he’d be in the mood to tell me stories…Or I would wait for him to finish drinking his prune juice, which, he liked to say,
was good for the machinery,
or to finish quietly talking to my mother as she did her nails at the kitchen table in front of the big bay window, or, standing in the “big” bathroom, which was tiled in pale blue, to finish taking, with great precision, one or more of the many, many pills he carried with him in a pale brown calfskin attaché case. My grandfather was a hypochondriac, we all knew, and evidently his various doctors humored him; each night and some mornings he’d stand in my mother’s gleaming bathroom and line up a bunch of pills and, one by one, swallow them in turn with a matter-of-fact smile. Since my father disapproved of medicines, pills, and even doctors in general, about whom he had great suspicions and toward whom, as a group, great if vague animosity (and why not, given what he’d spent his boyhood watching?), he would sneer, not so secretly, at my grandfather’s rituals with the pills. But we children loved to watch Grandpa take his medicines when he visited, a ritual that, like so much else, he made somehow funny.
Tonight,
he’d say, looking at the long row of pharmacist’s bottles in mock confusion, like a housewife confronted by a daunting array of detergents or breakfast cereals,
maybe I’ll take a blue one and a red one.