The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (46 page)

And yet although I love this story, what interested me about it the last time she told it was a detail that she had either never mentioned before, or one that I’d merely let slip because I hadn’t been interested in it: that the cousins to whom she was striving so mightily to describe the latest American health obsession were “Jägers from Germany.” Who were they, exactly? I asked my mother recently, when she was reminiscing about that trip to Israel. I thought I might know: my grandfather, years earlier, had told me that one of his father’s brothers had settled in Germany, and another in England, but beyond that he knew nothing. And now, it seemed that in 1973 there had been Jäger cousins from Germany in Israel.

Who were they? I repeated. But thirty years later, my mother couldn’t remember.

The tantalizing but frustrating appearance of those lost Jäger cousins reminds me of why I never wanted to go to Israel for so long. When I grew up at my grandfather’s knee, listening to his stories and, later, writing them down and entering information on index cards and (later still) in computer programs, it seemed to me that what our family meant, where its value lay, was inseparable from its long history in Europe, a history that my grandfather tried so hard, I now realize, to convey to me through the many stories he told. Of course I knew, abstractly, intellectually, what Israel was supposed to mean, historically and religiously and politically, both for Jews in general and, of course, for my family. (
He left just in the nick of time!
) And I knew, moreover—I, who even as a child was interested in ancient Greece and Rome, would spend my free time building models of ancient temples—that Israel, the place itself, boasted a history that, like that of Greece or Rome, went back millennia, and boasted ancient ruins of every provenance, too. But I still had little interest in going there, as if the newness of my relatives’ presence there was a consideration that outweighed the ancientness of the place’s history—a history in which my family had had no part, until thirty years earlier, whereas its history in Europe, in Austria-Hungary, in Poland, in Bolechow, I knew, went back to that distant time when the Jägers first came to Bolechow, which, I also knew, was when the Jews themselves had first come, centuries ago. I had no more interest in visiting my Israeli relatives than someone interested in the American Civil War would have in visiting my family in their split-level house on Long Island.

And so it was because my grandfather seduced me with enticing stories that were always about the distant past, when I was still young enough to believe everything he told me, that I had no interest in Israel, that brand-new place. Indeed, it was because of my grandfather, I now see, that I would spend
so much of my life researching the distant past, not just his ancient family history,
the same family living in the same house for four hundred years, a family of prosperous merchants and clever businessmen, a family who knew who they were in the world because they had lived for so long in the same place,
but other, even more ancient histories, the histories of the Greeks and Romans, which, although seemingly so different from the history of these Austro-Hungarian Jews, also told their comic and, more often, their tragic tales, their stories of wars and ruin, of young maidens sacrificed for the good of their families, of brothers locked in deadly struggles, of generations of a given family destined, it seemed, to repeat the same dreadful mistakes over and over again.

It was from my grandfather that I developed my taste for what is old, and because of that, I never wanted to go to Israel until I learned that in Israel, as late as the year 2003, there lived a handful of Bolechowers.

I
ARRIVED IN
Israel on June 26, a Thursday.

Or, I should say, we arrived. Matt hadn’t been able to come with me on this trip, because in May of that year he had had his first child, and couldn’t get away; we were already talking of a return trip later on, maybe, when I’d go back to Israel and he’d come with me to shoot the survivors I’d be seeing there, the five Bolechowers now living in Israel whom Shlomo Adler had arranged for me to meet. Apart from Shlomo himself there was Anna Heller Stern,
who was Lorka’s friend;
she lived now in Kfar Saba, a suburb of Tel Aviv where my mother’s cousin Elkana lived, too. (
You should come already to Israel,
Elkana had told me years ago, in his knowing and throaty voice, the voice of someone used to giving orders and being obeyed, of someone who just
knows,
a Jäger voice.
And you should come already and meet the family,
he told me years before I ever dreamed of going to Bolechow, of writing a book. And, knowing how to bait the hook, he had added,
Also there’s a woman here who was Lorka’s friend, you’ll talk to her
. It was in this same voice that he’d said, over the phone, about a year before I finally did go to Israel, after I’d sent him the immense printout of the Jäger family tree that I’d generated from the new genealogy software I’d bought, the family tree that now went back to the birth, in 1746, of my distant ancestress Scheindl Jäger, a document so large I had to mail it in a tube, since when fully extended it covered most of my living-room floor—it was in this same voice that he’d told me, after I’d called to find out if he’d had a chance to look at it,
Yes, it’s very impressive, a very good research you made. But there are mistakes—I’ll tell you when you come to Israel
.)

So there was Anna Heller Stern.

And there were, of course, Shlomo and his cousin Josef Adler who, as young boys, had been hidden by that Ukrainian peasant, and for this reason were the only ones of their families to survive. And there was, too, the Reinharz couple, Solomon and Malcia, who now lived in Beer Sheva, far to the south of Tel Aviv, a couple who were newly married in 1941, Shlomo had told me in one of the many e-mails we’d exchanged before I finally went. He’d told me that during the terrible roundup for the second Aktion, this Reinharz pair had somehow broken free and had hidden for a long time in the space between the ceiling and the roof of a building that was to become an amusement hall for the German occupiers—a
casino,
as Shlomo called it.

We would interview them, too, Shlomo assured me. He had arranged everything, he said. He would drive me himself. I thanked him, gratefully. For neither the first nor last time in what has become a long and complicated friendship with this big bear of a man, a man whose broad and incisive gestures and emotional voice have left their traces on every videotape I have of my trip to Israel, gestures and intonations I hear even when reading his e-mails, now, I sensed that behind Shlomo’s offers of assistance, the tremendous energy of his communications, his enthusiasm, there lay the shadow of something else, more personal to him: his own need to stay connected to Bolechow, to his lost childhood and lost life.

So those, I agreed with Matt, were the people we would have to come back and visit again, at whatever point in the future Matt felt he could leave his new child, the latest addition to the family that, officially at least, began in 1746 with the birth of Scheindl Jäger.

But still, I wasn’t alone on this trip. I was traveling with a friend; a friend despite the fact, one that I never think of, really, that she is a woman of my mother’s generation; a friend who is, like me, a classicist—indeed, a specialist above all in Greek tragedy, a genre that (as I am sure even Rashi would agree) has never been surpassed for the concision and elegance with which it ponders and portrays the disastrous collisions of accident and fate, of the individual will and the larger, seemingly random forces of History: those luminous and scalding points in time where men confront the inscrutable will of the Divine and must decide who is responsible for the enormities visited upon them. When I was in my twenties I went to graduate school to do a doctorate in Classics, went specifically to the university where Froma, this woman who is now my friend, taught, because I had been so electrified by the articles of hers that I’d read in scholarly journals, articles in which the style of the writ
ing, sinuous, allusive, complex, brilliantly layered, almost
woven,
perfectly mirrored the characteristics of the texts she sought to illuminate, texts that themselves made their subtle and beautiful meanings felt by means of complex interweavings, delicate but persistent allusions, small things that culminated in large and stirring comments about the way things work. I read these articles, when I was twenty-two and twenty-three, and I wanted to know her; and so went to where she was. Now she is so familiar to me, but I still remember the impression she made when I first entered her office, with its notorious metastasizing piles of books and masses of papers; several long brown cigarettes of different lengths were burning down in chunky glass ashtrays, forgotten. She was surprisingly (to me) small, and whereas I had expected someone who looked severe—I was still young enough to confuse brilliance with severity, then—there she was, disarmingly accessible, with her round, alert face, the feathery light-brown hair, close-cropped, and of course the famous clothes, the velvets and leathers in complicated hues, the Cubist bags with latches in unexpected places. We talked for only a few minutes that day when I first visited her, and at the end of our conversation she fixed me with one of those sudden, intense gazes of hers and said, in her low, slightly gravelly voice, But of course you must come here, it would be an
embarras de richesses
!

Still, it must be said that her mind is far vaster than mine, synthesizes material more creatively and daringly, sees possibilities where I (who grew up after all in a house run according to
the Mittelmarks’ German mania for order,
as my mother liked to say) see only messes, only problems.
Your
problem, Froma said to me once when I was halfway through my dissertation on Greek tragedy and had come to what I’d thought was a hopeless impasse, until she showed me that it was a passageway, Your problem, she said—she was holding one of the long brown cigarettes with one hand, staring at me, as she does when her mind is occupied with a problem, with her head cocked slightly to one side, oblivious to the fact that two inches of ash were about to drop into her lap; the other hand, heavy with rings, was toying with one of the large, artisanal pieces of metal-and-enamel jewelry she favors—your problem, she repeated, is that you see the complexity as the problem, and not the solution.

It was only after I went to study with her that I learned that she, too, had a profound interest in the fate of the Jews during World War II. Typically, her interest was higher, more far-ranging, at once more abstract and more searching than mine. The granddaughter of two rabbis, themselves the products of the high intellectual culture of Vilna (“the Jerusalem of the North,” as it was called, although I have been there and can tell you that very little remains)
and the daughter of serious Reconstructionist Jews, she, unlike me, had had a rigorous Jewish education: read and spoke Hebrew fluently, knew Jewish and Hebrew religion and law and literature intimately, as I had never cared to, until now. As a profoundly Jewish person and, in a way, as a person who had devoted her professional life to the nature of tragedy, how could she not, in the end, become obsessed by the Holocaust?

Whereas for me, as we know, it was a family affair, something much smaller. I wanted to know what happened to Uncle Shmiel and the others; she wanted to know what happened to everybody. And not only that. Even today, long after she first started pointing me in the direction of multivolume works on Nazi medical experiments and documentary films on the partisans of Vilna and dozens, hundreds of other documents and films and books, things I simply don’t have the time to absorb, and which leave me wondering, even now, at the enormous energy of mind that allows her to read and see and digest it all; years after those beginnings, she still hungers after information that will help her formulate answers to still larger questions: how it happened and, a question for which there can never be an answer any one person can grasp, why it happened.

Anyway, this is why, years after I had ceased to be her student, formally speaking, years after she had helped me through my thesis on Greek tragedy, I was still learning from her, still being pushed to see the problem as the solution.

A
ND SO
F
ROMA,
too, became part of the search for the lost, and now, in the summer of 2003, we were traveling together. We had met in Prague, where she was finishing up a tour of Holocaust-related sites. What did we see in Prague? We saw Josefov, the ancient Jewish quarter, with its tiny, almost subterranean synagogues with their cool walls perspiring against the summer heat, the crooked street filled with blond tourists dutifully consulting guidebooks and impulsively buying postcards (
THE PINCHUS SYNAGOGUE IN JEWISH PRAGUE
); we saw the opulent Islamic-inspired interior decoration of the yellow-and-white-painted Spanish Synagogue, built in 1868 on the site of what had been the oldest shul in Prague, and now restored for the admiring eyes of tourists in all of its riotous, polychrome dazzle; we saw, in the Old Jewish Cemetery, the lavishly sculpted and ornamented tomb of Rabbi Judah ben Loew Bezalel, who died at eighty-four in 1609 and who is the man who is said to have created the Golem from the mud of the Vltava River as a defense against the bitter anti-Semites in the court of the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II. By a curious coincidence, the Golem was called Yossel—“Joey,” in Yiddish—the same nickname that, three centuries later, the grateful Jews of towns like Bolechow gave to Rudolf’s descendant, Franz Josef I, in affectionate gratitude for his benevolence to the Jews. As you leave this cemetery, you can buy little statuettes of the earlier Yossel, an early if primitive response to the persecution of the Jews of the city.