The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (74 page)

So there is Sodom and Gomorrah. The second of the climactic stories told in
parashat Vayeira
, the story of Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac, nicely suggests—because it involves a father’s relationship with his young son as well as his relationship with his own divine parent—the way in which every single person constitutes within himself a bridge between the past and the future; and by introducing Isaac at last as a full-fledged character in the narrative, this story also lays the narrative foundation for the story of Abraham’s descendants, which will take readers to the end of the Hebrew Bible itself. The latter, however, will not concern us here, since, as I have said, at the time I briefly studied the Torah when I was a young adult and before I turned once again to the Greeks, I only got as far as
parashat Vayeira
, and so it is there that we shall stop.

I will return to the individual stories later, but here it seems worth trying to interpret one of the best known moments in
Vayeira
, if only because the two commentaries I have sought out to illuminate these texts, the ancient and the modern, Rashi and Fried
man, seem to me to fail to elucidate the meaning of this strange and famous incident (which is, however, minor enough not to be of concern to us later when considering the larger moral implications of the two stories I have alluded to). I refer here to the well-known story of Lot’s wife—of how, even as she and her husband and two daughters are being rescued from the doomed city by the intervention of God’s angel, are being physically dragged away from their home by the heavenly beings, the wife of Lot violates the angel’s express command not to turn back and look at the city during their flight, and for that transgression is turned into a pillar of salt.

Shockingly, at least to me, Friedman has nothing whatsoever to say about this riveting moment—perhaps because he’s saving his exegetical ammunition for where it’s really needed, which is the far more troubling story of Abraham’s willingness to kill his own child. Nor does Rashi’s explication seem to me, for once, to be persuasive. The medieval French scholar begins by explaining the angel’s order not to “look back” as a punishment of sorts: he glosses the text’s “Do not look behind you” by suggesting that, since Lot and his family had sinned in precisely the way that the inhabitants of the twin cities sinned, and since they are being saved only because of their relationship to Abraham, that good prophet, they have no right to witness the punishment of the doomed from the comfortable vantage point of their escape route. “You do not deserve to see their punishment while you are being saved” is how the Frenchman puts it. As for the fate of Lot’s wife, Rashi explains the bizarre detail of her metamorphosis from human being into mineral by saying that she “had sinned with salt” and hence “was stricken with salt.” This “sinned with salt” is a reference to a midrashic tradition that Lot’s wife had begrudged the traditional gesture of giving salt to guests. (The same tradition also holds that later, on the pretext of borrowing salt from her neighbors, Lot’s wife reported her foreign-born husband’s actions to the Sodomite authorities—a reminder that, unlike her husband, she is, presumably, a native Sodomite.)

As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text—its beautiful, and beautifully economical, evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the pasts we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. Perhaps because I am a classicist, I was struck, as I read Rashi’s explication of this passage, by how little attention is paid, how little appreciation is devoted by the Jewish text and its Jewish commentators to what seems to me to be the obvious question that arises in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the question of the value of beauty and pleasure. Abraham, we must not forget, was born in a city but has spent most of his life as a nomad, as
parashat Lech Lecha
makes clear; perhaps by now he has forgotten the pleasures of urbanity. But Lot’s wife is deeply attached to her city—Rashi identifies it as a “metropolis,” in fact—and we may imagine that this is because, like all great metropolises, the one we encounter in
parashat Vayeira
undoubtedly offered its share of beauty, of rarefied and complicated pleasures, among which, indeed, may have been the very
vices for which it was eventually punished. Still, perhaps that’s the pagan, the Hellenist in me talking. (Rabbi Friedman, by contrast, cannot bring himself even to contemplate that what the people of Sodom intend to do to the two male angels, as they crowd around Lot’s house at the beginning of this narrative, is to rape them, an interpretation blandly accepted by Rashi, who blithely points out that if the Sodomites hadn’t wanted sexual pleasure from the angels, Lot wouldn’t have suggested, as he rather startlingly does, that the Sodomites take his two daughters as substitutes. But then, Rashi was French.)

It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator’s inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel’s command to Lot’s family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful—which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandoned and lost forever, precisely the way in which, say, relatives who are dead are always somehow more beautiful and good than those who still live—then it seems clear that Lot and his family are commanded not to look back at it not as a punishment, but for a practical reason: because regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempts to make a new life, which is what Lot and his family now must do, as Noah and his family once had to do, as indeed all those who survive awful annihilations must somehow do. This explanation, in turn, helps explain the form that the punishment of Lot’s wife took—if indeed it was a punishment to begin with, which I personally do not believe it was, since to me it seems far more like a natural process, the inevitable outcome of her character. For those who are compelled by their natures always to be looking back at what has been, rather than forward into the future, the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks, if not the author of Genesis, knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless, so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.

O
H,
D
ANIEL, DON’T
go
back
! my mother said to me one night a few months after Mrs. Begley’s funeral.

I had called to mine her memory a little bit. At that point I was thinking a lot about my grandfather’s trip to Israel in 1956, and so I had asked her, a few days before, if she wouldn’t mind going into the family files and finding certain photographs that I thought might be helpful—not, of course, helpful in jogging my memory, since the event had taken place long before I was born, but helpful in providing a visual counterpart to the stories I’d so often heard. Because of her
meticulous German blood,
she had told me to call back in a
few days; by then, she said, she’d have had the chance to carefully unwrap the albums from what, since I was eight, I had thought of as their mummy wrappings. Now, as I talked to her on the phone one summer day about a month ago, she told me that she had unwrapped them all, and as we spoke on the phone she was describing various pictures, separating the ones I wanted from the ones that didn’t sound interesting.

Here was Nana, she said, sitting on a deck chair on the liner, she looked so
healthy
that year; here was her mother at the bon voyage party in their stateroom, smiling good-naturedly with one arm around her sister-in-law, Aunt Sylvia, who as usual was looking disappointed, and the other around Minnie Spieler, who, true to her bohemian legend, was daringly wearing a man’s suit and tie. Here were other pictures, mixed into the
ISRAEL TRIP SS UNITED STATES
album, pictures that, my mother observed as a puzzled annoyance crept into her voice, didn’t belong there. Her mother’s only brother, Jack, the handsome blond bachelor whom her father didn’t like (because, I said to myself as she talked, he was
competition
), here was her mother’s older sister, the unstable one who toward the end of her life wouldn’t bathe because she was convinced the Russians had put electrodes in her hairdo, a story that used to make us shriek with laughter when we were kids; the same older sister, indeed, who had tried to stop my grandfather from marrying my grandmother. This was a story I’d known by heart since I was ten years old, a staple of my grandfather’s after-dinner repertoire: how Pauline had broken the engagement three times because, she insisted, her baby sister, a bona fide American girl born in New York City, shouldn’t marry beneath her, marry an immigrant, a greenhorn,
grinhorhn
. But love conquered all! my grandfather would joke; and years later, when he had done well for himself, had acquired the Mittelmarks’ factory and had greatly prospered, this same Pauline had come up to him one night at some seder or another, some event at which my grandmother made her famous soups and the desserts that she could not eat, and said, You know something, Abe? You were always my favorite brother-in-law! To which my grandfather, not missing a beat, replied,
Ahhh, Pauline—so
now
I’m a Yenkee Doohddle Dehndee
!

And what’s more, it was true. Nobody pledged the Pledge of Allegiance more loudly than he, put out a bigger flag on Memorial Day, gave out more ice-cream cones on the Fourth of July. He had traveled far for this.

So my mother retold these stories as she looked through her folders, which, it is possible, she likes to label and arrange so neatly because, a hundred years before we had this conversation, a matchmaker in Bolechow had chosen for the young widower Elkune Jäger a girl from Dolina called Taube Ryfka Mittelmark,
Mittelmark
, a family whose German blood expressed itself, they liked
to say, in a taste for orderliness, the way that certain genes will express themselves in a straight nose or blue eyes or a tendency to develop cancer of the colon. It was while my mother was leafing through her neatly filed pictures that I mentioned to her that I’d decided to return to Ukraine, to Bolekhiv. (
Bolekhiv
, as I must henceforth call it, since I know now that I will never return there, never again go back, and for that reason—and the fact that, having gone back that one last time, I know at last that there is, now, truly nothing left to see, nothing left of
Bolechow
—I am willing, finally, to allow it to take its place in the present.) I told her that although I didn’t enjoy the thought of yet another trip—a trip, moreover, to somewhere we’d already been, where we’d already talked to people and seen what there was to see—I now thought that going back might be an interesting way to bring to an end the search that had started so long ago. I told her that I wanted to go back, in part, because I thought that more than anything else, a return to Bolekhiv would give me a sense of an ending; I thought that however much we’d never know, it would be satisfying to contrast this second and final trip with the first one we’d made: to walk again the confusingly twisting streets of the town once more, but armed, this time, with so much more information than we had had the first time we went, four years earlier, when we had known nothing at all except six names. This time, I had my notes, my tapes, the stories I’d heard, the descriptions, the maps that Jack and Shlomo had meticulously drawn and faxed to me, all the data that I’d culled over four years, which would now allow me to stride confidently around my family’s town saying
This is Dlugosa, the street where they lived, here, five meters from the Magistrat, was where the store was, here was the school, there was the Hanoar building, here was the Dom Katolicki, that is the road to Taniawa, here was the Szymanski store, here is the road that leads to the train station, those are the tracks to Belzec.
This time, we knew something, even if it wasn’t all we’d hoped to know. I thought I might end, I told my mother, by contrasting the total ignorance of our first trip with the partial knowledge of this final trip. By saying, There is more and more distance as time goes by, but just in the nick of time, we got close enough to know a few knowable things. By saying, There will never be certainty, never be a
date,
a
place:
but see how much we learned. An ending that showed how close we’d gotten, but also how far we’d always be.

So I told my mother all this, and she sighed. Do you really have to go back? she fretted. Haven’t you and Matthew already
been
everywhere? She made that little clicking noise she makes when she resigns herself to the fact that you’re making a bad decision: a double
tch, tch
formed by striking the front part of the
tongue against the upper palate. I supposed, as she made this familiar sound, that she had gotten it from her mother, who had gotten it from her mother, and so on, a thread stretching all the way back to Russia, to the nineteenth and eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, to Odessa in the sixteenth century and then beyond that, past the beginning of the modern era; a thread that spooled backward from the June afternoon in 2005 on which my mother told me not to go back, past the day of her wedding in Manhattan in 1953, of her parents’ wedding on the Lower East Side in 1928, of Elkune Jäger’s second wedding in Bolechow in 1894 and of his parents’ wedding in the same small town in 1846; past the day on which the architect Ignaz Reiser saw in his mind’s eye a certain shape that would later become the shape of the Moorish-style arches of the gate of the Zeremonienhalle of the New Jewish Section of the Vienna Central Cemetery, past the day on which an Austrian official in a hamlet called Dolina wrote the words
The mother of this illegitimate child is named
…, past the day on which Ber Birkenthal decided to commit his memories to paper in his elegant Hebrew, past the unknowable day on which a nameless Slav had raped a Jewess in a village near Odessa, thereby introducing a gene for a certain color of hair and eyes into the makeup of a family that would eventually be called
Cushman;
past all this, backward in time, spooling continuously, past the Sunday in 1943 when the first transport of Jews left the railway station in Salonica, the Wednesday in 1941 when the first Aktion in Bolechow ended in a field called Taniawa, the Friday in March at the beginning of the High Renaissance when Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain signed the Edict of Expulsion of the Jews, the Thursday in May 1420 when Duke Albrecht V expelled the Jews from Vienna, the Friday in 1306 when Philip the Fair drove the Jews out of France and assumed title to the loans owed to them by his fellow Christians, the Tuesday in 1290 on which Edward I expelled the Jews from England, back through the Middle Ages, past Saadia Gaon making his learned arguments before the caliph in Baghdad, past the moment at which the first of the Karaites decided he was not a Jew like the others; and back even farther, this tiny insignificant tic that, from daughter to mother, had created a thread, a path that you could, theoretically, follow as surely as it is possible to follow the trail left by the special DNA that exists in a certain organ that is present in every human cell, an organ called the mitochondrion, DNA unlike the DNA of every other part of every other cell, since this mitochondrial DNA is transmitted unchanged only from the mother to her child, unmixed, as is all other DNA, with the DNA of the father, and hence provides an unbroken chain of DNA from the present to the remotest imaginable past, only through the line of the mother. Perhaps, I wondered as I heard my mother make her disap
proving
tch,
perhaps this little sound went back through eons of time to some dark-haired, black-eyed, hawk-nosed woman in a long-vanished city called Ur, a woman who had made this noise one afternoon when her son Abram announced that he was leaving home on a trip from which he might never return.