The way in which tiny nuances of word order, diction, grammar, and syntax can have much larger ramifications for the entire meaning of a text colors Rashi’s commentary overall. For him (to take another example), the infamous “double opening” of Genesis—the fact that it has not one but two accounts of Creation, the first starting with the creation of the cosmos and ending in the creation of humankind (Genesis 1:1–30), the second focusing from the start on the creation of Adam, and moving almost immediately to the story of Eve, the serpent, and the Expulsion from Eden—is, at bottom, a stylistic issue, easily enough explained. In his discussion of Genesis 2, Rashi anticipates readers’ grumblings—the creation of man has, after all, already been dealt with in Genesis 1:27—but declares that, after having himself consulted a certain body of rabbinic wisdom, he has discovered a certain “rule” (number thirteen of thirty-two, as it happens, that help explain the Torah), and this rule says that when a general statement or story is followed by a second telling of that story, the second telling is meant to be understood as a more detailed explication of the first. And so the second telling of the creation of mankind, in Genesis 2, is, so to speak, meant to be taken as an enhanced version of the first telling, which we get in Genesis 1. As indeed it is: for nothing in the first chapter of Genesis, with its dry, chronological account of the creation of the cosmos, the earth, its flora and fauna, and finally of humankind, prepares us for the rich narrative of the second chapter, with its tale of innocence, deceit, betrayal, concealment, expulsion, and ultimate death, the man and the woman in the secluded place, the sudden and catastrophic appearance of the mysterious intruder, the serpent, and then: the peaceful existence shattered. And at the center of all that drama—for Rashi goes to no little trouble to explain that it does indeed stand at the center—the mysterious and somehow moving symbol of the tree in the garden, a tree that represents, I have come to think, both the pleasure and the pain that come from knowing things.
Interesting as all this is, when I immersed myself in Genesis and its commentators over a number of years recently, I naturally came to prefer Friedman’s general explanation of why the Torah begins the way it does. I say “naturally,” because the issue that Friedman is interested in having his readers understand is, in essence, a writer’s issue: How do you begin a story? For Friedman, the opening of Bereishit brings to mind a technique we all know from the movies: “Like some films that begin with a sweeping shot that then narrows,” he writes, “so the first chapter of Genesis moves gradually from a picture of the skies and earth down to the first man and woman. The story’s focus will continue to narrow: from the universe to the earth to humankind to specific lands and peoples to a single family.” And yet, he reminds his readers, the wider, cosmic concerns of the world-historical story that the Torah tells will remain in the back of our minds as we read on, providing the rich substratum of meaning that gives such depth to that family’s story.
Friedman’s observation implies, as is certainly true, that often it is the small things, rather than the big picture, that the mind can comfortably grasp: that, for instance, it is naturally more appealing to readers to absorb the meaning of a vast historical event through the story of a single family.
BECAUSE SHMIEL WASN’T much talked about, and because when he was talked about it tended to be in whispers, or in Yiddish, a language my mother spoke with her father so that they could keep their secrets—because of these things, when I did learn something, it was usually by accident.
Once, when I was little, I overheard my mother talking to her cousin on the phone and saying something like, I thought they were hiding, and the neighbor turned them in, no?
Once, a few years later, I heard someone saying, Four beautiful daughters.
Once, I overheard my grandfather saying to my mother, I know only they were hiding in a kessle. Since I knew by then how to make adjustments for his accent, when I heard him say this I simply wondered, What castle? Bolechow, to judge from the stories he told me, was not a place for castles; it was a small place, I knew, a peaceful place, a little town with a square and a church or two and a shul and busy shops. It was only much later on, long after my grandfather was dead and after I had studied more seriously the history of his town, that I learned that Bolechow, like so many other little Polish shtetls, had at one time been owned by an aristocratic Polish landowner, and when I learned this fact I naturally fitted the new information to my old memory of what I’d overheard my grandfather saying, I know only they were hiding in a kessle. A castle. Clearly, Shmiel and his family had managed to find a hiding place in the great residence of the noble family who’d once owned their town, and it was there that they were discovered after they had been betrayed.
At some point I heard someone saying, It wasn’t the neighbor, it was their own maid, the shiksa. This I found confusing and upsetting, since we ourselves had a cleaning lady who was—I knew this was what shiksa meant—a Gentile woman; a Polish woman, in fact. For thirty-five years, my mother’s Polish cleaning lady, a tall, heavy-hipped woman whom we eventually considered to be, and acted like, a third grandmother, a woman who, as the 1960s turned into the 1970s, and the 1970s into the 1980s, came to have the same body type that (as it is possible to see from the few photographs of her) Shmiel’s wife, Ester, once had, came each week to our house and vacuumed and dusted and mopped and slopped and, in time, advised my mother about which bric-a-brac to put where. (Iss the junks! she’d scold about this or that bit of porcelain or crystal. Throw him in garbage!) After Mrs. Wilk and my mother had become friends, and the weekly visits to the house devolved, over time, into increasingly long lunches of hard-boiled eggs and bread and cheese and tea at the kitchen table, at which the two women, whose worlds were less far apart than might at first seem likely (it was Mrs. Wilk to whom my grandfather, when he’d come to visit us, would tell his scandalous off-color jokes in Polish); after the years of Tuesdays when they would sit for hours and complain and share certain stories—for instance, the one that Mrs. Wilk eventually confided to my mother about how, yes, she and the other Polish girls of her town, Rzeszów, had been taught to hate the Jews, but they didn’t know any better—and also would gossip about the pani, the rich neighbor ladies who did not share their meals with their cleaning ladies; after this time, during which the two women became friends, Mrs. Wilk started to bring to my mother jars filled with Polish delicacies she’d cooked, of which the most famous, as much for the amusing sound of its name as for the sublime aroma they exuded, were something she pronounced “gawumpkees”: spiced ground meat wrapped in cabbage leaves, swimming in a rich red sauce…
This, and I suppose the fact that I did not grow up in Poland, is why I found it painful to think that Shmiel and his family had been betrayed by the shiksa maid.
Another time, years later, in a phone conversation, my mother’s first cousin Elkana in Israel, the son of the Zionist brother who had had the good sense to leave Poland in the Thirties, and a man who, more than anyone else alive, reminds me now of his uncle, my grandfather—with his air of omniscient authority and sly sense of humor, his largesse with family stories and family feeling, a man who, if he hadn’t changed his family name to conform with Ben-Gurion’s Hebraizing policies in the Fifties, would today be known still as Elkana Jäger, the name he’d been given at birth and, with minor variations in spelling, the same name that had once been borne by a homburg-wearing forty-five-year-old who fell over dead one morning in a spa in a province of an empire that no longer exists—my cousin Elkana said, He had some trucks, and the Nazis wanted the trucks.
Once I heard someone saying, He was one of the first on the list.
So I would hear these things, when I was a child. Over time, these scraps of whispers, fragments of conversations that I knew I wasn’t supposed to hear, eventually coalesced into the thin outlines of the story that, for a long time, we thought we knew.
Once, when I was a little bit older, I had the boldness to ask. I was about twelve, and my mother and I were
walking up a flight of broad, shallow concrete steps toward the synagogue we attended. It was autumn, the High Holy Days: we were going to the Yizkor, the memorial, service. At that time, my mother was obliged to say Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, only for her mother, who had died so unexpectedly after entrusting a twenty-dollar bill to her (and she has it still: the bill is safely tucked in the red leather purse at the bottom of a drawer in her house on Long Island, and sometimes she will take it out and show it to me, along with my grandfather’s glasses and hearing aid, as if they were relics)—“only for her mother,” since everyone else was still alive: her father, his sisters and brothers, all of those who had come over from Europe, fifty years before, all of them except Shmiel. We were slowly ascending those shallow steps that evening so my mother could mourn her mother. Perhaps it was because I had blue eyes, like her and her mother, that she took me that day. The sun was setting and it had grown suddenly cool, and it was for this reason that my mother decided to turn back to the parking lot in order to get a sweater out of the car, and during that brief extra time before the (I thought) scary prayer began she started talking about her family, her dead relatives, and I brought up the ones who had been killed.
Yes, yes, my mother said. At that time she was at the acme of her good looks: the high cheekbones, the strong jaw, the wide, photogenic movie-star smile with its sexy prominent incisors. Her hair, darkened over time into a rich chestnut that retained some blond highlights that were the only sign, now, that she had been a towheaded girl, as her mother and grandmother had been, as my brother Matthew once was (Matthew, Matt, who had the slender, high-boned, somewhat elongated face of an icon of the Orthodox Church, oddly feline amber eyes, and a shock of platinum blond hair of which I, with my mass of kinky, unmanageably wavy dark hair, was secretly jealous)—my mother’s hair flicked in the stiffening autumn wind. She sighed and said, Uncle Shmiel and his wife, they had four beautiful daughters.
At the moment she said this a small plane passed loudly overhead and for a moment I thought she’d said not daughters but dogs, which threw me into a small turmoil since, although we knew so little, I’d always thought that at least we knew this: that they had four daughters.
My confusion lasted only a moment, however, since a few seconds later my mother added, in a slightly different voice, almost as if to herself, They raped them and they killed them all.
I stood there stock-still. I was twelve years old, and a bit backward for my age, sexually. What I felt, when I heard this shocking story—the more shocking, it seemed, for the almost matter-of-fact way in which my mother let this information slip, as if she were talking not to me, her child, but to an adult who had ingrained knowledge of the world and its cruelties—what I felt was, more than anything, embarrassment. Not embarrassment about the sexual aspect of the information I’d just been made privy to, but rather embarrassment that any eagerness to question her more about this rare and surprising detail might be misinterpreted by my mother as sexual prurience. And so, strangled by my own shame, I let the comment pass; which, of course, must have struck my mother as even odder than if I had asked her to tell me more. These things raced through my head as we once again climbed the steps to our synagogue, and by the time I was able to frame, elaborately, a question about what she had said, framed it in a way that didn’t seem inappropriate, we were at the door and then inside and then it was time to say the prayers for the dead.
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to pray for the dead if you do not know their names.
Of course we knew Shmiel: apart from everything else, it was my brother Andrew’s Hebrew name. And, we knew, there had been Ester—not “Esther,” as I later found out—the wife. Of her I knew virtually nothing at all for a long time besides her name, and, later, her maiden name, Schneelicht, which, when I was studying German in college, I was obscurely pleased to know meant “Snow-light.”
Shmiel, then; and Ester and Schneelicht. But of the four beautiful daughters, my grandfather, in all the years I knew him, all the years I interviewed him and wrote him letters filled with numbered questions about the mishpuchah, the family, never uttered a single name. Until my grandfather died, we knew the name of only one of the girls, and that was because Shmiel himself had written it on the back of one of those photos, in the forceful, sloping handwriting that I would later become only too familiar with, after my grandfather had died. On the back of a snapshot of himself and his stout wife and a little girl in a dark dress, my grandfather’s brother had written a short inscription in German, Zur Errinerung; then the date, 25/7 1939; and then the names Sam, Ester, Bronia, and so we knew that this daughter’s name was Bronia. The names are underscored in a blue felt-tip pen, the kind my grandfather preferred, in his old age, to write letters with. (He liked to decorate his letters with illustrations: a favorite was a sailor smoking a pipe.) This underscoring interests me. Why, I now wonder, did he feel it necessary to underline their names, which clearly he knew? Was it something he did for himself, as he sat in the nights of his old age, who knows when and for how long, contemplating these photos; or was it something he meant us to see?
This German formula, Zur Erinnerung, “as a remembrance of,” appears, sometimes misspelled, always written in Shmiel’s energetic hand, on nearly all of the photographs that Shmiel sent to his siblings in America. It is there again, for example, on the back of the snapshot in which Shmiel is posing with his drivers next to one of his trucks, the image of the prosperous merchant, a cigar in his right hand, his left hand thrust into his trouser pocket, pulling the jacket away just enough so that you can see his gold watch-chain gleaming, his small, prematurely white mustache, in the toothbrush style made famous by someone else, neatly trimmed. On the back of this picture Shmiel wrote Zur Errinerung an dein Bruder, “to remember your brother by,” and then a slightly longer inscription that features the date: the 19th of April 1939. To his siblings Shmiel wrote only in German, although it was never the language they used to speak to one another, which was Yiddish, nor was it the one they used to speak to the Gentiles of their or other towns, which was Polish or Ukrainian. For them, German always remained the high, official language, the language of the government and of primary school, a language they learned in a large single schoolroom where once (I have learned) there had hung a large portrait of the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef I, which was replaced, eventually, by one of Adam Mickiewicz, the great Polish poet, and then by one of Stalin, and then of Hitler, and then of Stalin, and then—well, by that point there were no Jägers left to go to the school and see whose picture might be hanging there. But it was German they learned, Shmiel and his brothers and sisters, in the Baron Hirsch school, and it was German that remained in their minds as the language in which to write of serious things. For instance (four decades after those siblings first learned their Du’s and Sie’s and der’s and dem’s and eins-zwei-drei’s), What you read in the papers is barely ten percent of what is going on here; or, still later, I for my part will write a letter addressed to President Roosevelt and will explain to him that all my siblings are already in the States, and that my parents are even buried there, and perhaps that will work.
German, the language for weighty things, was a tongue in which they read and wrote with only rare errors in spelling or grammar, perhaps only a few lapses into Yiddish or, even more rarely, Hebrew, which they also learned by rote when they were boys and girls during the reign of the emperor whose empire was so soon to be lost. Lapses such as one in the letter in which Shmiel wrote, Do what you can to get me out of this Gehenim. Gehenim in Hebrew means “Hell,” and when I read this letter for the first time, in a year as far distant from Shmiel’s writing of it as his writing of it was from his own birth, I caught a sudden vivid whiff of something so tenuous as to have been almost completely lost: a fleeting but intense moment, perhaps, from his and my grandfather’s childhoods, the way, maybe, their father might have lapsed half angrily, half humorously into Hebrew when he was scolding his children or complaining about what a G
ehenim they’d made his life, little guessing in 1911 what kind of Hell his little town would become.
So German is the language they wrote in. But the only time I ever heard my grandfather actually speak German was long after Shmiel had become nothing more than the earth and weather in some Ukrainian pasture, when my grandfather, grudgingly preparing for the annual trip to the spa, Bad Gastein, that his fourth wife forced them to make, said to this woman (who had a number tattoed on her forearm and who, having been, a lifetime and many régimes ago, a well-bred Russian, disdained to speak Yiddish) as they finished packing their many bags and the special provisions for Schloimele, Also, fertig?—So, ready?—which may be why I would forever after associate German, even after I myself learned to read and speak it, with elderly Jews being forced to go places they didn’t want to go.
Zur Erinnerung, To remember me by. That picture, with its inscription, is the reason why, until much later, Shmiel was the only one of the six whose birth-date and year we knew. April 19 was his forty-fourth birthday, but he didn’t write “on the occasion of his 44th birthday”; he chose instead “in his 44th year,” and as I read this I am struck by the fact that the word I am translating as “year” is Lebensjahr, which means, literally, “year of life,” and this diction, although of course it was casual and there’s no doubt in my mind that he didn’t give it a second thought when he wrote it, strikes me as noteworthy, perhaps because I know that, on the spring day this picture was taken, he had exactly four of those life-years left to live.
HENCE WE KNEW a few names, and one date. After my grandfather died, certain documents pertaining to Shmiel, along with some other photographs that none of us had ever seen, came into our possession, and it was only when we found these documents and looked at these photographs that we finally learned, or thought we learned, the names of the other girls. I say “thought we learned” because, as a result of certain peculiarities of Shmiel’s old-fashioned handwriting (for instance, his way of adding a tiny horizontal line to the tops of his cursive l’s, or of making his final y’s the way we today might make final z’s, if we bothered to write longhand letters in proper cursive), we had, I later learned, been misreading one of the names. This is why, for a long time, in fact for over twenty years after my grandfather died, we thought the names of Shmiel and Ester’s four beautiful daughters were as follows:
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Page 3