The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  KORNBLUH CH. BOLECHOW FLEISCHER, FLEISCHHANDLER BUTCHERS, MEAT AND SMOKED MEAT

  KORNBLUH JAC. MAJER BOLECHOW FLEISCHER, FLEISCHHANDLER BUTCHERS, MEAT AND SMOKED MEAT

  KORNBLUH SCHLOME BOLECHOW FLEISCHER, FLEISCHHANDLER BUTCHERS, MEAT AND SMOKED MEAT

  And so it seems clear to me that, very likely just before his death on May 7, 1845, my great-great-great-grandfather, Abraham Jäger, arranged a profitable marriage between his son, Isak, who was then around twenty years old, and Neche Kornblüh, a daughter of a family that was also involved in the business of processing the meat that came from the cattle that grazed on the rolling green pastureland that surrounded this idyllic hamlet. My suspicion, moreover—judging perhaps erroneously from the terse but suggestive entry in volume fourteen (“Galicia”) of the Kaufmannisches Adressbuch für Industrie, Handel und Gewerbe, is that my Jäger ancestors had made the slightly more advantageous match, since after all these Kornblühs seemed to have their mercantile fingers in many more pies.

  But then, judging from this precious if rather abstruse resource, what a rich little commercial life Bolechow must have had in the mid-nineteenth century! Although I was preoccupied, on this particular day, with Kornblühs and Jägers—and was satisfied with what my search turned up, since it seemed to provide a reasonable back-story for the tantalizing entry on my great-great-uncle Ire’s birth record—I decided to enter, simply, the name of the town itself in the search field of the 1891 Business Directory, and this search yielded a list of all the merchants in Bolechow who bothered to list themselves on some long-ago day at the end of the 1800s. As I read the names and occupations, which ran an opulent gamut from the familiar to the hopelessly lost, I tried to imagine these long-dead neighbors of my Jäger ancestors. JACOB ELLENBOGEN, BUSINESS AGENT seemed to me to be a prosperous fellow: I pictured him with a broad, somewhat Slavic face, his eyes narrow and evaluating, full of testy humor and impatience, sleek in clothes he’s brought home from Lemberg or even Vienna, impatient to make the next deal. The entry devoted to ABRAHAM GROSSBARD, BAKER, because it made me think of how good fresh bread smells, permitted me to dream of a person of great goodness and patience; the kind of person who knows you have to wait, to let things rise. BERL REINHARZ, the Getreide-und Produktenhandler, the grain and produce dealer, who was based in Skole, the little resort spa near Bolechow, must surely have come to town every Monday, which I have subsequently learned was market day: a slender, pleasant man (I told myself), quiet and industrious. The otherwise anonymous GOLDSCHMIDT, FISH-DEALER was surely big, broad, and not without a certain self-deprecating sense of fun. (Life is smelly, but what’s the alternative?) GEDELJE GRÜNSCHLAG, on the other hand, is all business, with his flourishing Baumaterialienhandlerei, his building-materials firm, twinned with his Holzhandlerei, his lumber business—the opposite, in a way, of EFRAIM FREILICH, a Hadern-und Knocheshandler, a rag-and-bones man. Of course I knew nothing about poor Efraim, but I couldn’t help thinking, and of course I could have been completely wrong, that his nebuchl, his pitiable, profession had made him tough; perhaps he was the kind of person who’d do a lot, maybe too much, to push his family forward, to get ahead, to leave his rags and bones behind…

  But this, of course, was a fantasy, an indulgence. Much more probable was the other hypothesis that this directory yields, which was that the family business that Shmiel Jäger inherited, the butcher shop whose growth into a meat-shipping business eventually necessitated the purchase of a few trucks, a few trucks that were eventually to be the cause of no little trouble—that this family business was one that his ancestors (which is to say, my ancestors) had carefully tended in many ways….

  SO IT IS the tending of the family business that now, in January 1939, preoccupies Shmiel Jäger, too, all too obviously. What, exactly, has happened to this truck, on which his business, the business of shipping meat, depends? It is impossible to know, now—although naturally the imagination yearns to supply a dramatic explanation. In this case, history lends a helping hand. For we know that, by January 1939, the anti-Semitic Polish government then in power had enacted restrictions on Jewish businesses that were severe, though not of course on a par with those enacted across the border by the anti-Semitic German government. Indeed, after 1935, when the autocratic but (relatively) moderate leader Josef Piłsudski died, the government of Poland veered sharply to the right; admiring of Hitler, who of course would soon destroy Poland altogether, the country’s right-wing leaders were quite clear and open about their aims to reduce drastically what was perceived as Jewish influence on the faltering economy—even as the Polish political elite, with its lofty sense of the refinement of Polish civilization, denounced actual violence against Jews. “We have too high an idea of our civilization,” one 1937 government proclamation stated, “and we respect too strongly the order and peace which every state needs, to approve brutal anti-Semitic acts…. At the same time, it is understandable that the country should possess the instinct compelling it to defend its culture, and it is natural that Polish society should seek economic self-sufficiency.” This kinder, gentler anti-Semitism was reflected in the call by Prime Minister Sławoj-Składkowski for “economic struggle” against the Jews “by all means—but without force.”

  Still, the economic legislation against Jews that was subsequently enacted had brutal effects on businessmen like Shmiel Jäger. Between 1935 and 1939 the government of Poland made war on Jewish businesses, which citizens were encouraged to boycott: Christian-owned businesses were warned not to engage in commerce with Jewish-owned businesses; Christians were discouraged from renting property to Jews; anti-Semitic agitators appeared on market day in Polish towns warning Gentiles not to do business with Jews. Jewish stalls in marketplaces and at fairs were often destroyed, and Jewish shopkeepers in small towns were often terrorized by government-sponsored hooligans. And, in the most cunningly calculated attack, one aimed not so much on Jewish businesses as on an entire Jewish way of life—although its effect specifically on businesses like the one owned by Shmiel Jäger can easily be imagined—the Polish government banned shkite, the ritual slaughter of animals. Already crippled by the Great Depression—as far back as 1934, fully one-third of the Jews of Polish Galicia had applied for economic relief of some kind—the economic security of Poland’s Jews was devastated by the boycott. It is in this light, then, that we must read Shmiel’s letters, which are filled with mournful references to “troubles”—although of course his real troubles had not, in 1939, even begun. And indeed even if the disaster to Shmiel’s business, this trouble with the trucks, had somehow been accidental, certain references in the letter—the troubles of the Jews, my permit will be taken away, I am the only Jew who even had a permit—suggests the apparently concrete fact that whatever his previous prosperity, however much he may have achieved his goal, at least for a while, of being a big fish in this particular small pond, Shmiel, like nearly all the other Jews in that little pond, has been reduced to dire straits.

  And so on this January day he sat down to write a letter.

  You’ll be wondering, dear Cousin, why I’m writing to you after so many years; I’d have written you continuously if you’d only wished it…. I’ll hope that you and the dear family are well, how are things in the business? I don’t know, and I’ll hope that the answer is “good”…

  The reason that this letter makes me think about closeness and distance again is that, although it is written to a close relation—to his first cousin Joe Mittelmark, the son of his mother’s oldest brother—a certain rather embarrassing stiffness immediately makes itself felt. Note the odd progression: the ostensibly warm salutation with its three repeated “dear’s” (picked up yet again in the first line of the letter proper) followed by a marked defensiveness (I’d have been writing you continuously if you’d only wanted), which is itself followed by a certain forced casualness. In part, this stiffness, this awkwardness of tone, undoubtedly owes something to the fact that Shmiel has to ask for money, which is never a ple
asant thing. But I happen to know that there are other reasons for the awkwardness, the distance, the failure in feeling that are detectable in this letter. You have the Mittelmarks’ hair, my mother would sometimes hiss when I was a boy, thereby exiling me from my identity as someone who shared certain crucial traits of her family, of the Jägers and Jaegers, those self-dramatizing and grandiose Austro-Hungarian Jews for whom—because their handsome, high-browed faces and unusually blue eyes in their unusually deep sockets were merely the physical manifestations of the qualities of intelligence, artistic talent, culture, and refinement that they believed characterized them as a family, and which were summed up by the German word Feinheit, “refinement,” which they used of themselves a great deal and denied to those of whom they disapproved for whatever reason—the way you looked and who you looked like was of particular importance. I hate it when you’re so mean, she would say, glancing at my kinky hair. It’s the Mittelmark in you.

  The fact is that I know very well why Shmiel felt so awkward, that Monday in January, writing a letter to this man named Joe. For the Joe to whom Shmiel Jäger was writing, on that long-ago Monday, the “dear Cousin” to whom he addressed his mortified entreaty, was a Mittelmark; and even then, in January 1939, the bad blood between the Jägers and the Mittelmarks was already a generation old.

  The story of this bad blood looks, at first, like a story about feuding cousins. My grandfather and his siblings had, after all, been beholden to, uncomfortably indebted to, their wealthy Mittelmark uncle, who’d paid for their steamship passages to America; and then there was the awful fact that this debt had been paid off (as my grandfather saw it) in human flesh, in the flesh of two of the three Jäger girls, my grandfather’s sisters: the eldest, Ray, Ruchele, betrothed to that uncle’s unappealing son, Sam Mittelmark, her first cousin; and, after she died a week before the wedding, the youngest, Jeanette, Neche, married off to this same Cousin Sam after she’d had time to grow old enough to wed. Throughout his life my grandfather blamed that cousin for what he insisted were the unhappy lives, and what we know to have been the premature deaths, of those two girls, one at twenty-six, the other at thirty-five; and it is hard not to think that this poisonous resentment wasn’t shared, to some extent, by his other siblings as well, even far-off Shmiel.

  So it looks like a story of bad blood between cousins. But if you read carefully between the lines—if you are, at least, a person who’s grown up in a certain kind of family, a family, for instance, with five siblings—you realize that it must have started out as a story about poisonous feelings among brothers and sisters. When I was growing up, my grandfather would tell this story about the arranged marriages of his two sisters to their cousin, and as he related this irresistibly tragic tale he would linger above all on the anguish that these matches had caused his mother, who at the age of thirty-seven had found herself, suddenly, a widow with seven young children, and who after eight years of widowhood in Bolechow, of hardship and poverty and then a terrible war, was reduced, finally, to selling off—for surely this was the right way to put it—first one and then another of her lovely daughters to her rich brother in New York: the price she was forced to pay for tickets to America and a new life for her family. When I was growing up, my grandfather would tell this story and he would say, It broke her heart! And I would listen and think, How dramatic, how tragic, these bartered brides, these brides of death! But now, when I think about this story, I think, What kind of brother would compel a sister he loved to consent to such a marriage in the first place? And I wonder about the relationship between my great-grandmother Taube and her brother.

  But then, between siblings there can be trouble. Between siblings there can be small and ostensibly meaningless things that can simmer under the surface when you grow up together, many, perhaps too many, children in one small house, and then explode into rage or violence or both. Now when I ponder, Who would do that to his sister? I think of other things in my family history, things from the distant past and things more recent. I think of how, when I was ten and he was eight, I broke my brother Matt’s arm, just snapped it in a fit of rage during a fight one day out in the yard behind our parents’ house, the way you might snap a twig, and now I know that whatever the immediate reason for my violence was, the real reasons were murkier: the color of his hair, the fact that he had the middle name Jaeger, which I thought I deserved more; the fact that he liked sports and had friends at school, the fact that he was born too soon after I was. Close in age, we were not close in other ways: I can’t remember ever seeking out his company, when I was a child, and I am sure he didn’t want mine. I much preferred the company of our youngest brother, Eric, who like me was interested in (and, as soon became clear, more talented at) painting, drawing, art, and whom when I was around ten and he was only six I was trying to teach about ancient Egypt, a passion of mine just then, only so I’d have someone to talk to about it. In our basement, I would make myself costumes: pharaonic crowns made out of empty bleach containers, broad collars, kilts with cardboard fronts, the outfit of the oppressors of the Hebrews. In my room upstairs, I would put on my pharaonic regalia, hold my crook and flail, and, with the egotism of the older sibling, and no little vanity of my own, would make Eric recite aloud the names and dates of dynasties, which he gladly did because (I now realize, too late) he wanted me to love him, whereas all I wanted was not to be alone with my strange hobbies. So there we would be, me sitting on a child’s oak desk chair wearing a plastic crown painted blue, Eric kneeling before me, stumbling through names and dates about which he cared nothing at all, trying to please me.

  To Matthew, whose arm I snapped in two, I was, I now realize, less cruel. Perhaps that is why it was Matthew who would, against all odds, become my companion and partner in the search for Shmiel: for all of the many hundreds of photographs of our trips, first to Bolechow and then to Australia, Israel, and Scandinavia, and finally Ukraine one last time were, first, images that passed through his tawny eyes, eyes set in a face like that of one of the icons to which, for generations, the members of his wife’s Greek Orthodox family prayed. And perhaps that’s why Eric, the brother whom I, in my vanity and arrogance, my self-centered belief that what interested me must interest him, my desire to make him a moon circling the planet of myself, I had thought my companion, was the brother who, after years of this heedlessness on my part, I had estranged.

  Those murderous silences between brothers run through my family as surely as do certain genes. I think of my father, who for thirty-five years didn’t speak a word to his older brother, to whom I knew he had once been close, my Uncle Bobby whom my father, as a child growing up in the Bronx, had (I learned only after Bobby died) watched silently each morning as Bobby strapped the cumbersome braces to his pencil-thin legs. Bobby, whose polio, as so often happens, returned late in his life to kill him, and at whose funeral, a few months before I and four of my five siblings went in search of my grandfather’s unknown brother, my father read a eulogy of such poignancy and naked emotion that I realized only then that the reason he hadn’t spoken to him all those years was that the feelings were too strong, rather than too weak. I think of how, as in some bizarre zero-sum equation, as soon as my father had resumed talking to Bobby, he lost touch with his other brother, a gentle man, tall and bearing well into his adulthood and even old age the now almost-invisible traces of a terrible acne, who shared my brother Matt’s birthday, and who, an accomplished amateur photographer himself, was the first person to encourage Matt in the hobby that would eventually become his career.

  I think, too, of my grandfather, of how imperious and condescending he’d been to Uncle Julius, who’d committed no greater sin than to be unattractive and coarse in his manners, to lack Feinheit. I think of my grandfather and Shmiel, and wondered yet again what might have passed between them, what upsurge of unacknowledged and unknowable emotion that, in me, had led me one day to break my brother’s arm, might have led my grandfather to do something far more terrible, something I beg
an to worry about only when Shmiel’s letters were discovered.

  FOR WHEN, ON that January Monday in 1939, Shmiel sat down to write his letter, he needed money to save his truck; by the end of the year, he would be begging for money to save his life. Between January 1939 and December 1939, when the last letter got through, my grandfather’s brother wrote again and again, asking for money from my grandfather, from their younger sister, Jeanette, money this time not for trucks or repairs but for papers, affidavits, emigration papers for (at first) the four daughters, for (a little later on) two daughters, perhaps (finally) for one daughter, “the dear Lorka,” as he playfully called his eldest girl, whose given name, I know from a birth record sent to me a few years ago by the Polish State Archives, was Leah.

  Should the time of crisis not end immediately it will be impossible to endure things. If it were only possible for dear Sam [Mittelmark] to manage an affidavit for dear Lorka, then this would all be a little easier for me.

  I realize, on rereading these letters, that what makes them so uncannily moving is the second person address. Every letter, after all, is addressed to a “you”—“I bid you farewell and kiss you from the bottom of my heart,” is Shmiel’s favorite valediction—and because of this it is difficult, when reading letters, even letters addressed to other people, not to feel implicated, not to feel vaguely responsible. Reading Shmiel’s letters, after we found them, was to be my first experience of the strange proximity of the dead, who yet manage always to remain out of reach.

  As the requests for money get more strident, so too the references to the “troubles” Shmiel keeps mentioning. In the early spring, he writes my grandfather a bitter letter that begins “I turned 44 years old on 19th April of this year, and so far haven’t had a single good day, each time it’s something different.” He goes on: