The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  This subtle linkage between opposites—creation, destruction—recurs throughout Noach. For instance, just as the destruction narrated in Noach is linked to the prior act of creation described in Bereishit by the medium of earth (or, so to speak, mud), a further detail in the Flood narrative suggests, in turn, that we should see a link between the enormous destruction caused by the Flood and the next act of “creation”—that is, the new beginning of life, among the few survivors, that follows the Flood and reestablishes humankind on earth. For we are told in various midrashic commentaries that the waters of the Flood, the torrents that obliterated all living things from the face of Creation, were hot and sulfurous; but we are told in the Torah itself, at the beginning of Noach, that the ark, the vehicle of rescue and redemption from those sulfurous torrents, was made of a wood known as gopher—a name, Rashi comments, derived from gaf’riyth, “sulfur.” There is, therefore, a complex linkage between acts of creation, acts of drestruction, and acts of revival in Genesis, suggesting that these distinct and seemingly opposed acts are, in fact, coiled in an infinite and intricate loop.

  This interconnectedness suggests in turn another, larger point that the text wants us to be aware of. For if Noach were merely a tale of total annihilation—destruction without any survivors, without any new “creation”—it would soon lose our interest: it’s the existence of those very few survivors that helps us, ironically, to appreciate the scope of destruction. Conversely, to appreciate the preciousness of the lives that were saved, it is necessary to have a thorough appreciation of the horror from which they were so miraculously preserved.

  DEPENDING ON HOW you want to think about it, on how anxious you are about losing time, the trip from New York City to Australia takes either twenty-two hours or the better part of three days.

  The journey is divided into two legs. The first of these, according to the stewardess on the Qantas 747 that took me and Matt to Sydney in March 2003 to meet Jack Greene and the other Bolechowers there, is the “short flight,” although it constitutes what most people would think of as a significant journey in itself. We flew out of New York at 6:45 in the evening on the nineteenth, the day a war began—although, because we were in the air for so long, through the night on which the ultimatum expired and for most of the next day, too, we couldn’t be sure we were at war until a day and a half later—and then made our way across the continent, to Los Angeles. This took about five and a half hours. Then there was a stopover of about an hour’s duration in L.A., during which the plane had to receive a fresh crew because of, we were told, “industry regulations”: no single crew, a stewardess explained, is permitted to work through both legs of the flight—to work, in other words, for the entire length of time we were going to be flying. This information lent an air of emergency to the proceedings.

  Anyway, after we received our fresh crew, we all trundled back onto the plane, groggy and resentful, and then took off again. For the next sixteen hours, there was nothing beneath us but the Pacific Ocean. I had flown many times over the Atlantic, and had never really thought much about the size of oceans until I went around the world, to Australia, to meet five elderly Jews who had once lived in Bolechow and now lived there, five of what turned out to be twelve people still living who had once known Shmiel Jäger and his family, and who could tell me things about them. The Atlantic I had grown used to, and had come, I suppose, to seem manageable. The Pacific is vast.

  It is during the second leg of this long flight that you are most likely to become disoriented with respect to time. For the better part of a day there is nothing beneath you but water, indistinct and undifferentiated; the neutral quality of what you are able to see, when you look out of your window, reflects the quality of the time you are passing as you fly, which also is indistinct and undifferentiated. It is time that has no quality at all. If you make this journey, a journey I had not imagined I would ever make, the extremely pleasant Qantas stewards and stewardesses will bring you your meals from time to time and, handing you a tray with some steaming sealed dishes on it, will tell you that it is breakfast, say, or dinner; but after a while it’s difficult to tell whether these evenly spaced mealtimes are meant to correspond to those in the time zone you flew out of, or those over which you are flying, or perhaps some totally abstract, “virtual” time zone that exists in, and is particular to, the plane alone but nowhere else. In the end you must take their word for it, because you have no real sense of what time it really might be.

  AS I SAT in this plane, looking out the window and occasionally flipping through a dire-looking pamphlet about how to avoid something called “vascular thrombosis,” a circulatory crisis that can occur if you spend too long in a commercial jetliner’s pressurized cabin—which, of course, is precisely what Matt and I were doing—as I sat in this plane, hour after hour, I realized that the way in which the meals on board the plane had made me aware of a certain quality of time (or lack of quality) was reminding me of something from my childhood, something that had similarly connected mealtimes and the agonizing passage of bland hours.

  As I have said, my mother grew up in an Orthodox household, ruled over by her grand and domineering father, in whose elaborate observance of all the various holidays his wife, my grandmother Gerty (or, depending on who was addressing her, and under what circumstances, Golda), was an expert accomplice, cooking for him the superb and strictly kosher meals for which she was justifiably “famous,” in the tiny world that was her apartment building in the Bronx, even if my grandfather took pleasure in withholding the acclaim that everyone else gave her. (So, how is it, Aby? she would anxiously ask him after serving him a bowl of her soup, soups being her specialty; and he would answer, Soft!) She made her famous soups, my grandmother did, and her kneydlach and latkes and, every Hanukkah, her matzo brei, crisp on the outside and mushy within, dusted with confectioners’ sugar, and kept a kosher house. Scrupulously, Nana kept the fleyschadikh dishes, the dishes reserved for meals of meat, separate from the milkhadikh dishes, those that were reserved for dairy meals. Even the dish towels had to be kept strictly apart: one set (my mother has told me) bearing blue stripes, the other red. With equal scrupulousness, she strictly segregated from both of those sets of dishes the Peysadikh dishes, the Passover service, an ornate Bavarian service the colors of whose long-discontinued pattern (“Memphis”), even more than the images themselves (a stylized phoenix, perched atop a bower of orientalizing blossoms, grandly lofting one wing heavenward from the rim of each dinner plate, salad plate, bread plate, soup bowl, covered butter dish, soup tureen, creamer, sugar bowl, gravy boat), summon to mind another era entirely. For who now, really, cares to eat off such lavenders, citrines, turquoises, ivories, teals, oranges?

  Hence my mother’s family was, as they would have said, frum, deeply religious. But my father’s family, as I have also mentioned, was just as profoundly irreligious. It was because my father grew up in a household that was in many ways the diametric opposite of the one in which my mother was raised, a household unbound by traditions, by Judaism, by Europe, that we did not observe the Jewish holidays when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s to the extent that my mother had done when she was growing up in the 1930s and 1940s. Yom Kippur, however, was an exception. This had less to do with the august status of this holiest of holy days on the Jewish calendar than with the fact that it was the only Jewish holiday that had any intellectual or (as I always suspect) aesthetic appeal to my father, who is after all a scientist, a person who likes the idea of rigor, of absolutes, even of hardship. He enjoyed the self-denial, the abnegation of Yom Kippur. And so it was that every year, although he almost never set foot in the tiny, strange synagogue to which my mother took me and my brothers and sister over the years, the synagogue where, one day as she and I were walking into the Yizkor, or Memorial, service that comes toward the close of the Yom Kippur observances, she told me that her uncle Shmiel had had four beautiful daughters who had been raped before they were all killed by the Nazis—although my
father never set foot in this place for Yom Kippur services, he always strictly fasted. He would, in fact, keep a careful eye on the clock to make sure that no one broke fast until precisely twenty-four hours had elapsed.

  Most of those anguishingly slow-moving twenty-four hours, I should admit, were not usually spent by any of us, including my mother, in the little synagogue we went to. And yet because of some obscure flavor of uncanniness and, slightly, of scariness that clung to this one day of the year in our family (very likely because of the stories about it that my grandfather liked to tell, such as the one about the woodcutter), the twenty-four hours of fasting were, it was understood, not to be spent doing anything “frivolous.” Playing with toys was considered frivolous; so was watching TV. Go read, do something serious, my mother would tell us, absentmindedly, as she checked, with supreme self-control (it seemed to me then) the pans of roasting lamb or chicken, the potatoes, the vast, hotel-sized electric coffee urn that everyone pretended to be shocked by but secretly enjoyed, when they saw it churning away (“so many people this year!”), the sweet and savory noodle casseroles or kugels, the platters of smoked salmon and sable and whitefish that awaited the onslaught of the thirty or forty or so guests who, each year, would descend on my parents’ small split-level house for the breaking of a fast that most, but not all, of the guests kept. (An aunt whom I loved, petite, redheaded, foulmouthed, and pretty in, everyone used to say, a goyish way, would sit on my parents’ living room sofa and say, I’m just having some coffee, because coffee doesn’t count!) So we children would go do serious things. But between not being able to eat and not being able to watch our regular after-school TV programs, which were the most reliable markers of time when I was a kid, the day of the fast, that one day of the year, felt impossibly long, without any character at all except a feeling of anticipation, a day stripped of all the recognizable features that on every other day made, and make, the passage of time bearable.

  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.

  LIKE 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.

  THERE 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, s
imply 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.