From this pathetic woman my diabetic grandmother whom I loved so much inherited the golden hair that was my mother’s, too, which is why my brother Matt (of whom I, with my kinky, inky adolescent frizz, was once so jealous) had such beautiful white-blond hair when he was a boy; why I have always thought that he looked, with that hair and his slightly Tatar, slanted eyes and the austere planes of his face, both like the figure in an icon and like the Slavs who would have worshipped it. The Slavs, that is to say, who on some unknowable day in the 1880s descended on a town near Odessa and raped, and pillaged, and burned the houses of some insignificant Jews to the ground, which is why my great-grandmother came to America, and which was, indeed, how some of my family had come to have such blond, blond hair in the first place.
BUT THE BEST of all the stories were, naturally, the ones told by my mother’s father, since after all he was the only one of my relatives who’d made the remarkable trip to America and had been old enough at the time to have anything to remember about it. How was the trip to America, you want to know? my grandfather would repeat, chuckling softly, when I interviewed him about his life. I couldn’t tell you, because I was in the toilet throwing up the whole time! But of course this self-deprecating joke, meant to suggest that there was no story to tell, was part of the story of his coming to America, a story, as I knew, that had many chapters. In no particular order, I remember, now, these stories: the one about how he and his sister, my glum Aunt Sylvia, whom he always called Susha, and whose name appears on the passenger manifest, now available online through the Ellis Island database, as Sosi Jäger, had traveled “for weeks” to get from Lwów to Rotterdam “where the boat was waiting,” he would say, and being a child with little knowledge of the world, I would be impressed, back then, to think that such a big boat would wait for these two young people from Bolechow, a false impression that my grandfather did little to correct; and then how, after the long trip on the train, from Lwów to Warsaw, then Warsaw through Germany to the Netherlands, they almost missed the boat, because the girls had such long hair.
Because the girls had such long hair?! I would exclaim. The first time I heard this story, which was so long ago that I can’t remember when it might have been, I asked this question because I was genuinely perplexed; only now do I understand how sophisticated a storyteller my grandfather was, what a brilliant tease because the girls had such long hair was, how it was intended to make me ask just that question, so that he could launch into his story. Later on, I asked it simply because I knew he wanted me to.
Yes, because the girls had such long hair! he would go on, sitting there in the webbed garden chair on the broad stoop outside the front door to my parents’ house, surveying the neighborhood, as he liked to do when he visited, with an expression of lordly satisfaction, as if he were somehow responsible for the split-level houses in their many odd colors, the neat lawns, the spiral topiaries pointing to the clear summer sky, the silence of this weekday noon. And then he would tell me how, before boarding the big boat that took him and my perennially disappointed aunt to America, all the steerage passengers had to be inspected for lice, and because the girls, including my twenty-two-year-old great-aunt Sylvia, had such long hair in those days, these preboarding examinations took a very long time, and at a certain point my grandfather (who today, I suspect, we would describe as suffering from severe anxiety, although in those days people just said he was “meticulous”) panicked.
So what did you do? I would ask, on cue.
And he would say, So I yelled Fire! Fire! and in all the confusion, I took your aunt Susha’s hand and we ran up the gangplank and got on the boat! And that’s how we came to America.
He would tell this story with an expression that hovered between self-congratulation and self-deprecation, as if simultaneously pleased and (now) slightly embarrassed by the youthful audacity that, if this story is not a lie, had won him his trip to America.
THERE WERE, TO be sure, other stories about this trip to America, stories I often heard when my grandfather came to visit and I would hang quietly about the house in the hopes that he’d decide to sit down and talk to me, waiting for him to finish reading the paper, maybe the Times or, more likely, The Jewish Week (to which, after my mother married my father, he had bought them a subscription because, he said, he was afraid she’d forget how to be Jewish). He would read his paper slowly, letting his large head move down the left side and then jerking it up and to the right as he took in the print on the opposite side. Silently watching him read—for you never, ever interrupted my grandfather, no matter what he was doing—I would wait for him to finish and hope he’d be in the mood to tell me stories…Or I would wait for him to finish drinking his prune juice, which, he liked to say, was good for the machinery, or to finish quietly talking to my mother as she did her nails at the kitchen table in front of the big bay window, or, standing in the “big” bathroom, which was tiled in pale blue, to finish taking, with great precision, one or more of the many, many pills he carried with him in a pale brown calfskin attaché case. My grandfather was a hypochondriac, we all knew, and evidently his various doctors humored him; each night and some mornings he’d stand in my mother’s gleaming bathroom and line up a bunch of pills and, one by one, swallow them in turn with a matter-of-fact smile. Since my father disapproved of medicines, pills, and even doctors in general, about whom he had great suspicions and toward whom, as a group, great if vague animosity (and why not, given what he’d spent his boyhood watching?), he would sneer, not so secretly, at my grandfather’s rituals with the pills. But we children loved to watch Grandpa take his medicines when he visited, a ritual that, like so much else, he made somehow funny. Tonight, he’d say, looking at the long row of pharmacist’s bottles in mock confusion, like a housewife confronted by a daunting array of detergents or breakfast cereals, maybe I’ll take a blue one and a red one.
So I waited for him to finish doing whichever of his routines he happened to be doing and tell me these stories about his many travels and many adventures. The one about How Crowded the Boat Was, the one about How Afraid He and Aunt Sylvia Were of Being Robbed and So They Hid Their Money Wrapped in a Kerchief, or, worse, How Seasick He Was, how it made him never want to travel by ship again. How, after two weeks on the boat, the famous two weeks of being sick, they had arrived in New York and tried to make their way to the location of the rendezvous their Mittelmark cousin had designated, and how everyone he talked to had replied to his queries with blank stares. He would, he told me, approach people and utter the name of this place with an interrogatory tone of voice: Timmess skvar? Timmess skvar? and it wasn’t until he wrote it down on a piece of paper that someone finally laughed and pointed him in the right direction: Times Square. And from Times Square my grandfather and great-aunt, accompanied by their English-speaking cousin, went to the Lower East Side, to East Fourth Street, to live in the apartment of their uncle, Abe Mittelmark, a red-haired man whose estrangement from, or resentment toward, his only sister, my great-grandmother, was responsible, as I like to think, for the cruel matrimonial deal-making that would set the Jägers against the Mittelmarks for generations to come; and which was not the only instance of internecine sibling conflicts in my family.
Now, when I think of that trip, I whose longest journey was twenty-two hours in a business-class seat on a 747, I am impressed by the audacity he had to have simply to make the trip in the first place. As I write this I am looking at his Polish passport, the one with which he made that unimaginable journey, and although he is dead now and can no longer tell his stories, the document has its own tales to tell. By deciphering the elegant official handwriting with which its blanks are filled in, scrutinizing the visas and stamps, I can, with far greater precision than my grandfather was ever concerned with when he told his stories, reconstruct his trip to America.
I can, for instance, tell you that the passport (“DOWÓD OSOBISTY,” “identification paper”), number 19272/20, was issued to him at Dolina, the small village t
o the south of Bolechow that was the administrative center for the region, and where my grandfather’s mother’s family, the Mittelmarks, once lived, on the ninth of October 1920. Affixed to it is a small black-and-white photograph of my grandfather, the earliest known image of him. He is standing, it seems, against a wooden wall of some kind; the familiar face is smooth, serious, the nearsighted eyes very deep-set, the hair, still very thick, swept back from the high widow’s peak that I would inherit. The ears stick out ever so slightly, something I do not remember. The collar of his white shirt is narrow and uncomfortable-looking, and the extremely high, narrow lapels of the jacket he is wearing seem impossibly antique. The passport also provides a written description: stature “medium,” face “oval,” hair “dark,” eyes “blue,” mouth “medium”—precisely what this means I cannot say—and nose “straight.”
As I read this description now, having heard certain stories in which straight noses and blue eyes are elements on which the outcome depended, I wonder, not for the first time, how my sly, blue-eyed, straight-nosed grandfather would have fared, if he, like his older brother, had decided not to make the trip during which he used this passport. It is something my brother Andrew and I have discussed, when reminiscing about my grandfather and his tricks.
I bet he would have survived, Andrew once said, knowing well that there were other stories of my grandpa’s ingenuity, the times he bluffed and stonewalled people into giving him what he wanted, deals and breaks and, the one time I was a witness to his special kind of dexterity, when I was fourteen, a free wide-screen television from a savings bank—not for him, the account holder, but for my mother, which was, technically, against the rules. I, too, like to think that my grandfather, had he not made his long journey to Timess skvar in 1920, would have somehow used his talent to get what he wanted, to survive…
…AS I know, for instance, that Mrs. Begley, to whom I sometimes spoke about my grandfather and who also was lucky enough to be blond and blue-eyed, survived.
You see, I was fair, and I spoke German, she told me on one of my first visits to her apartment on the East Side, perhaps the first, in January 2000, when I was afraid she wouldn’t want to talk about the past, especially the war, but she surprised me by talking of little else, by even weeping, suddenly, at one point, as she pointed out to me the name, in the Yizkor book for her town, Stryj, of that seventeen-year-old boy who didn’t survive: whether a relative or a family friend, I couldn’t remember until I recently found the Stryj Yizkor book, the Sefer Stryj, online, and located the page on which she had showed me a list of names of the dead, a page bearing the Hebrew heading Sh’mot shel Qidoshei Striy, “Names of the Martyrs of Stryj.” (It’s perhaps worth stopping here to note that the Hebrew word qidush, “martyr” or “sacrifice,” is derived, as is the word for “sacrifice” in certain other languages, from the word “holy,” q-d-sh. The use of qidush in this way is consistent with the concept in Judaism known as qidush HaShem, which refers to dying in the name of a Jewish cause, the idea being that through the process of dying, you sanctify, or make holy (qdsh) God’s name—HaShem meaning “the Name.” The traditional example would be Hannah and her seven sons, who all died at the hands of Antiochus—this would have been Antiochus IV, the Hellenistic monarch of the Hanukkah story—because they wouldn’t eat pork or bow down to idols. But the use of the phrase also extends to Holocaust victims, who died based on the fact that they were Jewish.)
“Names of the Martyrs of Stryj” was, in any event, the page on which Mrs. Begley’s late husband, the very big doctor from Stryj whose name an old Ukrainian woman had instantly recognized six decades later, had caused to be entered the following text:
BEGLEITER-BEGLEY EDWARD DAVID Dr.
commemorates:
BEGLEITER SIMON, Father
BEGLEITER IDA, Mother
SEINFELD MATYLDA, Sister
SEINFELD ELIAS, Brother-in-law
HAUSER OSCAR & HELENA, Parents in law
SEINFELD HERBERT, Nephew
This Herbert Seinfeld, she told me as her low, deliberate voice broke, this Herbert Seinfeld had already had his emigration papers but failed to get out in time.
A boy of seventeen, she had said that day, weeping a little. He almost got out, but he didn’t make it.
I had said nothing, feeling embarrassed by this unexpected display of emotion. It was my fault: I’d asked her to show me this Yizkor book from Stryj because I wanted to see if Shmiel and his family were listed there among the names of the victims; his wife, Ester, as we knew, had been from Stryj. (And Minnie Spieler had been from Stryj, too.) And indeed there they were:
SCHNEELICHT EMIL
commemorates:
SCHEITEL HELENE, Sister
SCHEITEL JOSEPH, Brother-in-law & 3 child.
SCHNEELICHT MORRIS, Brother
SCHNEELICHT ROS, Sister-in-law & 5 child.
JAEGER ESTER, Sister
JAEGER SAMNET, Brother-in-law and 4 child.
SCHNEELICHT SAUL, Brother, wife & 5 child.
SCHNEELICHT BRUNO, Brother
SCHNEELICHT SABINA, Sister-in-law
This is why I had wanted to look at the Sefer Stryj, and it goes without saying that if I had located this book years ago, I would have known that my great-aunt Ester had had a brother Emil who had not perished, and perhaps would have found him sooner than the day in 1999 when his son had called me out of the blue from Oregon to tell me, among other things, that Minnie Spieler was Ester’s sister.
So I looked at the names of my dead—noticing, for how could I not, that Shmiel’s name, SAMUEL, had been grossly misspelled, perhaps because of the same peculiarity of handwriting, the crossed lower-case l, a tic, now lost but once widespread among a certain echelon of people from a certain place, that had transformed Shmiel’s “Ruchaly” into “Ruchatz” in my eyes—I looked at these names, whose presence on the page seemed obscurely like a confirmation of something, perhaps of the fact that these people for whom I was searching existed outside of my family’s private memories and stories of them, and for that reason was satisfying to me. But as I looked I suddenly felt foolish for having asked Mrs. Begley to look in her book for my relatives, whom I never knew and who meant something rather abstract for me at that point, when so many of hers, so much closer to her, were there, too.
You see, she repeated, pulling the book away from me slightly to run a cool, translucent hand over it, I was fair, and I spoke German. I could pass. My mother was very beautiful, but in a Jewish way. She was what they called a real Rebecca, a beautiful Jewish woman.
She stopped speaking for a few moments and simply looked across at me, steadily but warily, from beneath her hooded eye, the good one—whether to compose herself for the next story or (more likely, I suspect) because she doubted I could appreciate what she was telling me, I cannot say. I sipped my tea in silence. Then she took a breath that was also a sigh, and started telling me her own stories of slyness and survival, and other stories, too. Of, for instance, how, successfully hidden herself, she had bribed someone to bring her parents and in-laws to a certain place from which she would take them to safety, during the great roundup of Stryj’s Jews in the fall of 1941, and how when she arrived at this rendezvous she saw a wagon filled with dead bodies passing by, and on top of the pile of bodies were those of the elderly people she had come to rescue.
You see, she said, I recognized my father-in-law by the shock of long white hair that he had.
And then she added this: Because she herself was in danger, was “passing” at that point, she couldn’t allow herself to betray any emotion when she saw the bodies of her family passing by in the wagon….
…SO WHEN I hear about slyness, and survival, and the color of one’s hair or eyes, I think of Mrs. Begley, and I am also tempted to think of my grandfather and wonder whether he would have survived, too. But then, as I know, many clever people did not.
What else can my grandfather’s passport tell us, apart from the fact that at the age of eight
een he was fair, blue-eyed, and straight-nosed? I knew from his stories that he arrived in November 1920. (This element of his story is one that can be confirmed by the Ellis Island Web site: he did indeed arrive on the seventeenth of November 1920, on the SS Nieuw Amsterdam, accompanied by a sister to whom the records refer as “Sosi Jäger” from “Belchow, Poland,” the latter being a name that I know to be inaccurate but which someone else might, at this moment, be carefully writing down on a notecard somewhere). But what, exactly, happened between the ninth of October, when he received his passport, and the seventeenth of November, when we know he arrived? The passport fills in many blanks of this particular journey. For instance, I know that on the twelfth of October he was in Warsaw, where he visited the Dutch and American consulates. I know that on the fourteenth of October he went to the German consulate, where he received a transit visa for passage through Germany en route to the Netherlands. I know from various border stamps that he and Aunt Sylvia entered Germany at Schneidemühl on the eighteenth of October, passed through that country, and exited the next day, the nineteenth, at Bentheim, whence they passed across the German-Dutch border to Oldenzaal, at the eastern border of the Netherlands, and that from Oldenzaal they then proceeded west to Rotterdam, where, after perhaps ten days of waiting in the Netherlands, on the fifth of November 1920—having yelled Fire! Fire! because he was afraid of missing the boat—my grandfather and his sister finally boarded the SS Nieuw Amsterdam, a seventeen-thousand-ton, fourteen-year-old, single-stack liner of the Holland America Line, six-hundred and fifteen feet long and sixty-eight feet wide, accommodating 2,886 passengers in total (of whom 2,200 were, like my grandfather and great-aunt Sylvia, relegated to steerage), and commanded by P. van den Heuvel, who, on arriving in New York Harbor twelve days later, signed an affidavit stating that he had “caused the surgeon of said vessel…to make a physical and mental examination of each and all of the aliens named in the foregoing Lists or Manifest Sheets, 30 in number, and that from the report of said surgeon…no one of said aliens is of any of the classes excluded from admission into the United States.”
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Page 21