The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  There is one more picture, a photo of a small group of people who are standing far from the camera lens, perhaps on a pavement, an image it took me years to decipher. This was partly because it’s somewhat blurry and the faces are impossible to make out, partly because of the strange angle from which it was taken: an odd diagonal line cuts across the bottom left of the picture. Only recently did I realize that my grandfather took this picture on the day he left Israel, indeed at the moment he was going up the gangplank of the ship that took him and my grandmother back home, after their year in Israel; it was, I saw, the gangplank’s railing that slices diagonally across the left side of the photo. Only after I understood what that angled bar was could I see that the small group standing below was Uncle Itzhak and his family, waiting on the dock for my grandparents to sail away.

  IT WOULD BE nearly twenty years before anyone else in my family visited the Israeli cousins, and another thirty years after that, exactly, before I myself went, although as I have said what I was interested in was not Israel but Bolechow. But during those twenty years, Israel made itself felt. Occasionally, as those years passed, we would have Israeli visitors to the house, people who to my young mind were interestingly exotic and, for that reason above all, worth attending to. There was, for instance, a certain woman, somewhat younger than my parents, called Yona—another one of those mysteriously curt Israeli names, the clipped, stripped-down syllables of which seemed to me, then, to represent some essential quality of Israel itself: pared down, small, necessarily practical, impatient with sentimental ornament. This Yona would occasionally appear at our house alone, but more often would come with my grandfather who was, for a short time in the mid-1960s, “between wives,” as I once overheard someone say, before I knew what it really meant—the minds of children being quite literal, I envisioned my grandfather squished between my dead Nana and some other woman—and before I understood the underlying disdain of the comment. It was this overheard remark, perhaps, that made me wonder once, to my mother as she heated a pan filled with the tiny baby peas that were the only peas my grandfather would eat, whether Yona was going to marry Grandpa.

  Yona! my mother laughed, shaking her head. No, silly, Yona is our cousin!

  Since my mother is an only child, I had learned by then that when she talked about “cousins”—as when she talked about certain “aunts” and “uncles”—she was referring to relatives of mine whose connection to me and my siblings was, in fact, fairly remote—if indeed they were related to us at all. So I took it on faith that this youngish woman, attractive in a remote way, her black hair piled in a bouffant above her languid face, was connected to my Jaeger family somehow, and that I must be nice to her. I wanted to be nice to her anyway, since as young as I was I sensed that the attention she paid to me then was special. Such blue eyes he has! she would tell my mother, rather intensely. And indeed she was quite serious. Only my grandfather, as far as anyone knew, could make her laugh, my grandfather who would teasingly call her Yona geblonah! and tell scandalous stories to her in languages I did not, then, understand. But then my grandfather married the first of the three wives who succeeded my grandmother, and instead of Yona there would come to our house in the summers first Rose and then Alice and then, finally, Ray, Raya with the tattoo on her forearm, Raya who would always take care to occupy my father’s chair at the head of the table every night and then feign surprise when he’d stand next to her, looking down expectantly at the beginning of the meal, Raya who, when she finally ate, would hunch over her plate as if fearful, even now, that someone would take away her food; and maybe it was because of all those wives that we somehow lost track of Yona, who by the end of the 1960s had stopped visiting us on Long Island, and we never saw her again.

  Also in the 1960s we had our first visit from Elkana. He was, then, young, dark, rather dashing; his ability to get the local police department to fly him over our house in a helicopter seemed, to me, to be a reflection of his importance in the world, of his glamour. Elkana wasn’t a very tall man—no Jäger was, or so I thought until I learned better—but he had an expansive and commanding presence, much as my grandfather had had. It was both jarring and pleasing to me to see this familiar personality now worn by someone else, translated, on this younger, subtle, and foxy face, with its amused eyes and dashing mustache, into something vaguely exotic. When he came to visit us, sometimes alone and sometimes with his beautiful wife, Ruthie, who, we had already heard, wide-eyed, had never cut her hair, and who would let me watch her, sometimes, as she coiled her amazing blond braids around her head each morning in our blue-tiled bathroom, Elkana would promise us that if we would only come to Israel, he would make things easy for us, wonderful, first-class.

  With me, he would say (wiss me), you won’t have to do anything (anyssing) but get off the plane—no customs, no immigration, no passport controls, nussing. Just leave everyssing up to me! His voice, when he spoke, was even, amused, authoritative, spiced with the English-speaking Israeli’s citrus vowels and thickly buzzing consonants. Dehniel, he would call me. All ze best! he would say when parting or hanging up the telephone.

  In 1973, soon after my bar mitzvah, my parents finally took him up on his invitation. I was happy they were going: my grandfather and Ray were going to babysit for us five kids while my mother and father were gone. Let them have Israel; I had my grandfather.

  My parents had been planning this trip for a long time, because my grandfather had always wanted my mother to meet his brother, his adored brother whom he loved best of all. In the fall of 1972, which is when the plans for my bar mitzvah the following April were getting under way, my parents were also beginning to plan their first trip abroad, the long-postponed, long-awaited trip to Israel. But in December of that year, Uncle Itzhak died. Born with the century, he was seventy-two. It was a devastating blow to my mother to have come so close to meeting this storied relative—a mere four months would have made all the difference—and then to be denied, forever, the possibility of connecting to him. A couple of months after his death, close family friends happened to be traveling in Israel and, because they were close friends, then, ended up spending some time with Elkana there. They returned to Long Island from this trip with a precious cargo: among the many slides that they’d taken during their trip, a few were of Itzhak’s gravestone. One night, not too long before my parents themselves went to Israel, we set up the slide projector in our living room and there, on the immaculate white-painted walls of our house, there appeared what was to be my first-ever glimpse of the name “Jäger” as it looks when spelled out in Hebrew characters on a gravestone—a sight I would not see again for nearly thirty years, when in the overgrown cemetery in Bolechow we so unexpectedly came across the tombstone of my grandfather’s and Itzhak’s distant cousin, Chaya Sima Jäger, née Kasczka.

  On the wall of my parents’ living room, vastly enlarged, what you saw was this:

  It was soon after my bar mitzvah, the occasion on which my voice so humiliatingly broke on the final few words of my haftarah, that my parents flew to Tel Aviv. From this trip there are, of course, many stories. My mother likes to tell, for instance, about how, just as Elkana had promised years before, she and my father were spared the arduous line at customs and were, instead, whisked away in a waiting car; about the instantaneous affection between my cerebral father and old Aunt Miriam, the multilingual intellectual whose fiery Zionism, we knew, had been responsible for saving her family; about the secret nighttime trips to Arab neighborhoods where the restaurants were unequaled, the late nights out in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv with friends. (It was shocking for me to hear this, since—my curiosity having never been engaged enough to read very much—I still thought of the entire country as a sea of brand-new two-story concrete apartment blocks.) And she would talk about how they then went to Haifa, where Aunt Miriam and her other child lived, Elkana’s sister, Bruria: Miriam upstairs and Bruria and her family downstairs, and about how as different groups of friends and relatives, some belongin
g to Miriam and some to Bruria, would come by to visit the American cousins, my mother would, like a character in a farce, race up and down the stairs, up and down all day, in order to make sure that she’d spent enough time with each group of relatives. One detail in particular snared my interest. Oh, Daniel, my mother said, when she and my father called from Israel very quickly to see how we were all doing, you should see Aunt Miriam’s photo album! She has Aunt Jeanette’s wedding picture, it’s the one I lost, she’s in a gown made entirely of lace that the Mittelmarks bought for her. She’s so beautiful. As she said this, it seemed both odd and thrilling to me to think that these far-off relatives had photographs of my family.

  And there was, most famous of all the stories, the tale of my mother’s attempt to explain what cholesterol was to a group of distant cousins, in the only common language they all (more or less) spoke, which was Yiddish. My mother still loves to tell this story, and even now I can’t help smile as I hear her repeating it, as she did just the other day:

  And so I said, Es iss azoy, di cholesterol iss di schmutz, und dass cholesterol luz di blit nisht arayngeyhen!

  And then the cousins suddenly looked at me and said, Ahhhh, DUSS iss di cholesterol!

  And yet although I love this story, what interested me about it the last time she told it was a detail that she had either never mentioned before, or one that I’d merely let slip because I hadn’t been interested in it: that the cousins to whom she was striving so mightily to describe the latest American health obsession were “Jägers from Germany.” Who were they, exactly? I asked my mother recently, when she was reminiscing about that trip to Israel. I thought I might know: my grandfather, years earlier, had told me that one of his father’s brothers had settled in Germany, and another in England, but beyond that he knew nothing. And now, it seemed that in 1973 there had been Jäger cousins from Germany in Israel.

  Who were they? I repeated. But thirty years later, my mother couldn’t remember.

  The tantalizing but frustrating appearance of those lost Jäger cousins reminds me of why I never wanted to go to Israel for so long. When I grew up at my grandfather’s knee, listening to his stories and, later, writing them down and entering information on index cards and (later still) in computer programs, it seemed to me that what our family meant, where its value lay, was inseparable from its long history in Europe, a history that my grandfather tried so hard, I now realize, to convey to me through the many stories he told. Of course I knew, abstractly, intellectually, what Israel was supposed to mean, historically and religiously and politically, both for Jews in general and, of course, for my family. (He left just in the nick of time!) And I knew, moreover—I, who even as a child was interested in ancient Greece and Rome, would spend my free time building models of ancient temples—that Israel, the place itself, boasted a history that, like that of Greece or Rome, went back millennia, and boasted ancient ruins of every provenance, too. But I still had little interest in going there, as if the newness of my relatives’ presence there was a consideration that outweighed the ancientness of the place’s history—a history in which my family had had no part, until thirty years earlier, whereas its history in Europe, in Austria-Hungary, in Poland, in Bolechow, I knew, went back to that distant time when the Jägers first came to Bolechow, which, I also knew, was when the Jews themselves had first come, centuries ago. I had no more interest in visiting my Israeli relatives than someone interested in the American Civil War would have in visiting my family in their split-level house on Long Island.

  And so it was because my grandfather seduced me with enticing stories that were always about the distant past, when I was still young enough to believe everything he told me, that I had no interest in Israel, that brand-new place. Indeed, it was because of my grandfather, I now see, that I would spend so much of my life researching the distant past, not just his ancient family history, the same family living in the same house for four hundred years, a family of prosperous merchants and clever businessmen, a family who knew who they were in the world because they had lived for so long in the same place, but other, even more ancient histories, the histories of the Greeks and Romans, which, although seemingly so different from the history of these Austro-Hungarian Jews, also told their comic and, more often, their tragic tales, their stories of wars and ruin, of young maidens sacrificed for the good of their families, of brothers locked in deadly struggles, of generations of a given family destined, it seemed, to repeat the same dreadful mistakes over and over again.

  It was from my grandfather that I developed my taste for what is old, and because of that, I never wanted to go to Israel until I learned that in Israel, as late as the year 2003, there lived a handful of Bolechowers.

  I ARRIVED IN Israel on June 26, a Thursday.

  Or, I should say, we arrived. Matt hadn’t been able to come with me on this trip, because in May of that year he had had his first child, and couldn’t get away; we were already talking of a return trip later on, maybe, when I’d go back to Israel and he’d come with me to shoot the survivors I’d be seeing there, the five Bolechowers now living in Israel whom Shlomo Adler had arranged for me to meet. Apart from Shlomo himself there was Anna Heller Stern, who was Lorka’s friend; she lived now in Kfar Saba, a suburb of Tel Aviv where my mother’s cousin Elkana lived, too. (You should come already to Israel, Elkana had told me years ago, in his knowing and throaty voice, the voice of someone used to giving orders and being obeyed, of someone who just knows, a Jäger voice. And you should come already and meet the family, he told me years before I ever dreamed of going to Bolechow, of writing a book. And, knowing how to bait the hook, he had added, Also there’s a woman here who was Lorka’s friend, you’ll talk to her. It was in this same voice that he’d said, over the phone, about a year before I finally did go to Israel, after I’d sent him the immense printout of the Jäger family tree that I’d generated from the new genealogy software I’d bought, the family tree that now went back to the birth, in 1746, of my distant ancestress Scheindl Jäger, a document so large I had to mail it in a tube, since when fully extended it covered most of my living-room floor—it was in this same voice that he’d told me, after I’d called to find out if he’d had a chance to look at it, Yes, it’s very impressive, a very good research you made. But there are mistakes—I’ll tell you when you come to Israel.)

  So there was Anna Heller Stern.

  And there were, of course, Shlomo and his cousin Josef Adler who, as young boys, had been hidden by that Ukrainian peasant, and for this reason were the only ones of their families to survive. And there was, too, the Reinharz couple, Solomon and Malcia, who now lived in Beer Sheva, far to the south of Tel Aviv, a couple who were newly married in 1941, Shlomo had told me in one of the many e-mails we’d exchanged before I finally went. He’d told me that during the terrible roundup for the second Aktion, this Reinharz pair had somehow broken free and had hidden for a long time in the space between the ceiling and the roof of a building that was to become an amusement hall for the German occupiers—a casino, as Shlomo called it.

  We would interview them, too, Shlomo assured me. He had arranged everything, he said. He would drive me himself. I thanked him, gratefully. For neither the first nor last time in what has become a long and complicated friendship with this big bear of a man, a man whose broad and incisive gestures and emotional voice have left their traces on every videotape I have of my trip to Israel, gestures and intonations I hear even when reading his e-mails, now, I sensed that behind Shlomo’s offers of assistance, the tremendous energy of his communications, his enthusiasm, there lay the shadow of something else, more personal to him: his own need to stay connected to Bolechow, to his lost childhood and lost life.

  So those, I agreed with Matt, were the people we would have to come back and visit again, at whatever point in the future Matt felt he could leave his new child, the latest addition to the family that, officially at least, began in 1746 with the birth of Scheindl Jäger.

  But still, I wasn�
��t alone on this trip. I was traveling with a friend; a friend despite the fact, one that I never think of, really, that she is a woman of my mother’s generation; a friend who is, like me, a classicist—indeed, a specialist above all in Greek tragedy, a genre that (as I am sure even Rashi would agree) has never been surpassed for the concision and elegance with which it ponders and portrays the disastrous collisions of accident and fate, of the individual will and the larger, seemingly random forces of History: those luminous and scalding points in time where men confront the inscrutable will of the Divine and must decide who is responsible for the enormities visited upon them. When I was in my twenties I went to graduate school to do a doctorate in Classics, went specifically to the university where Froma, this woman who is now my friend, taught, because I had been so electrified by the articles of hers that I’d read in scholarly journals, articles in which the style of the writing, sinuous, allusive, complex, brilliantly layered, almost woven, perfectly mirrored the characteristics of the texts she sought to illuminate, texts that themselves made their subtle and beautiful meanings felt by means of complex interweavings, delicate but persistent allusions, small things that culminated in large and stirring comments about the way things work. I read these articles, when I was twenty-two and twenty-three, and I wanted to know her; and so went to where she was. Now she is so familiar to me, but I still remember the impression she made when I first entered her office, with its notorious metastasizing piles of books and masses of papers; several long brown cigarettes of different lengths were burning down in chunky glass ashtrays, forgotten. She was surprisingly (to me) small, and whereas I had expected someone who looked severe—I was still young enough to confuse brilliance with severity, then—there she was, disarmingly accessible, with her round, alert face, the feathery light-brown hair, close-cropped, and of course the famous clothes, the velvets and leathers in complicated hues, the Cubist bags with latches in unexpected places. We talked for only a few minutes that day when I first visited her, and at the end of our conversation she fixed me with one of those sudden, intense gazes of hers and said, in her low, slightly gravelly voice, But of course you must come here, it would be an embarras de richesses!