The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  It occurred to me, as I learned all this, that to me, part of the appeal of Jews like Rambam and Saadia Gaon was their immense cosmopolitanism, which was in turn a reflection of the richly layered imperial cultures in which they lived. Cultures in which, say, Arab-speaking Jews wrote treatises meant to combat the popular intellectual appeal of ancient Greek philosophers; cultures not that different, in their way, from the richly layered one in which my grandfather grew up, another imperial culture in which Jewishness was, for a while, one of many vivid strands woven into a complicated but beautiful pattern, a pattern that is now, as we know, in tatters. It will seem odd, but when I read about Saadia, I thought of my grandfather, who of course was not a man of immense learning or great intellectual subtlety, but who was an Orthodox European Jew who spoke seven languages and who, even after the Second World War, would go to Bad Gastein in the heart of Austria to take the waters, because that was what you did if you were a certain kind of European person, a subject of a certain vanished empire. Two years after Froma and I walked through the Beth Hatefutsoth, ogling the diorama of Saadia Gaon, we sat in a café in L’viv talking avidly about the remarkable richness of that city’s prewar culture, in which Jews and Poles and Austrians and Ukrainians had coexisted, in which Ukrainian priests would lunch regularly at a certain famous gefilte fish restaurant cheek by jowl with Polish bureaucrats and Jewish merchants. Now it’s just completely homogenous, Froma said, rather forlornly, perhaps even with a tinge of disapproval, as she looked at the slender and quite pretty blond Ukrainian women walking up the avenue, past Beaux-Arts and Secession buildings that had been built, a hundred years earlier, by Austrians. I looked at her and said, mischievously, I know, it’s like having a country only of Jews. She gave me a look and I took another swallow of my Ukrainian beer, which was called L’VIVSKAYA.

  To return to the tenth century A.D.: the most vital struggle that Saadia conducted during his scholarly career was his ongoing attacks on the sect known as the Karaites. Starting in the ninth century A.D., these “People of the Scripture” distinguished themselves from mainstream rabbinic Judaism in important ways: unlike most Jews, they do not regard the immense body of oral law to have been handed down, along with the written law, by God, but instead see it as merely the work of sages and teachers, and thus subject to the errors of any human teaching. As a result of this rejection of rabbinic interpretation, which is after all the basis of all contemporary Jewish practice, certain Karaite practices differ importantly from those of mainstream Jews. Karaites, for instance, will not light candles on the Sabbath, a practice universal among all other Jews. (Nor will they engage in sexual intercourse on the Sabbath, although other Jews believe that the Sabbath is particularly propitious for that activity.) Because of these and many other errors, Saadia argued in the three treatises that he devoted to refuting Karaite belief (grouped under the title Kitab al-Rudd, “Book of Refutation”) that the Karaites were not, essentially, Jewish at all. This is interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that, twelve centuries after Saadia made this argument, the leaders of the Karaite community themselves argued as much before the Nazi authorities in 1934, and—gesticulating, perhaps, in the same heated way that the Beth Hatefutsoth figurine gesticulates—persuaded the Reich Agency for the Investigation of Families that they were not, in fact, Jewish, and therefore ought to be exempt from Nazi racial laws; which is why the admittedly small population of Karaites in Eastern Europe, for instance the community in the town of Halych, which is, today, perhaps an hour’s drive from Bolechow, were left unharmed while the Jews around them were vanishing off the face of the earth.

  IT TOOK A great deal of time, that morning in Tel Aviv, to absorb all this and so much more; we hadn’t gotten through more than two-thirds of the museum when we realized it was already two-thirty and we hadn’t eaten lunch. So we left the museum and, after emerging into the bleaching sunlight, found a chic little café on the grounds of the university campus. As we sat under an awning and devoured our pappardelle and insalate, it became clear that Froma, as usual, wanted to cram more activity into the day.

  After lunch, she said, let’s go back. Come. How can we leave here before we’ve finished with the museum?

  I shook my head, smiling. After all these years, I was familiar with her insatiability, and like to tease her about it, sometimes—just as she likes to tease me back about how lazy and incurious I can be.

  Froma, I said, I’ve had enough. I kept smiling, although I had every intention of winning this little skirmish. The day before, the trip to Beer Sheva, had been a long and tiring one; the weather was annihilatingly hot, and tomorrow, Tuesday, our last day in Israel, I had still more interviews to do. I wanted to rest. I wanted to swim in the Mediterranean, which lay, green and glassy, in back of my hotel. Besides, I’ve always found myself resisting when a certain kind of woman, someone my mother’s age, some authoritative older woman to whom I feel both indulgent and obliged, says, Let’s go back.

  What I said, however, was that I needed time to be by myself and absorb what I’d gotten thus far, to go over my notes, and so forth.

  But, Daniel, Froma said, waving a little black olive in my direction, you haven’t even seen the genealogy section! She was appalled by my lack of enthusiasm. When we’d first entered the museum, we’d been told that there was a genealogy database upstairs—a room with computers on which you could, for instance, enter your family’s name and see what information appeared. Trying to seduce me into going back up the hill and into the huge museum with her, Froma argued that we had no idea what undiscovered troves of information about the lost Bolechow Jägers might be in those machines. I crankily replied that whatever information was on those computers was just the information that my own relatives had entered, however many years ago; and that frankly, I knew more than they did.

  But of course, in the end, she won. She has always been pushing me to go further, think harder; even though I knew there’d be no reward, this time, it seemed petty not to accompany her back inside, if she wanted it so badly. Besides, I thought to myself, it was now nearly three-fifteen; the museum closed at four. Whatever happened couldn’t last too long.

  We finished our lunch, walked back, and went upstairs. The place already had the feel of a public space that was emptying out for the day; as we passed by various office doors, we heard the unmistakable desultory noises of collegial leave-taking. The genealogy room, for instance, was empty when we got there, except for two women in, I guessed, their sixties, who were clearly employees and not visitors: they were standing at the front of the room and chatting familiarly with each other in Hebrew when we walked in. I stood in the little entryway and Froma said, Go, tell them why you’re here, maybe you’ll find something.

  Before I had a chance to open my mouth, the one who seemed to be in charge, a serious-looking woman with a face that was both sweet and somewhat aloof, said to me, in English, I’m sorry, we’re just about to close.

  Oh, I said. Of course I was relieved.

  It doesn’t make sense, she went on, for you to rent the computer to research, you pay for an hour at a time and we close at four, it’s only a few minutes from now.

  For Froma’s sake I tried to act disappointed. I nodded sadly.

  The woman, smiling very faintly, looked at me in a vaguely maternal way and said, So you came a long way to Tel Aviv?

  New York, I said.

  From New York? It’s far! She looked at me and then, relenting imperceptibly, said, OK, listen, you tell me one name from your family, I’ll put it in the computer, we’ll see quickly what comes up.

  Wonderful! Froma said. She stood close to the door, leaning on a little railing, but motioned me to move closer.

  I think, now, that the reason I said Mendelsohn at that moment, instead of Jäger, was in part a childish resistance to Froma’s enthusiasm, to her insistence that we go back for another look, her confidence that my investigation would somehow be furthered by coming to this place, which I
knew it would not. I had come to Israel to research my mother’s family, not my father’s; but out of some irrational spite, when this woman asked me for a name to enter into the system, I said Mendelsohn. When you grow up in a house of rigorous, even maniacal orderliness, you can find a certain deep satisfaction in rebellion.

  Mendelsohn! the woman said to me, smiling faintly. She turned to her colleague and said something quickly in Hebrew, and they both laughed. So as not to appear rude, she turned back to me and explained that they were laughing over the fact that there were plenty of Mendelsohns in their database.

  It’s a famous Jewish name! she said to me.

  I know, I said.

  While she did things on the computer, she half turned toward where I was standing, still at the entrance, and said, You know, I used to know Mendelsohns, but they didn’t live in New York City. They lived on Long Island.

  Froma and I exchanged an amused glance, and I said, Really? I was born on Long Island.

  Oh? the woman said. So where on Long Island?

  Old Bethpage, I said, with a little challenging grin. Nobody knows Old Bethpage; it’s too small. Five Towns, people will say, knowingly, when you tell them you’re from Long Island. The Hamptons. But Old Bethpage was nowhere, a tiny needle in an immense haystack.

  She smiled, then. She said, What was your father’s name?

  I said, Jay.

  She paused and looked at me.

  Then she said, And your mother’s name is Marlene, no? And there are three boys, no? Andrew, Daniel, and Matthew.

  Froma and I were no longer smiling. Her mouth was, literally, open.

  I blinked and said, Who are you? Whoever it was, she hadn’t been in touch with our family for a long time, was unaware that my mother had had two more children after Matt.

  The woman smiled again. It wasn’t the impersonally polite smile she’d offered when I first arrived, nor the slightly warmer smile she’d given me when we first began talking. Her smile was, now, both sweet and slightly melancholy, slightly resigned, the smile of someone who is used to things working out in a certain way. I had the distinct if irrational impression, for a second, that she’d somehow been expecting this to happen.

  She said, I am Yona.

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, on a brilliantly sunny and quite windy day, Yona and I walked along the beach near my hotel. I was still reeling from the improbability of our meeting the way we did, after so many years. And I was, too, still thinking about the peculiar coincidences that, as we learned while Yona talked in the entryway to the Genealogy Section, had always linked my family to hers.

  After the initial shock, the exclaiming and embraces, she’d said to me, You know why I’m called Yona?

  No, I said.

  She smiled faintly. Well you see, it has to do with your grandfather and my parents. In Bolechow, before even the First World War, Avrumche—

  (throughout this conversation, she called my grandfather by his Yiddish nickname)

  —Avrumche your grandfather was the closest friend of my mother and father, when they were all growing up together, children together.

  I had never heard this before. So that’s why he was so close to her, I thought.

  Yona nodded. Yes, she said, you see they grew up as next-door neighbors. And my mother and your great-grandmother Taube knew each other, they were very close friends. So when my mother was giving birth to me (Yona touched her own chest, briefly), she was dreaming about her friend, your great-grandmother. And so she named me after her!

  A look of comprehension broke over Froma’s features. She had been watching this whole thing unfold, stock-still. Froma said to me, Yona in Hebrew means “dove.”

  Yona looked at me, then, and said, Why are you here in Israel?

  I smiled and said, Wait till I tell you.

  That evening, I’d called my mother from the Hilton and told her what had happened. Like me, she was amazed, almost tearful. Yona geblonah, my father used to call her! my mother had said, emotional as always when it came to anything that brought back memories of my grandfather. And yet Yona herself seemed oddly matter-of-fact about what seemed to me to be an astounding coincidence; when we talked about it the next day, as we ambled along the boardwalk, it was again as if she had half-expected something of the sort to occur.

  The strong breeze clipped her words. Well, she said, in that low voice, Israel is a—

  Country of miracles? I said, half-joking, thinking of what Shlomo had proudly exclaimed as we were driving way from Beer Sheva.

  Yona looked at me with her sweet, slightly crooked, slightly melancholy smile. No, it’s just a small country, that’s all. You’d be surprised. Things like that can happen here.

  We strolled for a while and finally found a nondescript little restaurant to sit down in, facing the ocean. The water was flecked with small whitecaps. She ordered very little; I ordered a salad and a Diet Coke.

  It’s all you’re having? she said, giving me a look that was at once curious and amused. Eat more! You’re not eating anything!

  I smiled and shook my head. We started to talk about family history. She had said there was a lot she could tell me about the Jägers of Bolechow.

  Since hearing the story about how she’d been named, I asked her if she’d ever heard anything about my great-grandmother Taube’s personality—something specific, I said.

  Oh, she was a personlikhkayt, a personality, a very good woman, Yona said after a minute, remembering whatever it was she’d heard from her own parents, years ago. She was so honest, so…good.

  Well, I thought to myself, what had I expected? She had died years before Yona was born; and besides, what can you really say about someone? She was so good, she had such pretty legs. He died for her.

  For my parents, your grandfather was something special, Yona went on. My parents used to say, Avrumche, he’s not a friend, he’s like a brother.

  I was so used to thinking of my grandfather as a Jäger above all, as a member and then head of his difficult, anxious, self-dramatizing, and tragedy-ridden family, that it came as a small shock to hear that he had had close friends, had had relationships with people outside of the family, friends in whom he’d inspired such loyalty and affection.

  Yona nodded. Nowadays, you can’t understand this kind of friendship, she said, looking at me steadily.

  I nodded. Although I didn’t know precisely what she meant, I wasn’t surprised to hear that Bolechower friendships, friendships forged in a lost civilization in a lost empire before the First World War had even begun, were, like everything else about Bolechow, irretrievable.

  She smiled suddenly. Your grandfather was a vitzer, you know what a vitzer is?

  I nodded again; I knew. A man who could tell a joke, someone who could spin a funny story. I thought of my Aunt Ida who peed in her pants, one Thanksgiving a half century ago; I thought of the way my grandmother would say, Oh, Abie!

  Your family lived on the Schustergasse, she said. Shoemaker Street. This small detail interested me; I had been to the house, but hadn’t known what the street was called. SCHUSTERGASSE, I wrote on the back of the paper place mat.

  She gave me a look. You’re taking notes?

  I nodded. It’s for the family history! There was about her soft-spokenness something defensive, I thought; she liked her privacy. She made a face, but kept talking. She told me about her father, whose name was Sholem, and who in 1916 had gone to Vienna to find work in order to support his family. It did him some good; he was very fond of music. Her family had a store where they sold bread, things like that. The times were hard, she said.

  I smiled. What else do you remember your parents saying about my grandfather’s family? I asked. I wondered if anyone had ever talked about my grandfather’s father, that well-heeled, goatee-sporting, homburg-wearing gentleman who’d died one day at a spa, setting in motion the disasters that would send my grandfather to New York, send Shmiel to New York and then back to Bolechow, and send me, eventually, here.

&n
bsp; Yona shook her head. About Elkune Jäger she knew nothing.

  But I can tell you that your grandfather’s family was always very poor, she said.

  Poor? I looked at her. Very poor? Always?

  She nodded. Yes, she said. I remember my father saying that when he was a child and his family would take him to a resort in Poland, Zakopane, he felt badly because Avrumche was too poor to come along.