The Girl from Human Street

by Roger Cohen

  The facts assert themselves. They push through silence, resist denial, undercut manufactured truths, and set curved foundations to right. It can take a long time. As Czesław Miłosz, the Lithuanian-born Nobel laureate, put it, addressing brutal killers of ordinary people in the poem “You Who Wronged”:

  Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.

  You can kill one, but another is born.

  The words are written down, the deed, the date.

  Rain falls. People cover up, hoist umbrellas. The good rain is on my lips. I think of the late Isaac Mendelson, the last Jew in Žagarė. His son Vidmantas is in the square. Zwi ends her speech with eloquence: “As I stand before this plaque, I am overwhelmed by the thought that my parents and I might also have lain in the mass grave together with my father’s family had they not left Žagarė in the 1920s. I never knew them, only saw faded photos many years later, but I mourn them to this day. ‘Remember us,’ their unquiet spirits seem to call from the grave, as though anyone could ever forget. They do not ask for vengeance, only remembrance. They will always be remembered. And in the language we would have had in common, I say: Mir zeinen doh! We are here!”

  The plaque is unveiled. Freedman reads the English text: “For hundreds of years Zhager [the Yiddish form of Žagarė] had been home to a vibrant Jewish community. Zhager had many Jewish shops and was a center of commerce for merchants from here and a range of other towns. Many of their shops surrounded this square. Zhager was also famous for its many Hebrew scholars, the ‘Learned of Zhager.’ German military occupiers and some Lithuanian collaborators brought the region’s Jewish men, women, and children to this square on October 2, 1941. Shooting and killing of the entire Jewish community of Zhager began here and continued in the forests nearby. About three thousand Jewish citizens were killed.”

  These few declarative sentences took seventy-one years to be engraved in stone. Vidmantas Mendelson recalls how his father never spoke of what happened. He says, “I wish everyone peace in your hearts, smiles on your faces, and remember, to see the future you must look into the past.”

  We are here, reclaiming our story. Cliff Marks, an American urban planner from Washington State who edits a website called Zhager, has made the long journey. Joy Hall, the founder of Lithuania Link, a nongovernmental organization that works closely with the people of Žagarė, has come from Britain. Her Israeli cousin Sara Manobla, who worked as head of the English-language section of Israeli Public Radio, presides at the ceremony. Both are descended from the Towb family of Žagarė. Manobla recounts how the family that saved George Gordimer, the child survivor of the Šiauliai ghetto who now lives in New Jersey and suffers from depression, also rescued two other Jews, Batya Trusfus and her granddaughter Ruth. Each of us, somehow, battles deracination, amnesia, and the knowledge that this continent had decided its Jews must die.

  Balćiūnas reads the Lithuanian version. Finally, the Yiddish text is read by Dovid Katz, an American scholar resident in Lithuania who has been passionate in his quest to uncover Jewish history and denounce Lithuanian denial. As Katz later points out in an article, the Yiddish version speaks of “German military occupiers and their Lithuanian collaborators,” whereas the English refers to “some Lithuanian collaborators.” This small difference suggests how ideological battles rage on.

  The Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, still devotes almost all its space to Soviet crimes against a valiant Lithuanian resistance, rather than to the Holocaust in which many Lithuanians were perpetrators. “Double genocide” debates pit Stalin’s crimes against Hitler’s in what Antony Polonsky of Brandeis University has called “the suffering Olympics.” The Lithuanian foreign minister has recently declared through a spokesman that the only difference between Hitler and Stalin was the length of their moustaches. So when a message of sympathy from the minister is read out in Žagarė at the ceremony, it rings false.

  The plaque restores meaning to words. It constitutes a small miracle here in my grandmother’s heim. Žagarė is coming fitfully to life. Its old timber houses, which once struck me as stage flats for some shtetl play, are acquiring volume. The annual cherry festival has been revived. Some of the gravestones in the two Jewish cemeteries are being cleaned up, their Hebrew inscriptions returned to legibility. Schoolchildren are learning about the town’s Jewish past. There is even a rumor that a Jewish woman named Sarah has come to live in Žagarė. (She is Sarah Mitrike, a Londoner of Italian descent who came here in 2004 to do social work and ended up marrying the local policeman.) I recall the nameless Jews of my first visit and how the plaque next to a bridge on the River Švėtė commemorating the death on June 29, 1941, of Jonas Baranauskas, who was killed defending “his homeland,” seemed offensive through omission. There are no Jewish names on the new plaque in the main square. But it is a start.

  The sky clears. Žagarė is filled suddenly with light. A davening Dovid Katz intones the Mourner’s Kaddish in Aramaic, and it carries across the square where my family might have met its end and on into the woods where the death trench was dug and out over the Baltic nations now safely ensconced, after long banishment, in the European Union; and the ancient sound restores to me a Europe that vanished and a chain that was severed and a young girl in the woods in all her innocence whose loving embrace I would know.

  Mir zeinen doh.

  CHAPTER 13

  A Single Chain

  Anyone who journeys to Jerusalem gazes at rocks and gravestones on the looping ascent into the city. It is a place where the dead carry as much weight as the living. Amos Elon, the Israeli writer, called Jerusalem a “necrocracy,” because it is “the only city where the vote is given to the dead.” There is no escaping the past. In the dimpled walls and smoothed alleys of the Old City, its impression is written. The restless, entangled memories of Jews, Christians, and Muslims find in Jerusalem their most contentious battleground. Reason here finishes a poor second best to revelation.

  On the southwestern slopes of the city, where cats slither over sharp shadows on the grave-packed terraces, my cousin Rena was buried. From her grave, you look down on an ancient landscape dotted with cypress groves, broken up by highways, and crossed by rail tracks tunneled into hills. Her younger brother, curly-haired Yonatan, the most spiritual of the children, found that the experience of mourning cemented a growing identification with Judaism. Rena’s suicide was unfathomable. Therefore, Yonatan concluded, you have to let go of the need to understand everything. There is more to this world than you can know.

  Jewish ritual struck him suddenly as condensed wisdom—the mourner barred for three days from standing up to welcome anyone, the interdiction on speaking to a mourner until he or she turns to you. “My parents just wanted us to have a little taste, Kiddush on Friday nights,” Yonatan says. “But I began to understand how essential Shabbat is. A human doing is not a human being.” After the funeral, his distraught mother said, “Maybe we are going to become religious.” Yonatan replied, “I think I am already religious.”

  Yonatan listens carefully and moves deliberately. He is big-limbed like his father. His heavy-eyed smile is radiant. A kippa is pinned to his curls. He has gone back, in the revived Jewish homeland, to the books, the rituals, and the prayer that shaped life in the shtetl before the onward-rushing family exodus and emancipation began a little over a century ago. Three generations on from our shared Lithuanian forebears, my cousin has come full circle. He has turned his back on modern ambivalence. Religious belief sets the contours and rhythms of his life. He is a man who has defined his borders. From diet to davening, from synagogue to bedroom, he follows habits observed by my great-grandparents before they headed for South Africa, the uprooting that saved us all from the ditches and the gas of what had been considered European civilization.

  His conversion to Orthodoxy was gradual. In the army Yonatan served in a Nachal unit, seeing combat and doing community service. He worked with drug addicts outside Beersheva. He spent time in Lebanon and Gaza. (�
�In Lebanon at least we knew where the border was and what we were defending. In Gaza, everything seemed gray, borderless, we were trying to defuse tensions between settlers and the local population, it was terrible.”) When he emerged after four years, he began to find prayer more meaningful. During a half year teaching English in South Korea, he encountered many Koreans who spoke of the wisdom of the Talmud and wondered how he might approach it and how he, an Israeli, knew less of it than they did. He felt he might learn more from going to yeshiva than from a professor at Hebrew University. Then, in 2003, Rena took her life.

  Manic depression lacerates a family, in Jerusalem as in London. The girl from Human Street, my mother, and the girl from French Hill, my cousin, left unanswerable questions. Bipolarity is a violent thing, yet Rena was a creature of peace. She and Yaakov had been very close in age, older siblings Yonatan adored but whose intimacy he could not quite share. A relationship of equals was just beginning between them when she vanished. He had felt in Rena his own yearning for something spiritual at a distance from the new hypermaterialistic Israel. Now Yonatan seeks his sister’s essence through the holy books. His starting point is the first major formulation of the Oral Torah, dating from 220 CE. Hillel said: “Be among the disciples of Aaron loving peace and pursuing peace, loving people and drawing them close to the Torah.” Aaron haCohen, forefather of all Cohenim, was characterized by the sages as one who pursues peace.

  But how is that calling to be fulfilled? Yonatan cites Leviticus, chapter 19, and the dense, difficult mitzvah, or divine commandment, at the heart of it: “Do not hate your brother in your heart. You must surely admonish your neighbor and not bear sin because of him. Do not take revenge or bear a grudge against the children of your people. Love your neighbor as yourself.”

  Interpretation of the holy texts is the transmission belt of Jewish life as Yonatan now sees it. He tussles with the words. Maimonides interpreted the mitzvah’s reference to sin as expressing failed responsibility toward society if someone who has given offense is not rebuked. Other sages have taken a more psychological approach to the mitzvah, arguing that if an offender is not admonished, resentment will fester, leading to hatred in the heart and inability to “love your neighbor as yourself.” It is therefore vital to admonish through love.

  In observing the mitzvah, a grudge may be removed from the heart, Yonatan argues, and at the same time an enemy or sinner offered an avenue to self-improvement through contrition. “A prerequisite for this is sensitivity. We must first be aware of the other’s needs and feelings if we are to pursue peace effectively and fulfill the mitzvah of rebuking through love,” he says. “One thing that stood out about Rena, of blessed memory, was her deep sensitivity, to such a degree that I find it hard to describe. This central, deep, and beautiful quality of hers is one everyone in the family can take with them in elevating her soul.”

  The journals are written in Hebrew just as Zionism is beginning to revive it, page after page penned on the porch of a modest South African house on Honey Street in the Berea district of Johannesburg in the early years of the twentieth century, almost two millennia after the language’s hibernation began. They are the work of my great-grandfather Shmuel Cohen, born in Lithuania, founder of the wholesale grocery Cohen & Sons at 103 Pritchard Street in downtown Johannesburg. My uncle Bert, who would go out on the mule-pulled wagons that delivered goods imported from England to Shmuel’s South African clients, has treasured the journals without ever understanding them. One day he hands me the frayed soft-covered books and asks if I might find a way to bring them to life.

  For a long time I wonder what to do with these reflections of a man transplanted from the shtetl into the emergent South Africa. Late in life Shmuel had a leg amputated as a result of complications from diabetes. Writing then became his consolation. It seems to me that Yonatan, who has returned to something my family spent a century shedding, is the natural translator. The act will draw together the paternal and maternal sides of my family. I have traveled a long way to find both men—a forgotten great-grandfather distilling wisdom acquired over a life in Europe and South Africa, a lost Israeli cousin whose sister suffered as my mother did: patterns within patterns reaching backward as if to mock the inadequacy of the forward-looking gaze.

  As Ecclesiastes has it: “That which hath been is that which shall be, and that which hath been done is that which shall be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.”

  My great-grandfather’s journals constitute the framework of a book entitled The Mindful Being. Shmuel’s Hebrew is eloquent and refined, Yonatan says. The book ranges far and wide, from prehistory to modern times, from evolution to faith. At its core lies an individual quest to structure a life of fulfillment and happiness through acute observation of human behavior and purposeful exercise of the will. It is the work of a free man of faith, writing at the dawn of the isolating modern world in the years between the Enlightenment and the Holocaust—a man who is rigorous in his appraisal of actions and their consequences and seeks to situate God in the theater of rational debate. His idea of religion is inclusive rather than exclusionary. It is arrived at not through revelation but through inquiry about nature and humanity. Its raison d’être is reconciliation—of the ancient and the modern, humankind and nature, the personal and the universal. It makes no territorial or material claims; nor does it promise any reward other than the serenity of mindfulness. It provides a moral and ethical framework for the linked fates of all mankind, with God as the expression of this unity.

  Shmuel writes:

  To begin living a life based on the mind, one is to observe oneself first, one’s own tendencies. For the more one is aware and refrains from that which triggers one’s acting according to a certain tendency the easier it will be to resist. If we observe the world, and realize that one who acted toward us in an evil manner, for example, was forced to do so because of circumstances and perhaps was not able to overcome his inclinations, our anger will soften. For one naturally tends to come to terms more easily with that which is a necessity.

  Moreover, if one is aware of one’s personal tendencies and whatever prompts acting in a certain way, it is wise to strive to balance them through acting in the inverse way: clinging to subservience to overcome pride, to compassion to overcome anger. One who recognizes the tendencies of his personal character shall be able to weaken the negative ones by awakening positive counter-tendencies.

  A man engaged in a mindful life, seeking his own benefit, seeks for true benefit, not for something false or virtual. This benefit must increase his vitality. It shall be increased by his inner happiness, decreased by inner sadness. Love shall increase happiness; hate sadness. Therefore he who lives according to his mind accustoms himself to love all humans. The more the love expands in his heart so does the circle of life. His world expands and extends and he lives with all of creation entirely.… He fears not death. He knows that real life is eternal. He fears not annihilation knowing well that in nature annihilation does not exist, but rather only change and transformation.

  As I write out my great-grandfather’s words, I become part of something I was not, something larger. Belonging is this chain of connection. Over the millennia, even since Moses received the Torah, words have been passed down, the intergenerational Judaic links. The flimsy exercise books from my father’s first home on Honey Street are the familial iteration of all the scrolls and tablets, codices and parchment, that have been the means by which a dispersed Jewish people bore with them an inner homeland.

  I am an atheist. Yet I can relate to Shmuel’s conception of a God reasoned toward, who is the ultimate expression of the unity of man and nature, a linchpin of the mindfulness for which his life has been preparation. It is a God representing what he calls “the eternal ideals of Judaism in their purest form: absolute justice, absolute peace, and absolute love.”

  This is not the cruel God of revealed truths invoked in the Holy Land to claim all Eretz Yisrael, a God used to stoke the fires of conf
lict between two peoples and two national movements with a claim to the same land. This is not the unforgiving God who, from Gaza to Gujarat, is invoked by believers to justify zealotry and violence and discrimination. This is not the God of dangerous certainties endemic to fundamentalism. No, this is God as reconciling idea. It is the God of a man who accepts his own fallibility and the limits of his self-knowledge. It is the God of “whoever saves one soul, it counts as if he saved the whole world.” It is the God to whom Israel and those Palestinians who would annihilate it should return, if it is a God they seek. Alternatively they could just deploy reason.

  For Shmuel, self-knowledge and sensitivity to others are the basis of a mindful life. He struggles in pursuit of this quest. In another passage he writes:

  Every man is a book worth reading. The “Book of Man” includes many chapters. Those speaking of others I have learned well. The first, speaking of my own character traits, I have learned but do not know. I have sought but not found. Many chapters transcend my wisdom.

  The difficulties are redoubled when trauma occurs. My mother, pulled out of her community and set down on a faraway shore, fell apart in the English chill. Manic depression took her from me. Trauma locks in a pattern of defensive behavior that erects a barrier to self-knowledge. It is, in the Lacanian definition, “a missed encounter with the real.” And so we repeat the trauma to control its reality, but, as Zadie Smith puts it, “in doing so reproduce, obliquely, some element of the trauma.”