So yes: he was mindful of the dead. It was to be many years before I realized just how mindful he was, my handsome and funny grandfather, who knew so many stories, who dressed so famously well: with his smoothly shaven oval face, the winking blue eyes and the straight nose that ended in the barest suggestion of a bulb, as if whoever had designed him had decided, at the last minute, to throw in a hint of humor; with his sparse, neatly brushed white hair, his clothes and cologne and manicures, his notorious jokes and his intricate, tragic stories.
MY GRANDFATHER WOULD come each year in the summer, since in the summer the weather on Long Island was less oppressive than it was in Miami Beach. He would stay for weeks at a time, accompanied by whichever of his four wives he happened to be married to at the time. When he came to stay he (and, sometimes, the wife) would occupy my little brothers’ room, with its narrow twin beds. There, on arriving from the airport, he would hang his hat on a lamp shade and neatly fold his sport coat over the back of a chair, and afterward he’d set about taking care of his canary, Schloimele, which is Yiddish for little Solomon: settling the cage on a tiny oak child’s desk, sprinkling the little bird with a few drops of water just to refresh a little. Then, slowly, meticulously, he would remove his things from his carefully packed bags, gently placing them on one of the two tiny beds in that room.
My grandfather was famous (in the way that certain kinds of Jewish immigrants and their families will talk about someone being “famous” for something, which generally means that about twenty-six people know about it) for a number of things—his sense of humor, the three women he married and, except for the one who outlived him, divorced in rapid succession after my grandmother died, the way he dressed, certain family tragedies, his Orthodoxy, the way he had of making waitresses and shopkeepers remember him, summer after summer—but to me the two salient things about him were his devoutness and his wonderful clothes. When I was a child and then an adolescent, these two things seemed to be the boundaries between which his strangeness, his Europeanness, existed: the territory that belonged to him and no one else, a space in which it was possible to be both worldly and pious, suave and religious, at the same time.
The first among the things that he would remove as he unpacked was the velvet bag that contained the things he needed to say his morning prayers—to daven. This he did every day of his life from the day in the spring of 1915 when he was bar mitzvahed to the morning before the June day in 1980 when he died. In this satin-lined bag of burgundy velvet, on the face of which was embroidered, in gold thread, a menorah flanked by rampant lions of Judah, were his yarmulke; an enormous old-fashioned white and faded-blue tallis sewn with its tickling fringes, in which, in conformance with the instructions that he meticulously dictated to me one hot day in 1972 when I was twelve, a year before my bar mitzvah, he was buried that June day; and the leather phylacteries, or tefillin, that he bound around his head and left forearm each morning as, while we watched in mute awe, he davened. To us it was a sight both bizarre and majestic: each morning after sunrise, murmuring in Hebrew, he would wrap his arm with the leather bands, and then wrap a single thick leather band around his skull, attached to which was a wooden box containing verses from the Torah that nestled in the center of his forehead, and would then put on the huge, faded tallis and the yarmulke, and then taking out his siddur, his daily prayer book, would mumble for about half an hour, his words completely incomprehensible to us. Sometimes, when he was finished, he’d say to us, I put in a good word for you, since you’re only Reform. My grandfather was an Orthodox Jew of the old school, and it was for his sake, more than anything else, that we had any religion at all: went to services on the holidays, got bar mitzvahed. As far as I know, my father, a scientist who did not see eye to eye with his garrulous father-in-law, went to the little synagogue we belonged to exactly four times: on the mornings of his sons’ bar mitzvahs.
As exacting and meticulous as the ritual of the davening was, so too the way in which my grandfather would dress each morning: precise and orderly, just as much of a ritual. My grandfather was what used to be called a “snappy dresser.” His brushed and polished appearance, his fine clothes, were merely the external expression of an inner quality that, for him and his family, characterized what it was to be a Jäger, something they would refer to as Feinheit: a refinement that was at once ethical and aesthetic. You could always count on his socks matching his sweater, and he preferred to wear soft-brimmed hats in whose bands you could spot a rakish feather or two, until the last of his four wives—who had lost her first husband and a fourteen-year-old daughter in Auschwitz, and whose soft, tattooed forearm I used to love to hold and stroke, when I was little, and who because she had lost so much, I now think, could not abide anything so frivolous as a feather in a hat—started to pluck them out. On a typical summer day in the 1970s, he might wear the following: mustard-yellow summer-weight wool trousers, crisply creased; a soft white knit shirt under a mustard-and-white argyle sweater-vest; pale yellow socks, white suede shoes, and a soft-brimmed hat that, depending which year in the 1970s it was, did or did not sport a feather. Before stepping outside to walk around the block a few times, or to the park, he’d splash some 4711 cologne on his hands and slap it onto the sides of his head and beneath the wattles of his chin. Now, he would say, rubbing his manicured hands together, we can go out.
I would watch all this very carefully. (Or so I thought.) He might also wear a sport jacket—this, to me, seemed incredible, since there was neither a wedding nor a bar mitzvah to attend—into which he would slip, invariably, both his wallet and, in the inside breast pocket on the other side, an odd-looking billfold: long and slender, rather too large in the way that, to American eyes, certain items of European haberdashery always look somehow the wrong size; and of a leather, worn to an almost suedelike smoothness, which I now realize was ostrich skin, since I own it now, but which then I merely thought amusingly pimply-looking. I would sit on my little brother’s bed as he talked, watching him and admiring his things: the argyle vest, the white shoes, the sleek belts, the heavy blue-and-gold bottle of cologne, the tortoiseshell comb with which he slicked back the sparse white hair, the worn, puckered wallet that, as I knew even then, contained no money, unable as I was to imagine at that point what might be so precious that he had to carry it with him every time he dressed himself so impeccably.
THIS WAS THE man from whom I gleaned hundreds of stories and thousands of facts over the years, the names of his grandparents and great-uncles and aunts and second cousins, the years they were born and where they had died, the name of the Ukrainian maid they had had as children in Bolechow (Lulka), who used to complain that the children had stomachs “like bottomless pits,” the kind of hat his father, my great-grandfather, used to wear. (Homburgs: He’d been a courtly man with a goatee, my grandfather liked to boast about his father, and was something of a bigwig in his small but bustling town, known for bringing bottles of Hungarian Tokay to prospective business associates “to sweeten the deal”; and had dropped dead at the age of forty-five of heart failure at a spa in the Carpathian Mountains called Jaremcze, where he’d gone to take the waters for his health. This was the beginning of the bad years, the reason, in the end, why nearly all of his children eventually had to leave Bolechow.) Grandpa told me about the town park, with its statue of the great nineteenth-century Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, and the little park across the square with its allée of lime trees. He recited for me, and I learned, the words to “Mayn Shtetele Belz,” that little lullaby-like Yiddish song about the town quite near the one he grew up in, which his mother had sung to him a decade before the Titanic sank—
Mayn heymele, dort vu ikh hob
Mayne kindershe yorn farbrakht.
Belz, mayn shtetele Belz,
In ormen shtibele mit ale
Kinderlakh dort gelakht.
Yedn shabes fleg ikh loyfn dort
Mit der tchine glaych
Tsu zitsen unter dem grinem
Beymele,
leyenen bay dem taykh.
Belz, mayn shtetele Belz,
Mayn heymele vu ch’hob gehat
Di sheyne khaloymes a sach.
My little home, where I spent
My childhood years;
Belz, my shtetl Belz,
in a poor little cottage with all
the little children I laughed.
Every Sabbath there I would go
With my prayer book
To sit down under the little green
tree, and read on the river’s edge.
Belz, my shtetl Belz
My little home, where I once had
So many beautiful dreams…
—learned these words, which I recently had the bizarre experience of hearing again, for the first time since my grandfather’s death twenty-five years ago, at a Sixties “theme” party at a club in New York City, and when I asked the DJ where he’d found this particular song he handed to me, without ceasing to gyrate to the strange music, the worn cover of a 1960 album, made by a famous Italian-American pop singer, titled Connie Francis Sings Jewish Favorites. From my grandfather I learned, too, about the old Ukrainian woodsman who lived in the hills above Bolechow but who, on the night before Yom Kippur, watching the unusual and, to him, frightening stillness settle along the glinting towns beneath the Carpathians’ timbered foothills as the Jews of the shtetls prepared for the awesome holiday, would make his way down the mountain and stay in the house of a kindly Jew, such was this Ukrainian peasant’s fear, on that one night each year, of the Jews and their glum God.
The Ukrainians, my grandfather would say now and then with a weary little sigh, as he told this story. Oo-krah-EE-nyans. The Ukrainians. Our goyim.
So he would come each summer to Long Island and I would sit at his feet as he talked. He talked about that older sister who’d died a week before her wedding, and talked about the younger sister who was married off at nineteen to that older sister’s fiancé, the hunchbacked (my grandfather said), dwarflike first cousin whom first one and finally the other of these lovely girls had had to marry because, my grandfather told me, this ugly cousin’s father had paid for the boat tickets that had brought those two sisters and their brothers and mother, brought all of my grandfather’s family, to the United States, and had demanded a beautiful daughter-in-law as the price. He talked bitterly about how this same cousin, who was of course also his brother-in-law, chased my grandfather down forty-two flights of steps in the Chrysler Building after the reading of a certain will in 1947, brandishing a pair of scissors, or perhaps it was a letter opener; talked about that mean aunt of his, the wife of the uncle who’d paid for his passage to America (the same aunt my grandfather’s older brother, the prince, had had to live with during his brief stay in the United States in 1913, and perhaps it was her meanness that had resulted in his decision to go back to Bolechow to live, the decision that seemed so right at the time); my grandfather talked about that aunt of his, Tante, who in the few remaining photographs of her is a huge, doughy, sour-faced matriarch whose fat arms settle around her torso like opulent robes of state, a woman so formidable that even today, in my family—even among those of us born a full generation after she died—it is impossible to hear the word Tante without a shudder.
And he talked about the pleasing modesty of Old Country bar mitzvahs as compared (you were meant to feel) to the overdressed and officious extravagance of the ceremonies today: first the religious ceremonies in cold, slope-roofed temples and, afterward, the receptions in lavish country clubs and catering halls, occasions at which boys like myself would read the parashah, the Torah portion for that week, and uncomprehendingly sing their haftarah portions, the selections from the Prophets that accompany each parashah, while dreaming of the reception to come and the promise of furtive whiskey sours. (Which is how I sang mine: a performance that ended with my voice cracking, loudly, mortifyingly, as I chanted the very last word, plummeting from a pure soprano to the baritone in which it has remained ever since.) Nu, so? he would say. So you got up at five instead of six that morning, you prayed an extra hour in shul, and then you went home and had cookies and tea with the rabbi and your mother and father, and that was that. He talked about how seasick he was on the ten-day crossing to America, about the time, years before that, when he had to guard a barn full of Russian prisoners of war, when he was sixteen during the First World War, which is how he learned Russian, one of the many languages he knew; about the vague group of cousins who would visit every now and then in the Bronx and who were called, mysteriously, “the Germans.”
My grandfather told me all these stories, all these things, but he never talked about his brother and sister-in-law and the four girls who, to me, seemed not so much dead as lost, vanished not only from the world but—even more terrible to me—from my grandfather’s stories. Which is why, out of all this history, all these people, the ones I knew the least about were the six who were murdered, who had, it seemed to me then, the most stunning story of all, the one most worthy to be told. But on this subject, my loquacious grandpa remained silent, and his silence, unusual and tense, irradiated the subject of Shmiel and his family, making them unmentionable and, therefore, unknowable.
Unknowable.
Every single word of the Five Books of Moses, the core of the Hebrew Bible, has been analyzed, examined, interpreted, and held up to the scrutiny of rigorous scholars over many centuries. It is generally acknowledged that the greatest of all biblical commentators was the eleventh-century French scholar Rabbi Shlomo ben Itzhak, who is better known as Rashi, a name that is nothing more than an acronym formed from the initial letters of his title, name, and patronymic: Ra(bbi) Sh(lomo ben) I(tzhak)—Rashi. Born in Troyes in 1040, Rashi survived the terrible upheavals of his time, which included the slaughters of Jews that were, so to speak, a by-product of the First Crusade. Educated in Mainz, where he was the student of the man who had been the greatest student of the renowned Gershom of Mainz (because I have always had good teachers, I love the idea of these intellectual genealogies), Rashi founded his own academy at the age of twenty-five and lived to see himself recognized as the greatest scholar of his age. His concern for each and every word of the text he was studying was matched only by the cramped terseness of his own style; it is perhaps because of the latter that Rashi’s own commentary on the Bible has itself become the object of some two hundred further commentaries. One measure of Rashi’s significance is that the first printed Hebrew Bible included his commentary…. It is interesting, for me, to note that Rashi, like my great-uncle Shmiel, had only daughters, which was, as far as these things go, more of a liability for a man with a certain kind of ambition in 1040 than it was in 1940. Still, the children of these daughters of Rashi carried on their grandfather’s magnificent legacy, and for that reason were known as baalei tosafot, “Those Who Extended.”
Although Rashi stands as the preeminent commentator on the Torah—and, hence, on the first parashah in the Torah, the reading with which the Torah begins, and which itself begins with not one but, mysteriously, two accounts of the Creation, and includes the story of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge, and which is for that reason a story that has attracted particularly rigorous commentary over the millennia—it is important to acknowledge the interpretations of modern commentators, such as the recent translation and commentary by Rabbi Richard Elliot Friedman, which, in its sincere and searching attempts to connect the ancient text to contemporary life, is as open-faced and friendly as Rashi’s is dense and abstruse.
For instance, throughout his analysis of the first chapter of Genesis—the Hebrew name of which, bereishit, literally means “in the beginning”—Rashi is attentive to minute details of meaning and diction that Rabbi Friedman is content to let pass without comment, whereas Friedman (who is, admittedly, writing for a more general audience) is eager to elucidate broader points. An example: Both scholars acknowledge the famous difficulties of translating the very first line of Bereishit—bereishit bara Elohim et-hashamayim
v’etha’aretz. Contrary to the belief of millions who have read the King James Bible, this line does not mean, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” but must mean, rather, something like “In the beginning of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth…” Friedman merely acknowledges the “classic problem” of translation, without going into it; whereas Rashi expends quantities of ink on just what the problem is. And the problem, in a word, is that what the Hebrew literally says is “In the beginning of, God created the heavens and the earth.” For the first word, bereishit, “in the beginning” ( b’, “in,” + reishit, “beginning”) is normally followed by another noun, but in the first line of parashat Bereishit—when we refer to a parashah by name we use the form “parashat”—what follows the word bereishit is a verb: bara, “created.” After an extended discussion of the linguistic issues, Rashi eventually solves the problem by invoking certain parallels from other texts in which bereishit is followed by a verb rather than a noun, and it is this that allows us to translate these first crucial words as follows:
In the beginning of God’s creating the skies and heavens—when the earth had been shapeless and formless, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and God’s spirit was hovering on the face of the water—God said, “Let there be light.”
The key issue, for Rashi, is that the wrong reading suggests an incorrect chronology of Creation: that God created the heavens, then the earth, then light, and so forth. But this is not how it happened, Rashi says. If you get the small details wrong, the big picture will be wrong, too.
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Page 2
