That I was mispronouncing the name of the town in which my mother’s family had lived for over three hundred years was something I didn’t know until I met an old woman in the late 1990s, the mother of a man with whom I had recently become friends. After knowing him for some time I learned that he, who is of my parents’ generation, was born in the town next to Bolechow—a small city, really, once called Stryj, now spelled Striy, which I have since visited, a place where today tall trees grow luxuriantly in the middle of the roofless ruin of what used to be the city’s main synagogue. When I discovered the strange geographical coincidence that linked our families, I mentioned it to my friend, who like me is a writer and who, knowing of my interest in the history of that small and now forgotten part of the world, offered to introduce me to his mother, a woman then nearly ninety years old; perhaps she would share with me her memories. His mother. Mrs. Begley. Begley: another name that, like the names of the towns where people like her once lived, had subtly altered; for the name had in fact been Begleiter, which in German means “companion” or “escort.” Of course I eagerly accepted my friend’s invitation, since by then, when I was nearly forty, there had been a small number of strange coincidences, odd reminders of Bolechow, or Shmiel, or our family’s specific past, that had surfaced improbably in the present, tantalizing us with the possibility that the dead were not so much lost as waiting…
A FEW YEARS AGO, FOR instance, I read somewhere that, sixty years after the event, it was still possible to submit to the International Red Cross the names of Holocaust victims to be traced. And so one day I walked to the local Red Cross office, which is in a large, rectangular, rather impersonal building not too far from my apartment. On the front of this building is a large red cross. Inside, I duly filled out a set of six Missing Person forms. I did so with the barest flicker of optimism, knowing what the odds were; but even so, I told myself, you never know.
And you never do know. Maybe fifteen years ago my youngest brother, who at that point was a costume assistant on Woody Allen movies, was shopping for fabrics in a dimly lighted store, a place filled with rolls of fabrics, located in the Garment District in New York City. He noticed that the elderly man at the counter bore a tattoo on his forearm, and struck up a conversation with this man. During this conversation, my brother mentioned that our own relatives who had perished in the disaster were from Bolechow, at which point the old Jew in the garment shop clapped his hands together in a kind of ecstasy and exclaimed, Ach, Bolechow! They had the most beautiful leather!
There was the time when, after I posted an inquiry in an Internet genealogy site, an old man called me to say he’d once known someone called Shmiel Jäger. Before I could respond, he added that this Shmiel Jäger had come from Dolina, a small town near Bolechow, and had fled eastward, when the Germans came in the summer of 1941—fled, as it turned out, deep into what was then the Soviet Union. I heard he married an Uzbek woman, he even had children with her! this old man, who was hard of hearing, shouted into the phone. Amused at the thought of a shtetl Jew roaming as far as Uzbekistan, I thanked him for getting in touch and hung up, thinking, So there’s nothing to be excited about.
And yet it was odd: like the unexpected touch of a cold hand.
Or there was the time that another one of my brothers—Matt, the one born just after me, with whom for a long time I had no great intimacy (unlike the youngest, who like me was thought to be artistically inclined and to whom I always thought I was very close); Matt, with whom I felt, while I was growing up, an obscure but ferocious competitiveness, and to whom, in a moment of fury, I once did something physically very cruel—Matt called me to say he’d stopped by a big international gathering of Holocaust survivors in Washington, D.C., where he lives. Matt is a photographer, so perhaps he was shooting a story about the convention; I don’t know, I can’t remember. At any rate he called me up to say that at this gathering he had run into someone who said he had known Shmiel Jäger.
What? I said.
Not Uncle Shmiel, Matt said, hurriedly. He then related what this man at the Holocaust survivors’ convention had told him: that the Shmiel Jäger he’d once known had been born with another name, but during the war, when he’d joined a band of partisans operating near Lwów, he’d taken the name Shmiel Jäger since, for safety’s sake, these partisans would sometimes take the names of dead men they had known.
I listened and thought, The oldest daughter was with the partisaner in the hills and died with them. Onkel Schmil and 1 daughter Fridka the Germans killed them 1944 in Bolechow.
So you never know. It was for this reason that I filled out the Red Cross forms, not hoping for much, and gave them to the person at the desk, and went home that day. About four months later I received a thick envelope in the mail from the Red Cross. My hands were shaking as I tore open the packet. Immediately, however, I saw that much of the bulk was due to the fact that the Red Cross was returning to me copies of the six forms I’d filled out. On a seventh piece of paper was a letter stating that there was no known information about the fates of Ester Jäger, Lorka Jäger, Frydka Jäger, Ruchatz (as I still thought) Jäger, or Bronia Jäger, inhabitants of the Polish town of Bolechow.
With respect to Shmiel Jäger, the letter concluded, his case was considered to be “still open”…
FOR THIS REASON, THEN, I was eager to meet my friend’s mother, this Mrs. Begley who had lived so close to my dead uncle and aunt and cousins. It wasn’t that I thought I’d learn anything from her; I just wanted to have the experience of talking to someone of her vintage and provenance, since it seemed incredible to me that there might still exist anyone who’d even walked the same streets as they did. That is how accustomed I’d grown to thinking they and everyone of their era belonged utterly and irretrievably to the black, white, and gray world of the past.
And yet it is also true that when I heard about the existence of this very old woman, of Louis’s mother, I was flushed with a fantasy so intense that it almost shamed me, the way that adolescents are shamed. I wondered if it could be possible that, even though this woman had lived in Stryj and my relatives had lived in Bolechow, perhaps…they had met? Perhaps she might remember them? Shmiel’s wife, I knew (from where? I can’t remember), came from a Stryjer family. Her brother ran a photography studio there, and indeed one of Shmiel’s daughters would, as I found out only because of an accident after my grandfather died, end up working there, briefly; and so when Louis offered to introduce me to his formidable mother—or so I thought of her, having read some years previously Louis’s first book, which seemed to be a novelized account of how he and his mother survived the Nazi years, outwitted the Germans and the Ukrainians as my own family had not—when Louis offered to introduce us, my mind began to race. I envisioned a scene in, say, October 1938, when Louis (then Ludwik) and his mother might well have come into the Schneelicht Studio in Stryj to have a picture taken to celebrate this only child’s fifth birthday. I imagine Shmiel’s daughter, my mother’s first cousin Lorka, a tall, good-looking, somewhat aloof girl of seventeen, carefully taking Mrs. Begley’s coat as she enters the atelier (it will have a fur collar, I think, since her husband, as an ancient Ukrainian woman would recall to me on a street corner sixty years later, was the biggest doctor in town), and, her natural reserve dissolving, saying something charming to the little boy, who is wearing a woolen cap from beneath which strands of his fair hair, which may or may not help save his life later on, escape. My fantasy is that the sudden warming of this serious-looking girl makes an impression on the Mrs. Begley of 1938—she is herself a serious and deeply shrewd woman—and because of that impression, Mrs. Begley will remember her, remember the murdered girl Lorka Jäger, remember her so many years later and in that way will help me rescue her.
But what happened was this:
I finally met Mrs. Begley for the first time in 1999, at a reception for one of Louis’s sons, who is a painter. The party, which was held in an upstairs room at an impressive-looking uptown gallery
in New York City, was noisy, and Mrs. Begley was sitting, very erect, with an expression that mixed a grandmother’s prideful pleasure and a deaf person’s isolated irritation—she had a bad enough time hearing in general, she told me soon after we met, without all that noise—in a chair at the back of the room.
So you had family there? she said to me after I’d taken her hand and crouched down to talk to her, slightly disoriented by the way in which she’d spoken, as if we’d been in the middle of a conversation, and not quite sure whether “there” meant eastern Poland or the Holocaust.
Yes, I replied, they lived in Bolechow.
BUH-leh-khuhv is what I said. This Mrs. Begley had a long, intelligent face with a high, clear forehead, the kind of face a person of another place and generation would have described as the face of a Rebecca, a soulful beautiful Jewish woman’s face; crowned by an immaculate coif of pure white hair, it was dominated by a tenacious, wry, covert gaze that was not diminished by the fact that it emanated from one eye alone; the other was opaque, and slightly hooded, and I never asked why. This gaze would hold your own and not let go during conversations, a gaze that even after I’d known her for a while struck me as unnerving, not least because it always seemed as if the eye, watchful, remote, assessing, was reacting not to the conversation that was taking place, but to a hidden conversation, a conversation about what happened to her and what she lost, a loss so great that she knew I would never understand, although she was sometimes willing to talk to me about it. On the night I met her, she was sitting there, elegant in a black velvet pantsuit, grasping the head of a walking stick in one hand and leaning toward me, partly to suggest she was interested and partly because of the terrific noise, and when I said that my family was from Bolechow—BUH-lehkhuv—her good eye flickered with amusement, and for the first time she smiled.
What, BUH-lekhuhv? she said, disdainfully.
The first word sounded like vawt.
She shook her head and I flushed like the teenager I was when I first became obsessed with this place. With a sour expression she said, You must say Buh-LEH-khooff. It’s a Polish town. You say it the Yiddish way!
I found myself embarrassed and defensive, having suddenly detected a whiff of long-dead gradations of class and culture that are of no importance to anyone, anymore: the condescension, perhaps, that the secular, urban, assimilated Jews of a certain era in a certain place, Jews who grew up in a free Poland and spoke Polish at home, displayed to the countrified Jews of the rural shtetls, Jews like my grandfather, who although not even ten years older than this Mrs. Begley had grown up in a wholly different world, Austrian, not Polish, who spoke Yiddish at home, and for whom a trip to even a small city, like Stryj, was something of an event.
In any case, because of all this, of the way I pronounced or mispronounced Bolechow, my secret fantasy suddenly was ashes in my mouth. Which is why, when Mrs. Begley asked me what my relatives’ name had been, after she’d corrected my pronunciation, and I’d replied Jäger, and she had shaken her head and told me she’d never heard the name, I couldn’t bring myself to mention the photography atelier of the family Schneelicht, my great-uncle’s in-laws who had lived in her city, in Stryj, where perhaps, once before, there had been the smallest chance that they and she would have met. A chance that, for me, would have been a way of connecting the remote past, in which my relatives seemed to be hopelessly, irretrievably frozen, to the limpid present in which this meeting was taking place, the transparent moment that, as anyone could see quite clearly, held me and the old woman with her white hair and her cane, held the noise and the party and an ordinary early evening in autumn in a city that was at peace.
DESPITE MY OCCASIONAL errors, however, I learned a lot, over the years of letters and queries and interviews and Internet searches, a lot about Bolechow that wasn’t mistaken. For instance: They were there since before there was a Bolechow! How long was that, exactly? It is possible to know almost to the day.
If you are an American Jew of a certain generation, the generation that, like mine, had grandparents who were immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century, you probably grew up hearing stories about the “Old Country,” about the little towns or shtetls from which your grandpa or grandma or nana or bubby or zeyde came, the kind of little town celebrated by Yiddish authors like Isaac Bashevis Singer and in Fiddler on the Roof, the kind of place that no longer exists; and you probably thought, as I thought for a long time, that they were all more or less alike, modest places with maybe three or four thousand inhabitants, with a vista of wooden houses clustered around a square, places to which we are, now, too willing to ascribe a certain sepia charm, perhaps because if we thought about the Ping-Pong games and the volleyball and skiing, the movies and the camping trips, it would be that much more difficult to think of what happened to them, because they would seem less different from us. The kind of place so ordinary that few people would have found it worth writing about, until of course it and all the places like it were to be wiped out, at which point their very ordinariness seemed to be worth preserving.
This, at any rate, is what I thought of Bolechow. Then, one day not too long ago, my older brother, Andrew, sent me as a Hanukkah gift a very rare volume, published by the Oxford University Press in 1922, called The Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow. (I say “Hanukkah gift” but as I write this I am aware that the words are not really true, and certainly not as close to the truth as my grandfather would have liked: since my two sisters-in-law are not Jewish, and my nieces and nephews are enjoying the kind of eclectic religious upbringing now very common, the gift I received was something I undoubtedly thought of at the time as a “holiday” gift. No: let me be really honest. I’m sure I just thought of it as a “Christmas present.” The fact is that in my own house, when we were growing up, we didn’t have a really thriving Hanukkah tradition. What I remember mostly was my mother, whose Orthodox upbringing clung to her despite the erosive force of my father’s disdain for religion, putting a kitchen towel or a doily on her head in our kitchen, the first night of Hanukkah, and as we kids gathered around the table somewhat self-consciously, singing the half-remembered blessing over the candles in Hebrew. When her memory as to the exact words failed her, she would lapse, with no embarrassment at all, into Yiddish filler: Yaidel-daidel-daidel-dai, she would say. The brass menorah she used was tiny and old-fashioned and plain, and had belonged to her mother; at some point her father gave us a more imposing one with rampant lions of Judah supporting the central candle. That was after most of us had gone off to college, and so I imagine that there was a time when my mother performed her annual ritual in front of this imposing object alone; although while my grandfather was still alive she would, I remember, call him in Florida just as she was getting ready to light the candles, and she would sing the blessing over the phone to him, so in a way she wasn’t really alone after all…. But for the rest of us, as I was saying, it wasn’t really a very big holiday, and the giving of gifts dwindled away after we were very small children. So I was surprised and impressed when my older brother started sending carefully chosen gifts to all of us, a few years ago.)
The Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow is the first English translation of a manuscript of some ninety-five sheets crammed with a good Hebrew cursive script, typical of educated Jews of the eighteenth century, that was written at the turn of the nineteenth century by a Polish Jew called Ber Birkenthal, an inhabitant of Bolechow. Reb Birkenthal, who lived from 1723 to 1805, a tumultuous period in the history of Poland and, as his memoirs show, of Bolechow itself, was a remarkable man—a sage of great repute whose grave, in the Bolechow cemetery, would become the site of pilgrimages. Ber was the son of a forward-thinking, broad-minded wine merchant who encouraged his son’s precocious intellectual appetites from his earliest childhood—even allowing the boy to study Greek and Latin with the local Catholic priests, an unheard-of thing that would later cast suspicion, briefly, on Ber’s allegiance to his religion. The precocious boy grew up to be a precocious man
: a successful wine merchant but also a scholar of enormous breadth and depth, a man who could read easily in Polish and German and Italian, as well as in Hebrew and Greek and Latin, a man who delved as happily into the great Italian work of world history known as the Relazioni universali, first published between 1595 and 1598 (which he began to translate into Hebrew), as he did into the arcane Kabbalistic texts that fascinated him, such as the Hemdat Yamim, by Natan Ghazzati, the so-called prophet of the false messiah Shabbtai Zvi. Ber of Bolechow, therefore, was a man who exemplified the liberal, worldly energies that helped to create the Haskalah, the great Jewish Enlightenment movement, during the eighteenth century, a movement that flourished, as it happened, under the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the grandfather of the composer.
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Page 6
