by Ramona Koval
I fled. I sat with my youngest grandchildren, the twins, and the little girl tried to feed me her corn kernels and her brother took bites out of my tomato. As I watched them, I thought of what happened to all the little Jewish children, and I couldn’t bear it. I wondered if not knowing something is better than knowing too much. I dreaded hearing the stories but I owed it to the tellers to listen.
I went back to the man’s testimony. Rabbi Lipman Radzic was his name. As I expected, the rest of the story was about the murder of the child by the German soldier who offered the chocolate. The soldier put a pair of gloves on, in order to hold the child by the feet and smash its head against a water pump. And, having killed the child, the man shot the mother in the face as she pulled out her hair in grief.
There it was. I had heard this kind of story before, I told myself, and I was used to it. I breathed again, understanding that I was not going to be newly horrified.
Jacob Rosenberg’s testimony was in the archive, too. He was, as you would expect of a writer, a natural storyteller. I searched the end of the recording, where he spoke of his life after the war, in case he talked about being in Melbourne and knowing Mama.
Perhaps, I thought, it was self-absorbed to be looking for places where his story merged with mine. But isn’t that the way it is for all of us? We are the summation of all the stories, some known and most unknown, and all the lives that come before us.
Much later, I watched the video once again, this time from the beginning. Jacob describes his poor but happy family before the war: ‘I cannot remember a time when we were not singing…We were readers…Whenever father bought a book it was like a celebration, like an extra member came into the family.’
He was calm, analytical, reasoned. In his accounts of his time as a slave labourer in the Łódz ghetto and in Auschwitz, he told of his method of keeping warm by thinking about fire, and noted that his poetry was full of imagery of snow and frost, as those times left an indelible mark. He told the story of a man who, forced to hang his own son, elected to hang himself as well: one noose for two heads.
The essential thing for survival, he said, was to hope, and not to think. Thinking was devastating. And that making sense out of such a senseless atrocity was a great art. For me, he said, the written word, my poetry, is my museum. I walk in there, and it’s alive. Survivors, he said, understood that there is a language beyond words.
Could I really hope to understand Max, a man I had never known, a survivor, without grasping the language beyond words?
13
A goatskin jacket and a bearskin hat
WHEN, in the 1960s, we moved from our one-bedroom flat in St Kilda to a three-bedroom triple-fronted solid-brick place in North Balwyn—from a seedy urban beachside suburb to one with leafy middle-class respectability—Dad was deputised to take me to Jewish Sunday school. Temple Beth Israel in Camberwell was a reform congregation with services held mostly in English. The Hebrew prayers and songs sounded almost Presbyterian. There were no great beards or side locks or black garb, and men and women sat side by side instead of the women being relegated to the area upstairs or behind a curtain, as they are in Orthodox congregations.
I was excited to be getting out of the house on Sunday mornings, yet shy. I knew nobody.
On the first Sunday I could hear Dad getting worked up over something as he spoke with the school officials. His voice was getting louder and higher even than his usual bellowing tones.
‘Of course she is Jewish!’ he was saying.
‘But is her mother Jewish?’ they asked.
‘Of course her mother is Jewish!’
‘But is she adopted?’
‘How can you say she is adopted?’
But I was so blond: how could I be of the faith? These not-so-religious Jews had taken all the Aryan propaganda to heart. I was fair and blond, so I must be part gentile. The fuss made me feel inauthentic, a state in which I would find myself again many times over the years.
Thinking about the conversation now, I wonder if they were just expressing their suspicions as they looked at Dad: at his black hair and brown eyes and swarthy complexion. Maybe they smelt a rat?
I learned then that people look like their mothers and fathers, sometimes more like one than the other. Their hair, their eyes, their skin, even the shape of their legs. I had never thought about it. But I began to notice the differences in our family.
When I asked Mama, she said that my sister took after Dad—who shaved each day but had a reddish beard. This seemed an intimate fact for Mama to know about Dad, and I remember feeling embarrassed by it. She went on to explain how, when she was a little girl, she had hair just like mine.
There was no way she could prove it. I had to take her word for it and not press the point. Mama seemed to know many things—those she told and those she didn’t. She was much smarter than Dad, who just worked in the factory, told jokes and played cards. She read books, sometimes in French or in Polish. And, even though she took in piecework from clothing factories and I heard the treadle machine’s whirring as the pedal rocked under her feet late into the night, she always gave the impression of being wise. That’s what the matter with her was, Dad would say. She read too many books.
When I was a teenager Mama let me read the books she had devoured: the banned ones (Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses, The Group, Portnoy’s Complaint), and those by the feminists and the sociologists (Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Alvin Toffler). Did she give me The Double Helix by James D. Watson, a hugely popular book in 1968? I don’t think so. It was technical and I was keen on chemistry, so it was probably my choice. There was a memorable subplot about the female X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin and how men played down her vital role in determining the structure of DNA.
I read of the mysterious, beautiful dance of the deoxyribonucleic acids, the DNA double helices, and learned about how they unzipped and transferred all their information to the new generation of cells. This was the way all kinds of things appeared and reappeared from one generation to the next. It was the unbroken chain that connected me with my antecedents and with theirs before them, all the way back as far as I could think. This elegant molecular chain of events led to your hair and your eyes and the shape of every body part, and I fell in love with its mystery and the stories it evoked.
I studied science at high school, then at university. In first year we studied the way the blood groups were inherited. I was B positive, my mother was O positive, and so was my sister, and that meant that my father had to be B positive, too. But he wasn’t. I raised it with my laboratory supervisor and got a story about the rate of false positives. It was, thinking back, a remarkably insensitive experiment to do with a group of students. Maybe it isn’t done quite so freely now we know that about ten per cent of children are not the issue of their official fathers.
I’d already told my supervisor about the simian crease on my right hand, which can be indicative of Trisomy 21 or Down syndrome. But he looked at me and rolled his eyes, as I clearly didn’t have any other Trisomy 21 features and had no intellectual deficit.
Now I see that, however unconsciously, I was on the cusp of embarking on this investigation, but at the time the blood testing didn’t trigger any urgent interest in me to follow up the mystery. My mother seemed uninterested in my laboratory experiments, perhaps trying to put me off the scent. I wonder now if she was troubled by her daughter’s pursuit of studies in heredity and the way genes are shared in families. By then, though, Mama was gravely ill and my father’s blood group was the least of my concerns and most likely of hers, too.
Years after she died, I returned to my musings. Where did the fairness and blue eyes come from? Why were the Sunday school officials so suspicious? How did I get to look like this if I was a descendant of a group of desert-wandering Middle Eastern Semites—why didn’t I have black hair and deep-brown eyes?
I read Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe. Here was the story of the Khazar Empire, which
ruled the Western Steppe—the region that stretches from the mouth of the Danube River along the north shore of the Black Sea, across the lower Volga and eastwards to the Altai Mountains—between the seventh and tenth centuries CE. It was a confederation of Turkic, Iranian and Mongol tribes who lived in what is now southern Russia, north of Georgia and east of Ukraine, a major connection between the Middle East, Russia and China, ruling the western end of the Silk Road.
The Khazars were a buffer between the Christian Byzantine Empire and the Muslim Umayyad Caliphate, and to fulfil this role the royal and aristocratic families of Khazaria, rather surprisingly, converted to Judaism. Surprising to me, because Judaism is not a proselytising religion and I’d never heard of a mass conversion like this. But there had been Jews in the Caucasus in the centuries before Jesus of Nazareth, and they were there after the increase of trade along the Silk Road and the decline of Judea in the first to seventh centuries CE.
Greco-Roman Jews and Mesopotamian Jews also found their way to Khazaria, and the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism in the eighth century increased their flow to the region. Just how many Khazars beyond the ruling class converted is unclear, but in any case the empire lasted for four hundred years, till the Mongols came.
What a story! It had all the elements of the Arabian Nights: mysterious travellers from abroad, kings and aristocrats, conversions to a foreign faith, topped off with a Mongol invasion.
Koestler theorised that the fair- or reddish-haired, blue-eyed Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe were directly descended from these wild men and women of the Caucasus, who fled eastwards following the collapse of their empire. In the fourteenth century they met the exiled Jews from the Spanish Inquisition as they were making their own way north and east through Italy, France and Germany. By the middle of the sixteenth century, most of the world’s Jews lived in Poland.
The Khazar theory of the founding Ashkenazi population was challenged by the Rhineland theory, which had Jews from Rome (following the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, in 70 CE, by Roman troops under Titus) merging eastwards through the Rhine Valley and into Eastern Europe. Here they may have met the Jewish remnants of Khazaria, although there are debates about the reliability of the original sources for the Khazar story.
Whichever way the populations arrived at their meeting point, the darkness of the Sephardic Jews mixed with the fairness of the Ashkenazi Jews. And if we fast-forward to the years after the Holocaust, there was a higher percentage of fairer survivors than darker ones. Fairer Jews could more easily hide in the Polish population, with its predominantly Northern European looks. It made sense to me. After all, this was the story of Mama’s survival. She was able to hide in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation using forged Aryan documents because she could pass as a Polish Catholic.
What’s more, it was redolent of a classic experiment in population genetics that I’d studied at university. The light-coloured peppered moths of Britain had an advantage over their dark-coloured brethren, because they could merge into the bark of birch trees common in their habitat, making it hard for predatory birds to see them and to pick them off. They bred happily.
During the industrial revolution, the air became polluted with soot and the surfaces of the trees were blackened. Now it was the turn of the dark moths to survive in favour of the light moths, which stood out against the sooty tree trunks. After 1970, when air-pollution regulations limited the output of soot from factories, the trees lightened, and the light moths regained pre-eminence.
I’d always been fascinated by this, and now I understood why. It was intrinsically interesting, but I also saw that I was like the light-coloured moths, a product of the vicissitudes of the environment of my antecedents, of the luck of the draw.
The Khazar story drew me in, offering answers to questions that had been nagging at me for decades. I wanted to discover what the Khazars looked like. I soon found, in several sources, references to them being handsome, with reddish hair, white skin and blue eyes.
I pored over maps of the kingdom and imagined an ancestor in boots and a long kaftan, with her hair plaited—and riding a wild horse, naturally. I used Google Earth’s satellite photos to swoop down on the lands of the Khazars from the safety of my home, testing to see if one landscape or another held a particular race memory for me. One mountain village looked much like the next, and much like the small Polish hamlets I’d seen in my travels. The larger towns were mixtures of traditional churches and Soviet-style public buildings. Nothing looked like a yurt, and the closest I ever got to seeing one was the writers’ retreat in the gardens at Charlotte Square at the Edinburgh Book Festival.
By this stage I’d long accepted that my experiments with Alan’s DNA had not been conclusive: I would not be able scientifically to confirm my relationship to Max. But ten years had passed since I sent off my DNA sample, and it was now possible to send another sample of cheek scrapings to a laboratory in the USA running the Genographic Project. Samples from people from all over the world were being collected and analysed for both Y chromosomal geographic movements (the Y chromosome is handed intact from father to son through all generations) and those carried on mitochondria, the energy factories of our cells, handed down from mothers to both men and women.
While I was unsure about who my father was, I was certain about my mother. And I was entranced by the idea that whatever genes were inside the mitochondria of my Ur-mother were in every cell of mine, too. Even more exciting was the discovery that geneticists could now trace the mitochondrial genes to particular geographic regions and communities, and offer a paleoanthropological theory about the journeys that had been undertaken by human populations with those particular markers, all the way back to the groups of Homo sapiens who ventured out of Africa between sixty thousand and 125,000 years ago.
Granted, it was at quite a remove from my here-and-now, but it was consoling to imagine the certainty of the connection. My mitochondrial DNA was given to me by my mother and to her by hers, as far back as I could visualise. And if the genes could tell me a story of travel and settlement, it would be more than the search for my father had revealed.
Some months later, when the results of the test came back, I learned that my mitochondrial DNA was derived from, led directly to, a woman whom scientists had named Katrine (or K), one of seven ‘mitochondrial Eves’ described by Bryan Sykes in his book The Seven Daughters of Eve.
Sykes imagined that K, the woman I was connected to by an unbroken chain of female relatives, would have been on a great plain now covered by the North Adriatic Sea, around fifteen to twenty-five thousand years ago. It wasn’t hard to imagine her descendants following bands of game animals eastwards for twenty thousand years and ending up as Khazars at the end of the first millennium CE. I looked at the map, and traced her journeys and those of her descendants.
I scoured the literature for anything I could find about this K group, and to my surprise I discovered I had another, more recent relative to meet. And a male relative, at that. On the direct line of mitochondrial genetics from K to me was Ötzi the Iceman.
Ötzi was the body, now rather withered and desiccated, that two German climbers found frozen and half-covered in ice in September 1991 as they descended the Fineilspitze in the Ötztal Alps, near the Italian–Austrian border. He was well preserved but clearly had been there for a while, judging by his clothing and equipment. Subsequently he was dated as being between five thousand and 5,350 years old. Because his body had been deep-frozen so long, it was possible not only for his DNA to be recovered but also for paleo-forensic experts to work out all kinds of things about him, by analysing what he was carrying when he died and the state of his body.
I found pages devoted to Ötzi on the website of the museum in Bolzano, northern Italy, where he is now housed. As I stared at his creepy form I found myself looking for traces of myself in his hair and what was left of the shape of his face. How bizarre to be combing this corpse for evidence of connection—but he was a long-
lost relative, and I was obsessed with finding myself a branch, any branch, of a family tree to perch upon.
I was not alone here. A large percentage of people with the K connection are Ashkenazi Jews: 1.7 million Jews alive today share the same genetic fingerprint. Brushing the 1,699,999 others aside, I read what I could about my old cousin Ötzi. Years of experts examining his body have given us a marvellous reconstruction of his story and especially the last day or so of his life.
For a Neolithic man forty-six years was elderly, and Ötzi was shortish at 152 centimetres tall. He had broken a couple of ribs in the past; he had arthritis, some fleas and intestinal whipworm; and he had cuts on his hands and torso. But what he would have been most bothered by on his last day was the arrowhead deep in his shoulder which, in addition to a head injury, caused his death.
Analysis of isotopes and enamel in Ötzi’s teeth and bones told of his growing up in the Eisack Valley and spending his adult life further west. The day before he died, he swallowed some pollen from around the Schnals Valley, and then had another meal which contained pollen from a lower region. His last meal, eaten three hours before he died, was high up again, near a sub-alpine forest.
He was wearing three layers of skins and grasses, a belt holding up his loincloth and leggings, a goatskin jacket, and a bearskin hat. The stitching on these items of clothing was carefully tailored; his shoes were made of skins of calf, deer and bear, and lined with grass. He had with him a large copper axe with a handle of yew wood; a longbow staff and arrows; a dagger and a sheath; a bark container for charcoal; and a belt with flints, tinder, and a tool for working on the arrows and unfinished longbow. He was also carrying a string net, perhaps for trapping birds.
Like Max, he was tattooed. He had fifty-two markings at various points on his body, including a cross on the inside of his left knee, and numerous parallel lines above his kidneys and across his ankles. They were not produced with needles but by rubbing charcoal into fine skin incisions. There was speculation about these being found at points of wear and tear on his body, and possibly where medications may have been applied or at acupuncture points. But there they were, more mysterious and less shocking than Max’s marking, and on a man to whom I could claim to trace a definite line of descent.
