The Turk Who Loved Apples: And Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World

by Matt Gross

  I nodded. Regina opened a folder and pulled out a piece of paper, a photocopy of a form from an ancient ledger.

  “Can you read that?” she asked, pointing to a word handwritten in Cyrillic.

  Remembering the Cyrillic alphabet was one thing, but making out the handwriting quite another. The first letters I could kind of understand, and I tried to pronounce them. “Gross—” was how it began, but the rest was gibberish. I looked up questioningly at Regina.

  “Grosmitz,” she said.

  I looked more closely at the Cyrillic ending: -myc, which could be pronounced -mitz or even -mütz, a kind of cap. So, my grandfather had been right! We had been Big Hats! But how had we lost our caps? And where had the name come from? And who were the Grosmützes before they became Grosses?

  Dammit. I didn’t want to care about this stuff, this question of origins. For thirty-five years, the Gross past had been a mystery to me, and I hadn’t cared. Okay, I had cared a little, when it came time in school to make a family tree (always frustratingly short of branches), or when Jean’s family had wanted to know about my background, but maybe only because my inability to describe my past revealed the ignorance I’d been trying for so long to conceal and destroy. But the great-grandparents’ generation, by their silence, had achieved their aim: The family began in the New World, and only in the New World. My father had even become a historian whose first book told the story of the birth of the American Revolution in Concord, Massachusetts, and I’d grown up acutely aware that I’d been born in Concord, too. What did the doings of my ancestors in Lithuania matter to my life in New York and my travels abroad?

  At the same time, I craved this knowledge out of simple, raw curiosity. Where and how did the Gross family’s story begin? So when I’d begun planning a Frugal Grand Tour of Europe in the summer of 2008, I knew that I’d have to get to Lithuania and investigate. After all, wasn’t genealogical travel the kind of thing that regular travelers did? They went to Ireland and saw the potato fields their great-great-great grandparents had abandoned, and they saw the ports in Senegal where their ancestors were forced aboard slave ships. My Lithuanian detour would be no different—an exploration, you could say, of other people’s desires for completion, not my own.

  Even the Grosmützes, Regina explained the next day in the sunlit reading room of the Lithuanian National Archives, were once someone else. For centuries, she said, Jews in the Russian Empire did not have family names—just patronymics. But sometime in the early-nineteenth century, the czar decreed that Jews, too, would have family names, and the process of naming began. As I would later learn, it wasn’t necessarily a process of self-naming. Often, imperial officials would bestow epithets on their Jewish subjects, sometimes logically, sometimes cruelly, sometimes randomly. “Big Cap” felt a bit like the latter.

  Regina had reserved several ledgers for us to look through—these were the records tracking births, deaths, and marriages in the Jewish community of Marijampolė throughout the nineteenth century. And there, in an entry dated February 9, 1829, the Grosmütz family’s recorded history begins. A joyous day! Mowsha, son of Berko and Freyda Grosmütz, married Dobra, daughter of Berko and Sora Braskowicz. Mazel tov! On December 15 of that same year, they had a daughter, Freyda, and over the next twenty years had many more children—Abram Itzko, Berko, Gabriel, Esther, Liba, and Jankiel Judel—not all of whom survived.

  “This is a sad page,” Regina said as she pointed to the 1840 deaths of seven-year-old Abram Itzko and two-year-old Esther.

  Sad? I guess. Personally, I was just excited to unearth any fragments of our past at all; learning that my ancestors’ kids had died was, well, ancient history. But the fact that Mowsha was a tailor, and his nephew Chaim a shoemaker—those were details that resonated more strongly.

  Regina and I flipped slowly through the pages, dust coating our fingers as we neared 1885 and the birth of Moshe Grosmütz, who would leave Marijampolė at the age of sixteen and arrive as Morris Gross in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

  1859: Gabriel and his wife, Golda, have a son, Abram Leib.

  1864: Mowsha’s son Berko marries Chana Yenta Fertynsztein.

  1865: Chaim has a daughter, Mera.

  1874: Mowsha’s wife, Dobra, dies at the age of seventy-three.

  And that was it. From there on out, until well after Moshe had left the village, the ledgers were missing—as was the vital link between myself and these Grosmützes. Were these Big Caps really my ancestors? Probably—Regina said they were the only ones in Marijampolė whose surname approximated my own—but then why had Moshe left them behind?

  The easy explanation was pogroms, the violent ethnic cleansing campaigns that periodically struck Jewish communities throughout Europe. But Regina, as well as histories I read later, described the beginning of the twentieth century in that part of Poland and Lithuania as relatively pogrom-free. Regina’s theory was that Moshe fled to escape conscription into the Russian army, but without further research (which I couldn’t yet afford) we couldn’t be certain.

  Where, I also wondered, had the other Grosmützes gone? The name had disappeared from the Lithuanian archives, and while a number of Grosmitzes appeared in the online databases of Holocaust victims, they were from hundreds of miles away, in Poland. Nor did the name have much Internet presence, although the existence of Grossmutz, a German village an hour north of Berlin, hinted at a possible ancestral homeland. If other members of my clan had made it to England or America, they might have become Grosses as well—and therefore unGoogleable.

  For the next few days, I pondered my family’s background. I walked the streets of the Old City, so well-preserved that my great-grandfather might have felt at home among them, and I inspected the Jewish museums for clues to Jewish life in Lithuania, and Regina and I trekked out to the Paneriai, the woods where almost all of Vilnius’s Jews were killed during World War II, their bodies thrown into pits. While interviewing a rabbi from Chabad, the Orthodox Jewish outreach center, I even allowed him to wrap tefillin, leather prayer straps, around my arm and lead me in reciting Hebrew verses I half-remembered from Sunday school twenty-five years ago.

  It left me cold, all of it. To be fair, it was enlightening to learn about the history of Lithuania’s Jews, but why did I really care? I considered myself as much (or more) an atheist and an American as a Jew, and the cosmopolitan Jewish world presented at the museums didn’t seem to have much to do with the lowly small-town shoemakers and tailors I’d descended from. The Chabad rabbi’s religiosity might actually have had more to do with the lives of the Grosmützes, but Judaism as a religion had had nothing to offer me since I was eleven. I felt no spiritual connection.

  What touched me in Vilnius, by contrast, were the wild strawberries growing among the trees of the Paneriai, and the fry-up of bacon, mushrooms, potatoes, and cream I ate as a hangover cure one morning. When I wasn’t with Regina, I was hanging around with a friend of a friend who’d recently, for fun, gotten licensed as a tour guide and was excited to show me around his stunning city. This was a human connection, not the fading ink of the past.

  Still, I had one more duty to accomplish in Lithuania. One Saturday morning, I took a train out to Marijampolė, eighty miles west. It was a nice town of fifty thousand, quiet and well-kept, and weddings were taking place at two churches. Most traces of the town’s Jewish history—in 1861, apparently, more than three thousand of Marijampolė’s 3,700 residents were Jews—had been eradicated. The synagogue was now a training center for teachers, and Nazis and their sympathizers had smashed all but eleven gravestones in the Jewish cemetery. A monument near the Sesupe River commemorated the 1941 murders of between seven thousand and eight thousand Jews, mostly by Lithuanians—“among them university and high school students who volunteered for the ‘job,’” according to a town history written by a former resident.

  As I sat by the river on that clear-skied Sabbath, and later in the graveyard, where the surviving stones had been arranged in a circle, I tried to figure o
ut what I was supposed to feel. Here I was, at last, in the town we Grosses had come from, where we’d cut jackets and cobbled boots, where we’d celebrated births, bar mitzvahs, and marriages among thousands of other Jews, and where thousands of likely friends and acquaintances of the Grosmütz family had been mercilessly slaughtered. But again, I didn’t feel much of anything, although I desperately wanted to. It seemed inhuman to have so little reaction, but then my family wasn’t buried here. We’d dodged that drama and wound up in Bridgeport. There was history all around me—and fascinating history, it was, too—but it was not mine to cry over. Really, I thought, I should never have given in to such a sentimental journey in the first place. What had I expected to find here in my “homeland,” anyway? Was I supposed to become as religious as my ancestors, or keep kosher for a week? Was I supposed to develop ties to this country and this town that would keep me returning year after year? Was I supposed to break down in tears and weep at the tragic forces that had altered the fortunes of my people?

  What had I learned anyway? That my ancestors had been rural Jews who stitched clothing and cobbled shoes—that they were not the individuals I’d hoped to discover but stereotypes, background figures, extras. And why had I traveled thousands of miles to learn any of this when I could have accumulated the same research through e-mails, Web searches, and hours spent in libraries?

  This was neither the first nor the last time I’d asked myself this fundamental question about travel: why do it at all? Travel is expensive and troublesome and uncomfortable. You plan and plan and plan, and then you show up in Urumqi, in far northwestern China, and discover you can’t buy a ticket for the train to Beijing for another four days. You find yourself bored to death in Frankfurt or bedridden in Kefalonia, and your clothes are infested with chiggers from that campground in northern Georgia. Or you cross half the globe in search of clues to your heritage and come away full of knowledge, empty of revelation.

  Why bother? Why bother with anything but the simplest vacations, the package tours to Paris and all-inclusive Caribbean resorts? Why not spend the money to have a travel agent pin down every variable and let idiots like me do the rough and random exploring? Who needs the friendship of a thousand foreigners when the kids, the in-laws, and the high school pals (whom you don’t much like anymore, but still) are clamoring for your attention at home? Why schlep to Bangkok and risk gastric distress when another reasonably good Thai place just opened around the corner? That guy on Yelp! said it’s even better than the burrito joint that was there before.

  Travelers (and travel writers) like myself love to harp on about the importance of travel. We decry the low rate of passport ownership in the United States—only 35 percent! only 110 million people!—and the lingering reliance on travel agents and pre-packaged trips. We can’t understand why anyone would want to go on a cruise ship, except when we go and it’s awesome, and we will patiently explain to you the advantages of various frequent-flier programs and which credit cards have no overseas-transactions fees. We talk and write about how our trips have changed us, made us into better, fuller human beings, enabled us to understand people whose lives we once thought beyond comprehension.

  Travel is our religion, and we are its apostles, who will always tell you that travel is, without question, good. We want you to believe us, and you’ve probably already taken that leap of faith. For who among us believes travel is bad? No one. So now join us. (Although we’ve already got our own rough itineraries sketched out, so you should develop your own.) We have canonized saints both living (Paul Theroux, Jan Morris, Pico Iyer, Bill Bryson) and dead (Bruce Chatwin, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac). And we quote from our inspirational gospels without prompting:

  “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” —Mark Twain.

  “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”—Martin Buber.

  “Not all those who wander are lost.”—J.R.R. Tolkien.

  And my favorite: “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read but one page.”

  The quote is attributed, probably falsely, to St. Augustine, whose Confessions has guided my understanding of travel since I read it (or most of it) in college. The work is Augustine’s spiritual autobiography, the tale of his evolution from a wanton, hedonistic professor of rhetoric in fourth-century Carthage to the upstanding Christian bishop of nearby Hippo Regius. The story’s great drama, as far as I’m concerned, is Augustine’s conversion to Christianity, and the reconciliation of Manicheanism and Christian dogma that allows him to fully embrace Christianity. That is, Manicheanism saw the world as torn by dual, separate, competing forces—good and evil—while Christianity claimed that all things were created by God, that God was good, and that his creations were therefore good, too. But how then, Augustine wondered, to account for evil, which clearly existed? How can a benevolent god be responsible for evil? Or as Augustine put it, “Whence is evil?”

  The answer he came to, after much tortuous soul-searching, was supremely elegant: Evil does not exist. What we call evil is but a lesser form of good, for it allows us to see, appreciate, and desire good in its greater forms:

  [I]n the parts of creation, some things, because they do not harmonize with others, are considered evil. Yet those same things harmonize with others and are good, and in themselves are good. And all these things which do not harmonize with each other still harmonize with the inferior part of creation which we call the earth, having its own cloudy and windy sky of like nature with itself. Far be it from me, then, to say, “These things should not be.” For if I could see nothing but these, I should indeed desire something better—but still I ought to praise thee, if only for these created things.

  This is, clearly, the Christian version of my own travel philosophy—that I have needed to experience the bad in order to understand the good, and that I have needed to accept all experiences on their own terms, without prejudice or expectation, for every corner of the world, every bite of food, every half-drunk Canadian wanderer has had something new and wondrous to show me.

  And so when Augustine says (apocryphally) that the world is a book, and that one must travel to read its pages, I am tempted to believe him unquestioningly.

  But you know what else is a book? A book.

  Maybe it’s a little perverse for a travel writer, one whose life and career have been built around unquenchable wanderlust, to suggest reading as an alternative to actual travel. But there’s something to be said for the book (and journalism) as a vector of vicarious experience. I don’t plan to walk from Rotterdam to Istanbul, so Patrick Leigh Fermor’s erudite tales of his own journey suffice; I am not about to summit Everest or cross the Sahara, but I will devour the stories of those who have. And if I truly wanted to understand the history of the Jews of Lithuania, there are doubtless many, many books I could read.

  What I mean is that there are limits to what we can learn through travel. Few of us are willing to devote months or years of our lives to a particular place, learning the language and customs so that we understand them more deeply than a native. And there is always someone who was there earlier, or longer, who picked up the tongue and married into the family, who paid the dues and paid them again and made the exotic land into a home—and wrote a book or a magazine article about that little-known world.

  Sometimes, for me, the writing creates a world better than the real one. Bruce Chatwin’s books are said to have as much fiction as fact in them, and yet when he crosses Patagonia or fries up steaks-and-eggs at a cabin in the Australian Outback, I don’t care what he’s invented. The words form their own world, one I’ve loved since Tolkien’s books lured me into a self-contained realm of disparate peoples and cultures, strange logic and pervasive magic, new languages and ancient genealogies. I can’t stand to read those books now, but I remember well how it felt to be inside them. It’s the same feeling I get today from reading Zola; I don’t know if his rendition of late-nineteenth-century France is unerring, but t
he precision of his language, the raging complexity of his characters, and the quantum-mechanical determinism of his plots together construct a place I can put my faith in. If it didn’t exist that way then, it does now.

  It’s more than that, actually. Having now spent years turning my own journeys into written stories, I have a hard time distinguishing between the two. What I wrote about Turkey in 2006 is not exactly the same as what I did in Turkey in 2006, but the articles I produced have come to define my memories of that trip, and whatever details failed to make my first draft, or were cut by my editor, are slowly fading into unreality. In writing this book, I frequently had to refer to the published stories to see what I had done, and dig up earlier drafts to see what I’d done but forgotten. Eventually, the published stories may be all I remember. And they may be all that is important to remember. When you separate the wheat from the chaff, you sometimes wind up with a lot of chaff.

  At the same time, the world itself feels to me less concrete—less real—than ever. Facts are slippery, geography pliant, data-based explanations untrustworthy. And my own memory? Did these things really happen? Did a Cambodian midget in a tuxedo once usher me into a lightless nightclub? Did Singaporean film producers drive me for hours through Phnom Penh’s back streets, only to emerge at a slick, French-run lounge where bartenders set cocktails on fire? On that early February morning, as our party barge drifted, half-lost, through the reedy tributaries of the Saigon River, did I really spot a black man—an African-American, I’m sure of it—watching us with his Vietnamese family from a bamboo hut high on stilts above the shore? These moments, so fixed for so long in my consciousness, can’t be as real as they feel. But now that they are written here, they can’t be questioned, and no amount of overseas investigation will alter that.

  Enough. I need to come clean. My argument for reading over traveling has another root, too, which is that in the past two or three years I’ve wanted to travel less and less. I can’t remember exactly where or when it began—Slovakia or Ireland? before Sasha’s birth or well after?—but about a week into one of those ten- or twelve-day trips, I suddenly wished I was back in Brooklyn. It’s not that I wasn’t enjoying my schnapps-based tour of Austria or navigating the complexities of the Greek ferry system. The trip, I knew at the time, was invigorating and eye-opening. But I also wanted it to be over. I sensed how everything would play out from that point forward, and could almost imagine writing the end of the article right then, well before I’d circled back by long-delayed train to Surabaya or sipped that last glass of genziana in the hills of Abruzzo. Why stick around?