Disaster Falls

by Stephane Gerson

  There were now moments when I embraced the persona of the bereaved parent, as if by virtue of my suffering I could inhabit a higher plane of existence, above the tawdry contests and unrealized ambitions of our material world. Melancholy veered all too easily into a moral superiority that blunted my sense of empathy and my curiosity about others. This was the cruelest outcome—coupled with the distance I now kept from children. I did not inquire about the children of my friends. I did not ask my sister about her pregnancy. I did not always smile back when a kid smiled at me in the street.

  Other things continued to feel meaningless: political debates, intellectual questions, and my work, too. I still could not muster much interest. But when I learned that a book contract with a leading publisher would not come through, I bent over in my office. I actually bent over because of the setback, and because I realized right then that experiencing one tragedy does not mean that more hardship will not come your way. At that moment, I had to admit that somewhere within me material strivings remained strong enough to make me bend over in disappointment. After all this?

  Sometime after the one-year mark, I noticed that my right forearm no longer bore traces of the gash I had incurred while searching for Owen along the river. During the first months, I had scratched at the red scab to keep a permanent incision, a memento in the flesh, a bodily deformation that I and others would see every day. But a pink scar had emerged in its stead, and then that scar had quietly blended into the skin. I searched for it under the hair and the freckles, but there was nothing to be found. My arm looked perfectly normal.

  What I am trying to say is that the second year was not easier than the first.

  Zara: Was the water deep?

  And yet something changed at the end of that year. It happened after I invited my father on a trip to his parents’ native Belarus. Over the years, Berl had collected all kinds of documents relating to his family history, among them, census records, lists of taxpayers, ship manifests, certificates of arrival, and petitions for naturalization. He kept some in the envelopes in which they arrived, lending the project a vaguely fetishistic quality. But though he often spoke of visiting Belarus, he had never followed through. Sometimes he voiced concerns about the country’s repressive apparatus, but I wondered if he was afraid of going on his own. With his eightieth birthday approaching, I told him that he had to visit Belarus. I would come along, I said, and we would take Julian, too.

  I did not overthink the matter, but neither could I forget that after contemplating the rapids at Disaster Falls, I had allowed the guides to override my instincts. This time, I had to trust my gut feeling; we had to go, even if the journey to the old country struck me as a little hackneyed, with its well-worn itineraries and tour companies bearing names such as Routes to Roots. The timing was poor, too. There were now days when I understood why some bereaved parents spoke about feeding their grief because it was the last connection to their child. The thought of traveling to a repressive, quasi-Soviet state, so far from Owen, in search of ancestors I had barely known, held little appeal.

  My father’s relationship to our family history complicated matters as well. Three years earlier, he had given my sister and me a CD containing sixty photographs, arranged chronologically. It began in Bobruisk, a predominantly Jewish town near Minsk that had taken advantage of its location on the Berezina River to become a trading center in the nineteenth century. After the outbreak of World War I, one of its residents, a young blacksmith named Leib Gerschowitz, deserted the Russian army and made his way to New York via Rotterdam. He changed his name to Louis Gerson and settled in Akron, Ohio, where, working as a fruit wholesaler, he saved enough money to purchase passage for his wife and daughter six years later. Louis became an American citizen in 1928; Esther followed suit in September 1939, twenty days after Hitler’s invasion of Poland. They had three more children in the United States, including my father, born in 1930.

  The CD traces a Jewish family’s integration into American society. There is a shot of the Akron synagogue, on whose steps immigrant families, including the Gersons, proudly posed after services. Photographs of other institutions follow: the local Workmen’s Circle, where adults listened to speakers warn about Hitler and kids learned Yiddish; Buchtel High school—Berl wore a crisp white shirt and a pinstripe suit for his senior-year picture in 1948; the Jewish Center day camp, where he worked as a counselor; and the University of Akron, where he was among the tallest of his fraternity brothers, with dark hair, thick eyebrows, and the sparkling smile of a young man who expected only good things. Berl then went off into the world: Fort Benning for his military service in the mid-1950s and then Chicago, where he earned an MBA, began a career as a CPA for a Big Five accounting firm, and wore dark suits and narrow ties.

  In 1960, the year he turned thirty, my father accepted a transfer to Brussels. This was his first overseas stay. The photographs now depict a different social world. Here he is with Belgian and expat friends: Britons, Greeks, and Americans who sported ascots while sipping cocktails on the patio of the Tudor-style villa they rented on summer weekends in the swank Flemish resort of Knokke-le-Zoute. Here he is sandwiched between bikini-clad girls in the Israeli port of Eilat, smiling broadly on the Greek island of Corfu, and drinking tall beers on a terrace in Prague. And here he is at sea, greeting the captain of an ocean liner at a black-tie dinner somewhere between New York and Rotterdam, which he may or may not have remembered at the time as his father’s port of departure forty-odd years earlier.

  The photographs he selected depict a glorious immigrant experience, a tale of familial sacrifice, achievement, and tangible rewards. There was no reference to anti-Semitism; the story was of unimpeded progress. There were no traces either of his wife and children. In his accompanying notes, Berl explained that he was sharing these photographs “so that other family members could enjoy them.” Though I appreciated his gesture, I wondered why he had left us out. He had titled the CD “Bernard Gerson—Ancestors to 1964.” Belarus and the ancestors seemed to exist only as preambles to a personal success story that ended the year before he met my mother.

  Berl wrote “Album 1” on the CD, but when I asked him whether he intended to give us a second one, he said no. There was to be no record of his affectionate embraces and sudden mood swings, no photographs that corresponded to my own experiences. It was my father’s life on that CD and not mine, his history more than ours. So much remained unsaid.

  Regardless, I told him that we would go to Belarus.

  —

  It was a quick trip: two days in Minsk, with its faded Communist murals and colossal governmental buildings; a day in Bobruisk, where rusty apartment complexes tower above wooden houses in bright colors; and a day in Parichi, the small town that had been home to Berl’s maternal family. Our main guide and translator was a short, avuncular Jewish woman whose easy cadence drew me in. I followed Vera as she discussed the Pale of Settlement, the devastation of World War II, and the postwar reconstruction of a wrecked country. Far from the New York streets through which I still wandered alone and the upstate woods in which I sank in white powder, I could escape some of the routines of grief. Still, I was only drifting along—a historian oblivious to history.

  Julian, now thirteen, had a difficult time as well. He complained about the food, the lack of amenities, the dirt, the poverty. He also clung tight to his childhood, tickling Vera and hurrying us along during historical visits. In Minsk, he insisted that we play Frisbee in a park filled with monuments to the decimated Jewish population. When I hesitated, he said that the dead wouldn’t want us to be upset. It had not crossed my mind that, two years after the death of his brother, a journey in search of other dead relatives would prove unsettling to Julian.

  Though I walked by Berl’s side, I did not pay close attention to his emotional state. I knew that he was not seeking to fill holes in his family history; the documents in his possession told him everything he wanted to know about ancestors who had lived there since the 1
850s at the latest. In the travel journal he later shared with us, Berl related ordinary episodes—for instance, our luncheon with our day guide to Parichi. A silver-haired woman in her sixties, Chana lived in a ramshackle house with a white-brick wood oven and a fly-infested toilet that she drained with a bucket of water. The dining and living rooms evoked the Soviet era, with wallpaper, furniture, rugs, and curtains in various gradations of brown. Berl wrote that Chana awoke at dawn to cook with vegetables from her garden. He then listed the dishes she had set before us: cucumbers and tomatoes, radishes, borscht, sour cream, boiled potatoes, meatballs, and stuffed kishke, or intestine.

  Berl wrote at particular length about another episode: an encounter with elderly Jewish men in a Bobruisk community center. These men could not tell us anything about our relatives since they had not grown up in this region, but Berl asked them about their lives and they inquired about his. “I explained that I lived very well now and that I started working at twelve years old,” he wrote in his journal. “I wanted to convey that hard work was the basis of success for my generation. Most of the men are retired so they lived under Soviet rule. Not much chance to show initiative in those circumstances.”

  It had been a long road from Bobruisk to Akron to Brussels, but, standing in a house that could not have differed much from the one his forebears had inhabited or surrounded by men who bore a physical resemblance to his parents, Berl could now sense their presence and connect their wholesome values, which he associated with pre-Soviet shtetls, to those of small-town America, which he linked to democracy and capitalism. “Although we didn’t learn anything new about my parents, we were able to get a good feel about the way they lived,” Berl wrote.

  Berl had come to Belarus to commune with his kin and complete his own family story of escape and growth. I was happy for him, and yet at the same time detached from his experience. When he thanked me on the plane home for accompanying him, I smiled, but found it difficult to look him in the eyes. The story he told—about initiative, hard work and its rewards, people shaping their destiny in a just and controllable world—no longer made sense to me. When I began high school, Berl had told me to write my goals for the four years to come. He taught me to break complex tasks into component parts and devise multiyear plans—a foolproof method for moving forward in the world. That had sustained me for a long time. Now, however, this approach seemed foreign, if not bankrupt.

  Nor did his story account for Owen. I had watched from the sidelines as Berl resurrected his ancestors without ever mentioning one of his progeny. It is possible that Owen accompanied him on the trip. Perhaps the two of them held hands on the squares of Bobruisk and the dirt roads of Parichi. Berl’s silence was so heavy, however, that I could not tell. It also prevented me from noticing much else. Owen’s absence from my father’s itinerary made him even more present in mine.

  At dinner one evening, Vera had asked me if I had other children at home. I hesitated before answering. The thought crossed my mind that Julian, who looked at me fixedly across the table, or Berl, who cast his eyes down, might want me to say that there had never been another child, or that our other child awaited our return. If I remained silent about Owen, we would all be less distraught.

  But I only hesitated for a second because, two years after the accident, I sometimes forgot Owen’s towering presence, the rhythm of his step, what it was like to parent him every minute of the day. He was becoming a shadow, or a polished and thus diminished version of his real self. The boy I now remembered seemed so much quieter and more eager to please that I sometimes wondered whether such an imposing being could have existed. Owen had of course existed, and Vera had to know.

  She sat at the opposite end of the table, which meant that my words had to cut through my father’s silence. Berl did not take hold of them as they passed by—he did not even raise his eyes—but they seemed to weigh him down. His shoulders slumped. I felt sadness for him, but less than for Owen, and less than for Julian, who continued to stare at me as I acknowledged the existence of a boy whose voice could not be heard in the land of his ancestors.

  —

  And yet, Owen had not been alone in Belarus.

  One morning, our driver failed to show up because his wife had given birth to a stillborn baby the previous night. The next day, I learned that the local woman who guided us in Bobruisk had lost a child years earlier. And the day after that, in Parichi’s Jewish cemetery, Chana led us to a black marble grave with white lettering and an engraved portrait of a skinny man with cropped hair and thin lips. Though Chana did not speak English, she conveyed that this was her son. He had died of the flu at the age of thirty-one.

  Every day we also came upon desecrated graves. Seventy years earlier, Jewish boys and girls were shot or burned alive in these towns. Twenty thousand Jews still lived in Bobruisk when it fell to the Nazis on June 28, 1941. At that time, in Brussels, Zosia had met a former POW named Jules; in Akron, Berl was eleven and posing for pictures on a couch with his brother and parents. Belarus, however, became what one historian has called “the deadliest place in the world.”

  The following autumn and winter, Bobruisk was hit by several Aktions, or mass killings, culminating with the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto by members of Police Battalion 316 and Einsatzkommando 8, whose task was to murder the Jews of Belarus. On December 19, an SS officer reported that Bobruisk’s Jews had made connections with partisans and refused to work or wear badges—standard Nazi justification for their executions. “By carrying out a special action, a total of 5,281 Jews of both sexes were shot. The town of Bobruisk and its nearby area are free of Jews.” In Parichi, “a special action was carried out in the course of which 1,031 Jews and Jewesses were shot.”

  In both towns, we followed the routes that these children, women, and men had taken as they marched to clearings where they were lined up next to massive ditches and murdered, rows of bodies falling atop one another. Chana related that in Parichi, the head rabbi had told the commanding officer that Germany’s persecution of Jews would cost it the war. The officer responded by cutting off his tongue. The rabbi staggered on in shock, blood running down his shirt. According to the town’s book of remembrance, the Nazis raised children on spears and tossed them into the pits. In 1944, they dug up the corpses, covered them with tar and gasoline, and set them on fire. Today, an obelisk with a marble base and a red star in the center stands near the ditches, along with urns of wartime remains and the number 10,000 in black concrete. Ehrenberg—the family name of Berl’s maternal ancestors—is fourth from the bottom on the obelisk.

  Berl jotted this last bit of information in his journal. What he could not have known, and what I did not realize until I returned home, is that Belarus’s horrors past and present had made the place strangely hospitable to me. Children had long died in these lands; parents had long lost their sons and daughters and continued to do so. The death of one’s child, of an eight-year-old even, is as immeasurably sad there as it is elsewhere. But it finds its place within a universe in which stability, control, and justice are not rights or expectations but aspirations, perhaps even delusions. In this universe, bereaved parents are not culpable in crimes against nature or civilization. They do not have to allay the fears of others or their own by huddling in church basements.

  When Chana led us to her son’s grave, she stood there without speaking, as if a bereaved mother were the most normal being in the world. Her silence felt different from Berl’s or even Ginette’s. It was so full of emotion, so embedded in the local terrain, and also so light that it floated above the ground, lifting her as high as the young couple whom Marc Chagall once painted above his native Vitebsk, another Belarusian town whose Jewish population all but vanished. I wanted to tell Chana that I, too, had lost a son, but we had no language in which to communicate and I did not want to convey this through a translator, so I just stood with her, and this was enough.

  This kind of silence becomes possible when one no longer expects to understand th
e suffering or avert the violence of the world. There are of course stories of rescue in Belarus. Some local men and women did for Jews what Charles and Annie did for Zosia and Jules. Minsk’s Great Patriotic War Museum honors Elena Valendovich, a Christian who sheltered a Jewish girl she found on a doorstep. The girl’s mother had left her there and then watched from a distance as the gentile woman took her home. Other local Christians guided Jews to the Pushcha, the forest of thick trees and bushes that provided enough cover to hide and perhaps survive. The Communist partisans who made the forest their own have been commemorated as heroes since the war. They fought the Nazis with courage and worked with the Minsk Ghetto underground to hide thousands of Jews in the woods.

  The situation in Minsk was unique, however, and even there only a tiny minority survived. Some people anticipated what was bound to follow the German invasion, found the will and strength to take action, and secured the necessary assistance. But in a country in which more than 350,000 Jews perished—the greater part of the Jewish population that had not fled—who could be expected to save loved ones? You could turn to a neighbor or bribe one more guard or set out for the forest a week earlier and still lose a child. This I learned in these badlands.

  This is why, after our return, I attached so much importance to another episode on the trip, a walk that the three of us took before lunch at Chana’s. We ended up by the Berezina, a wide river with tall grasses and willows sloping over the surface. As I took in the scene—the flow of the current, an islet within swimming distance, three boys fishing by a half-submerged rowboat—I did not imagine people drowning in these waters. Nor did my thoughts take me to the Green, No-Name Island, or the abandoned red dory we had passed on the day of the accident, pinned against a rock in the middle of the river. The three boys did remind me of Owen—his hair had been as short as theirs that summer—but this was not the first thought to cross my mind.