W
HEN WE HAVE PASSED A CERTAIN AGE, THE SOUL OF THE CHILD WE WERE AND THE SOULS OF THE DEAD FROM WHOM WE HAVE SPRUNG COME TO LAVISH ON US THEIR RICHES AND THEIR SPELLS….

Marcel Proust,

In Search of Lost Time

(The Captive)

1
THE FORMLESS VOID

S
OME TIME AGO,
when I was six or seven or eight years old, it would occasionally happen that I’d walk into a room and certain people would begin to cry. The rooms in which this happened were located, more often than not, in Miami Beach, Florida, and the people on whom I had this strange effect were, like nearly everyone in Miami Beach in the mid-nineteen-sixties, old. Like nearly everyone else in Miami Beach at that time (or so it seemed to me then), these old people were Jews—Jews of the sort who were likely to lapse, when sharing prized bits of gossip or coming to the long-delayed endings of stories or to the punch lines of jokes, into Yiddish; which of course had the effect of rendering the climaxes, the points, of these stories and jokes incomprehensible to those of us who were young.

Like many elderly residents of Miami Beach in those days, these people lived in apartments or small houses that seemed, to those who didn’t live in them, slightly stale; and which were on the whole quiet, except on those evenings when the sound of the Red Skelton or Milton Berle or Lawrence Welk shows blared from the black-and-white television sets. At certain intervals, however, their stale, quiet apartments would grow noisy with the voices of young children who had flown down for a few weeks in the winter or spring from Long Island or the New Jersey suburbs to see these old Jews, and who would be presented to them, squirming with awkwardness and embarrassment, and forced to kiss their papery, cool cheeks.

Kissing the cheeks of old Jewish relatives! We writhed, we groaned, we wanted to race down to the kidney-shaped heated swimming pool in back of the apartment complex, but first we had to kiss all those cheeks; which, on the men, smelled like basements and hair tonic and Tiparillos, and were scratchy with whiskers so white you’d often mistake them for lint (as my younger brother once did, who attempted to pluck off the offending fluff only to be smacked, ungently, on the side of the head); and, on the old women, gave off the vague aroma of face powder and cooking oil, and were as soft as the “emergency” tissues crammed into the bottom of their purses, crushed there like petals next to the violet smelling salts, wrinkled cough-drop wrappers, and crumpled bills…. The crumpled bills.
Take this and hold it for Marlene until I come out,
my mother’s mother, whom we called Nana, instructed my other grandmother, as she handed her a small red leather purse containing a crinkled twenty-dollar bill one February day in 1965, just before they wheeled her into an operating room for some exploratory surgery. She had just turned fifty-nine, and wasn’t feeling well. My grandmother Kay obeyed and took the purse with the crumpled bill, and true to her word she delivered it to my mother, who was still holding it a number of days later when Nana, laid in a plain pine box, as is the custom, was buried in the Mount Judah Cemetery in Queens, in the section owned (as an inscription on a granite gateway informs you) by the F
IRST
B
OLECHOWER
S
ICK
B
ENEVOLENT
A
SSOCIATION
. To be buried here you had to belong to this association, which meant in turn that you had to have come from a small town of a few thousand people, located halfway around the world in a landscape that had once belonged to Austria and then to Poland and then to many others, called Bolechow.

Now it is true that my mother’s mother—whose soft earlobes, with their chunky blue or yellow crystal earrings, I would play with as I sat on her lap in the webbed garden chair on my parents’ front porch, and whom at one point I loved more than anyone else, which is no doubt why her death was the first event of which I have any distinct memories, although it’s true that those memories are, at best, fragments (the undulating fish pattern of the tiles on the walls of the hospital waiting room; my mother saying something to me urgently, something important, although it would be another forty years before I was finally reminded of what it was; a complex emotion of yearning and fear and shame; the sound of water running in a sink)—my mother’s mother was not born in Bolechow, and indeed was the only one of my four grandparents who was born in the United States: a fact that, among a certain
group of people that is now extinct, once gave her a certain cachet. But her handsome and domineering husband, my grandfather,
Grandpa,
had been born and grew to young manhood in Bolechow, he and his six siblings, the three brothers and three sisters; and for this reason he was permitted to own a plot in that particular section of Mount Judah Cemetery. There he, too, lies buried now, along with his mother, two of his three sisters, and one of his three brothers. The other sister, the fiercely possessive mother of an only son, followed her boy to another state, and lies buried there. Of the other two brothers, one (so we were always told) had had the good sense and foresight to emigrate with his wife and small children from Poland to Palestine in the 1930s, and as a result of that sage decision was buried, in due time, in Israel. The oldest brother, who was also the handsomest of the seven siblings, the most adored and adulated, the
prince
of the family, had come as a young man to New York, in 1913; but after a scant year living with an aunt and uncle there he decided that he preferred Bolechow. And so, after a year in the States, he went back—a choice that, because he ended up happy and prosperous there, he knew to be the right one. He has no grave at all.

O
F THOSE OLD
men and women who would sometimes cry at the mere sight of me, those old Jewish people with the cheeks that had to be kissed, with their faux-alligator wristwatch bands and dirty Yiddish jokes and thick black plastic glasses with the yellowed plastic hearing aid trailing off the back, with the glasses brimful of whiskey, with the pencils that they’d offer you each time you saw them, which bore the names of banks and car dealerships; with their A-line cotton-print dresses and triple strands of white plastic beads and pale crystal earrings and red nail varnish that glittered and clicked on their long, long nails as they played mah-jongg and canasta, or clutched the long, long cigarettes they smoked—: of those, the ones I could make cry had certain other things in common. They all spoke with a particular accent, one with which I was familiar because it was the accent that haunted, faintly but perceptibly, my grandfather’s speech: not too heavy, since by the time I was old enough to notice such things they had lived here, in America, for half a century, but still there was a telltale ripeness, a plummy quality to certain words that were ripe with
r
’s and
l
’s, words like
darling
or
wonderful
, a certain way of biting into the
t
’s and
th
’s in words like
terrible
and (a word my grandfather, who liked to tell stories, often used)
truth. It’s de troott
! he would say. These
elderly Jews tended to interrupt one another a lot on those occasions when they and we would all crowd into somebody’s musty living room, cutting off one another’s stories to make corrections, reminding one another what had really happened at this or that
vahnderfoll
or (more likely)
tahrrible time, dollink, I vuz dehre, I rrammembah, and I’m tellink you, it’s de troott
.

More distinctive and memorable still, they all seemed to have a second, alternate set of names for one another. This confused and disoriented me, when I was six or seven years old, because I thought that the name of (say) my Nana was Gertrude, or sometimes Gerty, and so I couldn’t figure out why, in this select company, in Florida, at large family gatherings that took place forty years after her husband’s bossy and self-dramatizing family had disembarked at Ellis Island to remake themselves as Americans (while never ceasing to tell stories about Europe), she became
Golda
. Nor could I understand why my grandfather’s younger brother, our Uncle Julius, a famous giver-out of inscribed pencils, who had married unusually late in life and whom my swaggering, well-dressed grandfather always treated with the kind of indulgence you reserve for ill-behaved pets, suddenly became
Yidl
. (It would be decades before I learned that the name on his birth certificate had been Judah Aryeh: “lion of Judah.”) And who, anyway, was this
Neche
—it sounded like
Nehkhuh
—whom my grandfather would sometimes refer to as his darling youngest sister, who, I knew, had dropped dead of a stroke at the age of thirty-five in 1943 at (so my grandfather would tell me, by way of explaining why he didn’t like that holiday) the Thanksgiving table; who was this
Nehkhuh
, since I knew, or thought I knew, that his beloved baby sister had been Aunt Jeanette? Only my grandfather, whose given name was Abraham, had a nickname that was intelligible to me: Aby; and this added to my sense that he was a person of total and transparent authenticity, a person you could trust.

Among these people, there were some who cried when they saw me. I would walk in the room and they would look at me and (mostly the women) would put both twisted hands, with their rings and the knots, swollen and hard like those of a tree, that were their knuckles, they would put these hands to their dry cheeks and say, with a stagy little indrawn breath,
Oy, er zett oys zeyer eynlikh tzu Shmiel!

Oh, he looks so much like Shmiel!

And then they would start crying, or exclaiming softly and rocking back and forth with their pink sweaters or windbreakers shaking around their loose shoulders, and there would then begin a good deal of rapid-fire Yiddish from which I was, then, excluded.

O
F THIS
S
HMIEL,
of course, I knew something: my grandfather’s oldest brother, who with his wife and four beautiful daughters had been killed by the Nazis during the war.
Shmiel. Killed by the Nazis
. The latter was, we all understood, the unwritten caption on the few photographs that we had of him and his family, which now lie stored carefully inside a plastic baggie inside a box inside a carton in my mother’s basement. A prosperous-looking businessman of perhaps fifty-five, standing proprietarily in front of a truck next to two uniformed drivers; a family gathered around a table, the parents, four small girls, an unknown stranger; a sleek man in a fur-collared coat, wearing a fedora; two young men in World War I uniforms, one of whom I knew to be the twenty-one-year-old Shmiel while the identity of the other one was impossible to guess, unknown and unknowable….
Unknown and unknowable
: this could be frustrating, but also produced a certain allure. The photographs of Shmiel and his family were, after all, more fascinating than the other family pictures that were so fastidiously preserved in my mother’s family archive precisely because we knew almost nothing about him, about them; their unsmiling, unspeaking faces seemed, as a result, more beguiling.

For a long time there were only the mute photographs and, sometimes, the uncomfortable ripple in the air when Shmiel’s name was mentioned. This was not often, when my grandfather was still living, because we knew this was the great tragedy of his life, that his brother and sister-in-law and four nieces had been killed by the Nazis. Even I, who when he visited loved to sit at his feet, shod in their soft leather slippers, and to listen to his many stories about “the family,” which of course meant
his
family, whose name had once been Jäger (and who, forced to give up that umlaut over the
a
when they came to America, over time became Yaegers and Yagers and Jagers and, like him, Jaegers: all of these spellings appear on the gravestones in Mount Judah), this family who for centuries had had a butcher store and then, later, a meat-shipping business in Bolechow,
a nice town
,
a bustling little town
,
a shtetl
, a place that was famous for the timber and meat and leather goods that its merchants shipped all over Europe,
a place where a person could live
,
a beautiful spot near the mountains;
even I, who was so close to him, who as I grew older would ask him so often about matters of family
history, dates, names, descriptions, places, that when he responded to my questions (on thin sheets of stationery from the company he’d owned long before, in blue ink from a fat Parker fountain pen) he’d occasionally write
Dear Daniel, Please don’t ask me any more questions about the mishpuchah, because I’m an old man and I can’t remember a thing, and besides are you sure you want to find more relatives?!
—even I felt awkward about bringing it up, this dreadful thing that had happened to Shmiel, to his very own brother.
Killed by the Nazis
. It was hard for me, when I was a child and first started hearing that refrain about Shmiel and his lost family, to imagine what exactly that meant. Even later, after I was old enough to have learned about the war, seen the documentaries, watched with my parents the episode of a PBS series called
The World at War
that was preceded by a terrifying warning that certain images in the film were too intense for children—even later, it was hard to imagine just how they had been killed, to grasp the details, the specifics. When? Where? How? With guns? In the gas chambers? But my grandfather wouldn’t say. Only later did I understand that he wouldn’t say because he didn’t know, or at least didn’t know enough, and that the not knowing, in part, was what tormented him.

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