The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2 page)

And so I didn’t bring it up. Instead I would keep to safe subjects, the questions that would allow him to be funny, which he liked to be, as for instance in the following letter, written to me just after I turned fourteen:

An addendum to this letter is addressed to my sister and youngest brother:

Yiskor,
yizkor
: a memorial service. My grandfather was always mindful of the dead. Each summer when he came to visit, we took him to Mount Judah to visit my grandmother and all the others. We children would wander around and look blandly at the names on the modest headstones and low footstones, or at the giant monument, in the shape of a tree with its branches lopped off, which commemorated my grandfather’s older sister, who had died at twenty-six,
a week before her wedding,
or so my grandfather used to tell me. Some of these stones bore little electric-blue stickers that said
PERPETUAL CARE
, nearly all of them boasted names like
STANLEY
and
IRVING
and
HERMAN
and
MERVIN
, like
SADIE
and
PAULINE
, names that to people of my generation seem quintessentially Jewish although, in one of those ironies that only the passage of a certain amount of time can make clear, the fact is that the immigrant Jews of a century ago, born with names like
SELIG
and
ITZIG
and
HERCEL
and
MORDKO
, like
SCHEINDEL
and
PERL
, had chosen those names precisely because to them the names seemed quite English, quite un-Jewish. We would wander around and look at all this while my grandfather, always in a spotless sport coat, crisply creased slacks, boldly knotted tie, and pocket square, would make his meticulous and orderly progress, stopping by each stone in turn, his mother’s, his sister’s, his brother’s, his wife’s, he had outlived them all, and would read the prayers in Hebrew in a kind of urgent mumble. If you drive along the Interboro Parkway in Queens and stop near the entrance of the Mount Judah Cemetery, and look over the stone fence by the road, you can see all of them there, can read their adopted, slightly grandiose names, accompanied by the ritualistic labels:
BELOVED WIFE, MOTHER, AND GRANDMOTHER; BELOVED HUSBAND; MOTHER
.

So yes: he was mindful of the dead. It was to be many years before I realized just how mindful he was, my handsome and funny grandfather, who knew
so many stories, who dressed so famously well: with his smoothly shaven oval face, the winking blue eyes and the straight nose that ended in the barest suggestion of a bulb, as if whoever had designed him had decided, at the last minute, to throw in a hint of humor; with his sparse, neatly brushed white hair, his clothes and cologne and manicures, his notorious jokes and his intricate, tragic stories.

M
Y GRANDFATHER WOULD
come each year in the summer, since in the summer the weather on Long Island was less oppressive than it was in Miami Beach. He would stay for weeks at a time, accompanied by whichever of his four wives he happened to be married to at the time. When he came to stay he (and, sometimes, the wife) would occupy my little brothers’ room, with its narrow twin beds. There, on arriving from the airport, he would hang his hat on a lamp shade and neatly fold his sport coat over the back of a chair, and afterward he’d set about taking care of his canary, Schloimele, which is Yiddish for
little Solomon:
settling the cage on a tiny oak child’s desk, sprinkling the little bird with a few drops of water
just to refresh a little
. Then, slowly,
meticulously, he would remove his things from his carefully packed bags, gently placing them on one of the two tiny beds in that room.

My grandfather was famous (in the way that certain kinds of Jewish immigrants and their families will talk about someone being “famous” for something, which generally means that about twenty-six people know about it) for a number of things—his sense of humor, the three women he married and, except for the one who outlived him, divorced in rapid succession after my grandmother died, the way he dressed, certain family tragedies, his Orthodoxy, the way he had of making waitresses and shopkeepers remember him, summer after summer—but to me the two salient things about him were his devoutness and his wonderful clothes. When I was a child and then an adolescent, these two things seemed to be the boundaries between which his strangeness, his Europeanness, existed: the territory that belonged to him and no one else, a space in which it was possible to be both worldly and pious, suave and religious, at the same time.

The first among the things that he would remove as he unpacked was the velvet bag that contained the things he needed to say his morning prayers—to
daven
. This he did every day of his life from the day in the spring of 1915 when he was bar mitzvahed to the morning before the June day in 1980 when he died. In this satin-lined bag of burgundy velvet, on the face of which was embroidered, in gold thread, a menorah flanked by rampant lions of Judah, were his yarmulke; an enormous old-fashioned white and faded-blue tallis sewn with its tickling fringes, in which, in conformance with the instructions that he meticulously dictated to me one hot day in 1972 when I was twelve, a year before my bar mitzvah, he was buried that June day; and the leather phylacteries, or
tefillin
, that he bound around his head and left forearm each morning as, while we watched in mute awe, he davened. To us it was a sight both bizarre and majestic: each morning after sunrise, murmuring in Hebrew, he would wrap his arm with the leather bands, and then wrap a single thick leather band around his skull, attached to which was a wooden box containing verses from the Torah that nestled in the center of his forehead, and would then put on the huge, faded tallis and the yarmulke, and then taking out his
siddur
, his daily prayer book, would mumble for about half an hour, his words completely incomprehensible to us. Sometimes, when he was finished, he’d say to us,
I put in a good word for you, since you’re only Reform
. My grandfather was an Orthodox Jew of the old school, and it was for his sake, more than anything else, that we had any religion at all: went to services on the holidays, got bar mitzvahed. As far as I know, my
father, a scientist who did not see eye to eye with his garrulous father-in-law, went to the little synagogue we belonged to exactly four times: on the mornings of his sons’ bar mitzvahs.

As exacting and meticulous as the ritual of the davening was, so too the way in which my grandfather would dress each morning: precise and orderly, just as much of a ritual. My grandfather was what used to be called a “snappy dresser.” His brushed and polished appearance, his fine clothes, were merely the external expression of an inner quality that, for him and his family, characterized what it was to be a Jäger, something they would refer to as
Feinheit:
a refinement that was at once ethical and aesthetic. You could always count on his socks matching his sweater, and he preferred to wear soft-brimmed hats in whose bands you could spot a rakish feather or two, until the last of his four wives—who had lost her first husband and a fourteen-year-old daughter in Auschwitz, and whose soft, tattooed forearm I used to love to hold and stroke, when I was little, and who because she had lost so much, I now think, could not abide anything so frivolous as a feather in a hat—started to pluck them out. On a typical summer day in the 1970s, he might wear the following: mustard-yellow summer-weight wool trousers, crisply creased; a soft white knit shirt under a mustard-and-white argyle sweater-vest; pale yellow socks, white suede shoes, and a soft-brimmed hat that, depending which year in the 1970s it was, did or did not sport a feather. Before stepping outside to walk around the block a few times, or to the park, he’d splash some 4711 cologne on his hands and slap it onto the sides of his head and beneath the wattles of his chin.
Now,
he would say, rubbing his manicured hands together,
we can go out
.

I would watch all this very carefully. (Or so I thought.) He might also wear a sport jacket—this, to me, seemed incredible, since there was neither a wedding nor a bar mitzvah to attend—into which he would slip, invariably, both his wallet and, in the inside breast pocket on the other side, an odd-looking billfold: long and slender, rather too large in the way that, to American eyes, certain items of European haberdashery always look somehow the wrong size; and of a leather, worn to an almost suedelike smoothness, which I now realize was ostrich skin, since I own it now, but which then I merely thought amusingly pimply-looking. I would sit on my little brother’s bed as he talked, watching him and admiring his things: the argyle vest, the white shoes, the sleek belts, the heavy blue-and-gold bottle of cologne, the tortoiseshell comb with which he slicked back the sparse white hair, the worn, puckered wallet that, as I knew even then, contained no money, unable as I was to imagine at
that point what might be so precious that he had to carry it with him every time he dressed himself so impeccably.

T
HIS WAS THE
man from whom I gleaned hundreds of stories and thousands of facts over the years, the names of his grandparents and great-uncles and aunts and second cousins, the years they were born and where they had died, the name of the Ukrainian maid they had had as children in Bolechow (Lulka), who used to complain that the children had stomachs “like bottomless pits,” the kind of hat his father, my great-grandfather, used to wear. (Homburgs: He’d been a courtly man with a goatee, my grandfather liked to boast about his father, and was something of a bigwig in his small but bustling town, known for bringing bottles of Hungarian Tokay to prospective business associates “to sweeten the deal”; and had dropped dead at the age of forty-five of heart failure at a spa in the Carpathian Mountains called Jaremcze, where he’d gone to take the waters for his health. This was the beginning of the bad years, the reason, in the end, why nearly all of his children eventually had to leave Bolechow.) Grandpa told me about the town park, with its statue of the great nineteenth-century Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, and the little park across the square with its allée of lime trees. He recited for me, and I learned, the words to “Mayn Shtetele Belz,” that little lullaby-like Yiddish song about the town quite near the one he grew up in, which his mother had sung to him a decade before the
Titanic
sank—

—learned these words, which I recently had the bizarre experience of hearing again, for the first time since my grandfather’s death twenty-five years ago, at a Sixties “theme” party at a club in New York City, and when I asked the DJ where he’d found this particular song he handed to me, without ceasing to gyrate to the strange music, the worn cover of a 1960 album, made by a famous Italian-American pop singer, titled
Connie Francis Sings Jewish Favorites
. From my grandfather I learned, too, about the old Ukrainian woodsman who lived in the hills above Bolechow but who, on the night before Yom Kippur, watching the unusual and, to him, frightening stillness settle along the glinting towns beneath the Carpathians’ timbered foothills as the Jews of the shtetls prepared for the awesome holiday, would make his way down the mountain and stay in the house of a kindly Jew, such was this Ukrainian peasant’s fear, on that one night each year, of the Jews and their glum God.