The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (3 page)

The Ukrainians, my grandfather would say now and then with a weary little sigh, as he told this story.
Oo-krah-EE-nyans
. The Ukrainians. Our
goyim.

So he would come each summer to Long Island and I would sit at his feet as he talked. He talked about that older sister who’d died
a week before her wedding,
and talked about the younger sister who was married off at nineteen to that older sister’s fiancé, the hunchbacked (my grandfather said), dwarflike first cousin whom first one and finally the other of these lovely girls had had to marry because, my grandfather told me, this ugly cousin’s father had paid for the boat tickets that had brought those two sisters and their brothers and mother, brought all of my grandfather’s family, to the United States, and had demanded a beautiful daughter-in-law as the price. He talked bitterly about how this same cousin, who was of course also his brother-in-law, chased my grandfather down forty-two flights of steps in the Chrysler Building after the reading of a certain will in 1947, brandishing a pair of scissors, or perhaps it
was a letter opener; talked about that mean aunt of his, the wife of the uncle who’d paid for his passage to America (the same aunt my grandfather’s older brother, the prince, had had to live with during his brief stay in the United States in 1913, and perhaps it was her meanness that had resulted in his decision to go back to Bolechow to live, the decision that seemed so right at the time); my grandfather talked about that aunt of his,
Tante,
who in the few remaining photographs of her is a huge, doughy, sour-faced matriarch whose fat arms settle around her torso like opulent robes of state, a woman so formidable that even today, in my family—even among those of us born a full generation after she died—it is impossible to hear the word
Tante
without a shudder.

And he talked about the pleasing modesty of Old Country bar mitzvahs as compared (you were meant to feel) to the overdressed and officious extravagance of the ceremonies today: first the religious ceremonies in cold, slope-roofed temples and, afterward, the receptions in lavish country clubs and catering halls, occasions at which boys like myself would read the
parashah,
the Torah portion for that week, and uncomprehendingly sing their
haftarah
portions, the selections from the Prophets that accompany each
parashah,
while dreaming of the reception to come and the promise of furtive whiskey sours. (Which is how I sang mine: a performance that ended with my voice cracking, loudly, mortifyingly, as I chanted the very last word, plummeting from a pure soprano to the baritone in which it has remained ever since.)
Nu, so?
he would say.
So you got up at five instead of six that morning, you prayed an extra hour in shul, and then you went home and had cookies and tea with the rabbi and your mother and father, and that was that
. He talked about how seasick he was on the ten-day crossing to America, about the time, years before that, when he had to guard a barn full of Russian prisoners of war, when he was sixteen during the First World War, which is how he learned Russian, one of the many languages he knew; about the vague group of cousins who would visit every now and then in the Bronx and who were called, mysteriously, “the Germans.”

My grandfather told me all these stories, all these things, but he never talked about his brother and sister-in-law and the four girls who, to me, seemed not so much dead as lost, vanished not only from the world but—even more terrible to me—from my grandfather’s stories. Which is why, out of all this history, all these people, the ones I knew the least about were the six who were murdered, who had, it seemed to me then, the most stunning story of all, the one most worthy to be told. But on this subject, my loquacious grandpa remained silent, and his silence, unusual and tense, irradiated the subject of Shmiel and his family, making them unmentionable and, therefore, unknowable.

Unknowable.

Every single word of the Five Books of Moses, the core of the Hebrew Bible, has been analyzed, examined, interpreted, and held up to the scrutiny of rigorous scholars over many centuries. It is generally acknowledged that the greatest of all biblical commentators was the eleventh-century French scholar Rabbi Shlomo ben Itzhak, who is better known as Rashi, a name that is nothing more than an acronym formed from the initial letters of his title, name, and patronymic: Ra(bbi) Sh(lomo ben) I(tzhak)—Rashi. Born in Troyes in 1040, Rashi survived the terrible upheavals of his time, which included the slaughters of Jews that were, so to speak, a by-product of the First Crusade. Educated in Mainz, where he was the student of the man who had been the greatest student of the renowned Gershom of Mainz (because I have always had good teachers, I love the idea of these intellectual genealogies), Rashi founded his own academy at the age of twenty-five and lived to see himself recognized as the greatest scholar of his age. His concern for each and every word of the text he was studying was matched only by the cramped terseness of his own style; it is perhaps because of the latter that Rashi’s own commentary on the Bible has itself become the object of some two hundred further commentaries. One measure of Rashi’s significance is that the first printed Hebrew Bible included his commentary…. It is interesting, for me, to note that Rashi, like my great-uncle Shmiel, had only daughters, which was, as far as these things go, more of a liability for a man with a certain kind of ambition in 1040 than it was in 1940. Still, the children of these daughters of Rashi carried on their grandfather’s magnificent legacy, and for that reason were known as
baalei tosafot
, “Those Who Extended.”

Although Rashi stands as the preeminent commentator on the Torah—and, hence, on the first
parashah
in the Torah, the reading with which the Torah begins, and which itself begins with not one but, mysteriously, two accounts of the Creation, and includes the story of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge, and which is for that reason a story that has attracted particularly rigorous commentary over the millennia—it
is important to acknowledge the interpretations of modern commentators, such as the recent translation and commentary by Rabbi Richard Elliot Friedman, which, in its sincere and searching attempts to connect the ancient text to contemporary life, is as open-faced and friendly as Rashi’s is dense and abstruse.

For instance, throughout his analysis of the first chapter of Genesis—the Hebrew name of which,
bereishit
, literally means “in the beginning”—Rashi is attentive to minute details of meaning and diction that Rabbi Friedman is content to let pass without comment, whereas Friedman (who is, admittedly, writing for a more general audience) is eager to elucidate broader points. An example: Both scholars acknowledge the famous difficulties of translating the very first line of
Bereishit—bereishit bara Elohim et-hashamayim v’etha’aretz
. Contrary to the belief of millions who have read the King James Bible, this line does not mean, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” but must mean, rather, something like “In the beginning of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth…” Friedman merely acknowledges the “classic problem” of translation, without going into it; whereas Rashi expends quantities of ink on just what the problem is. And the problem, in a word, is that what the Hebrew literally says is “In the beginning of, God created the heavens and the earth.” For the first word,
bereishit
, “in the beginning” (
b
’, “in,”
+ reishit
, “beginning”) is normally followed by another noun, but in the first line of
parashat Bereishit
—when we refer to a parashah by name we use the form “parashat”—what follows the word
bereishit
is a verb:
bara
, “created.” After an extended discussion of the linguistic issues, Rashi eventually solves the problem by invoking certain parallels from other texts in which
bereishit
is followed by a verb rather than a noun, and it is this that allows us to translate these first crucial words as follows:

The key issue, for Rashi, is that the wrong reading suggests an incorrect chronology of Creation: that God created the heavens, then the earth, then light, and so forth. But this is not how it happened, Rashi says. If you get the small details wrong, the big picture will be wrong, too.

The way in which tiny nuances of word order, diction, grammar, and syntax can have much larger ramifications for the entire meaning of a text colors Rashi’s commentary overall. For him (to take another example), the infamous “double opening” of Genesis—the fact that it has not one but two accounts of Creation, the first starting with the creation of the cosmos and ending in the creation of humankind (Genesis 1:1–30), the
second focusing from the start on the creation of Adam, and moving almost immediately to the story of Eve, the serpent, and the Expulsion from Eden—is, at bottom, a stylistic issue, easily enough explained. In his discussion of Genesis 2, Rashi anticipates readers’ grumblings—the creation of man has, after all, already been dealt with in Genesis 1:27—but declares that, after having himself consulted a certain body of rabbinic wisdom, he has discovered a certain “rule” (number thirteen of thirty-two, as it happens, that help explain the Torah), and this rule says that when a general statement or story is followed by a second telling of that story, the second telling is meant to be understood as a more detailed explication of the first. And so the second telling of the creation of mankind, in Genesis 2, is, so to speak, meant to be taken as an enhanced version of the first telling, which we get in Genesis 1. As indeed it is: for nothing in the first chapter of Genesis, with its dry, chronological account of the creation of the cosmos, the earth, its flora and fauna, and finally of humankind, prepares us for the rich narrative of the second chapter, with its tale of innocence, deceit, betrayal, concealment, expulsion, and ultimate death, the man and the woman in the secluded place, the sudden and catastrophic appearance of the mysterious intruder, the serpent, and then: the peaceful existence shattered. And at the center of all that drama—for Rashi goes to no little trouble to explain that it does indeed stand at the center—the mysterious and somehow moving symbol of the tree in the garden, a tree that represents, I have come to think, both the pleasure and the pain that come from knowing things.

Interesting as all this is, when I immersed myself in Genesis and its commentators over a number of years recently, I naturally came to prefer Friedman’s general explanation of why the Torah begins the way it does. I say “naturally,” because the issue that Friedman is interested in having his readers understand is, in essence, a writer’s issue: How do you begin a story? For Friedman, the opening of
Bereishit
brings to mind a technique we all know from the movies: “Like some films that begin with a sweeping shot that then narrows,” he writes, “so the first chapter of Genesis moves gradually from a picture of the skies and earth down to the first man and woman. The story’s focus will continue to narrow: from the universe to the earth to humankind to specific lands and peoples to a single family.” And yet, he reminds his readers, the wider, cosmic concerns of the world-historical story that the Torah tells will remain in the back of our minds as we read on, providing the rich substratum of meaning that gives such depth to that family’s story.

Friedman’s observation implies, as is certainly true, that often it is the small things, rather than the big picture, that the mind can comfortably grasp: that, for instance, it is naturally more appealing to readers to absorb the meaning of a vast historical event through the story of a single family.

B
ECAUSE
S
HMIEL WASN’T
much talked about, and because when he was talked about it tended to be in whispers, or in Yiddish, a language my mother spoke with her father so that they could keep their secrets—because of these things, when I did learn something, it was usually by accident.

Once, when I was little, I overheard my mother talking to her cousin on the phone and saying something like, I thought they were hiding, and the neighbor turned them in, no?

Once, a few years later, I heard someone saying,
Four beautiful daughters
.

Once, I overheard my grandfather saying to my mother,
I know only they were hiding in a kessle
. Since I knew by then how to make adjustments for his accent, when I heard him say this I simply wondered, What castle? Bolechow, to judge from the stories he told me, was not a place for castles; it was a small place, I knew, a peaceful place, a little town with a square and a church or two and a shul and busy shops. It was only much later on, long after my grandfather was dead and after I had studied more seriously the history of his town, that I learned that Bolechow, like so many other little Polish shtetls, had at one time been owned by an aristocratic Polish landowner, and when I learned this fact I naturally fitted the new information to my old memory of what I’d overheard my grandfather saying,
I know only they were hiding in a kessle
. A castle. Clearly, Shmiel and his family had managed to find a hiding place in the great residence of the noble family who’d once owned their town, and it was there that they were discovered after they had been betrayed.