The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (44 page)

(Summer)

I
T WAS MY
grandfather’s fault that I had always avoided going to Israel.

It wasn’t that he didn’t love Israel. He did, and he told many stories about it. There was, to begin with, the story, by now almost a myth, of his brother’s journey to Palestine in the 1930s. “Just in the nick of time!” we would say in unison, whenever my grandfather would tell about his older brother’s fabulous and prescient emigration a mere five years before the world locked down, not quite realizing, as we said it, that by reacting in this way to the story of the brother my grandfather was willing to talk about (the one whose Hebrew name, Yitzhak, or Itzhak, we pronounced the Yiddish way:
ITZ-ik
), we were alluding, however tacitly, to the fate of the brother that he would not talk about. My grandfather would explain to me how, at the prodding of Aunt Miriam, that fervent Zionist, his brother Itzhak, too, had finally escaped from Bolechow’s gravitational field, from the pull of the past, the attraction exerted by so many centuries of family connections and family stories, and made a new life for himself and his small children, my mother’s cousins, who would grow up to take a new, Israeli name, with the result that the only Jäger of my grandfather’s generation who had sons ended up with sons and grandsons and, now, great-grandsons who do not have the name
Jäger;
and indeed, in the case of more than a few of Uncle Itzhak’s numerous descendants, as I learned when I finally did go to Israel, do not know that their family’s name was once Jäger.

So Uncle Itzhak and Aunt Miriam had gone to Israel. There, we knew, they had settled, just in time to avoid the conflagration that consumed everyone else. There they had had their children and, later, the innumerable grandchildren with the odd names that sounded, to us American cousins, like the names of characters in science-fiction movies, guttural and clipped and oddly lulling: Rami and Nomi and Gil and Gal and Tzakhi and Re’ut. And there, in Israel, they did the kinds of things that to my ear sounded at once exotic and, since I had been brought up on a different kind of family story, unappealing: lived on communes in drab houses, worked in the fields, picked oranges, fought in the endless wars, got married very young, were fruitful and multiplied. Every six months or so, when I was growing up, we would get another flimsy, almost transparent aerogramme from Aunt Miriam in which (against the postal rules; but then, she was a fiery socialist) shiny Kodacolor prints of someone’s wedding had been enclosed, and what struck me, in those days, was the fact that these Israelis never seemed to wear neckties or even jackets at important family events. A small thing, you will say, but one that to my mind seemed obscurely to confirm the fact that these people weren’t, in the end, really
Jägers. For to me, when I was a boy, it seemed obvious that being a Jäger, like being Jewish, had much to do with traits I associated with my grandfather: a dressiness, a formality (which in religious terms meant a strict Orthodoxy, and in secular terms might translate into the fact that you never traveled in anything but a suit and tie), a severity of attitude, things that clearly had much to do with Europe and, as far as I could tell, nothing to do with a place in the middle of the desert.

But as it happened, my grandfather loved Israel deeply, had loved it from the very beginning. He—and later on, after he was dead, my mother—liked to tell the story of how, during the United Nations vote on Israeli statehood in 1948, he sat on the windowsill of his apartment in the Bronx listening anxiously to the radio broadcast of the voting, and how as each member nation voted Yay or Nay, he would make a meticulous notation on a sheet of paper, keeping a careful tally. And then, when the vote was in, how he exclaimed, how they cried!

Before this new country was even a decade old, there took place the storied trip in the great ocean liner that, in such pointed contrast to the first time my grandfather crossed the Atlantic in a boat, that unimaginably difficult, strange, and terrifying voyage, took him and my grandmother across the ocean in great luxury, this time not to Europe but to the more ancient place, which was now new again. In February 1956, my grandfather, having retired quite early after selling the business he had co-opted from the Mittelmarks and turned into a company that bore his name,
JAEGER
, took my grandmother and boarded the SS
United States
, the ship that would take them to Itzhak and Miriam. The ship was renowned above all for its swiftness, which hardly surprises me: for how could my grandfather, who had last laid eyes on his brother Itzhak more than thirty-five years before, wait even one unnecessary extra day to see him now?

Just as there were stories about the luxurious crossing, the menus and passengers lists that my grandfather, and then my mother, carefully preserved in plastic bags so that when, twenty years after that trip, I looked at them, they seemed quite new—just as there were stories about the crossing, about the sleek elegance of the ultramodern ship, the opulence and variety of the strictly kosher food they were served, the endless entertainments on board, so there was a story about the moment of that long-awaited reunion. For when the great boat docked, my grandfather grew impatient with the long lines at the customs area and, having glimpsed his brother in the crowd across the vast room, took my grandmother by the hand and pushed through the
lines of Israeli customs agents and immigration officials, telling them, in that way he had,
I haven’t seen my brother in thirty years and you’re not going to stop me now! So arrest me!

And that is how my grandfather came to Israel. There, in this brand-new country that was, simultaneously, a very old place, he and my grandmother spent a full year. My mother still will tell you that during that period, when ordinary people did not casually make transatlantic phone calls, her father called her twice from Israel: once when he and my grandmother arrived, and once on my mother’s birthday. But then, being in a foreign country didn’t stop my grandfather from being himself, from being a person who liked to make big gestures—from being a Jäger. Because he himself had a flawless instinct for the appropriate gesture, whether sentimental or comical (
Now Marlene, first you’d better stop crying because you know how lousy you look when you cry
…), he tended to arouse, in people who appreciated this about him, a similar desire to make grand gestures for his benefit. For instance: my grandfather always loved birds. When I was growing up and he would come to stay with us during the summers, we would pick him up at Kennedy Airport, and of all the luggage that he carried, the many suitcases and the special briefcase for his pills, the only thing that he would insist on carrying himself, after my father, exasperated perhaps but silent, had lugged everything else to the car, was the large, round-topped cage of Shloimeleh, the canary.
Solomon.
Why was the bird called Shloimeleh? I asked him one July morning when I was fifteen, and he was dictating to me (because I could type, because I was so interested in his family, because it would have upset my mother too much for him to ask her to do it, because I was happy to have any time alone with him) that long list of instructions for what needed to happen on his death, an event that he thought about often but good-naturedly, the way you might think about a visit, far in the future but certain nonetheless, from a childhood friend with whom, you knew, the conversation would soon run out.

Should I die on a Saturday or a Friday night,

(he made me type)

Why was the bird called Shloimeleh
? he repeated, when he had signed this document with the blue fountain pen he liked to use.
Why else? Because it’s the smartest bird I ever talked to
.

It was because my grandfather loved birds so much that his brother Itzhak, whom he loved so much and who clearly loved him, too, built for him, when he and my grandmother spent that year in Israel, a pigeon coop atop their house, so that my grandfather could sit and look at the pigeons each dusk as the day faded.

There were other stories about that trip to Israel, stories in which my grandfather emerged, rather typically, as the quick-witted or grandiose hero. For instance, there was the story about how, when my grandmother ran out of insulin, her husband didn’t bother with anything so mundane as pharmacies or hospitals but instead phoned the American consulate and got them to take him in a motor launch to an American warship that lay harbored nearby, where there was known to be a supply of insulin. (You know
him,
my mother added, when retelling me this tale recently. He was afraid of
no one
.) Or the one about how he took the orphans in a certain asylum under his wing, and would walk to this orphan asylum—only now, long after any answer is possible, do I ask myself, Whose children were they?—he would walk to this orphan asylum and take the children for walks in the park and give them candy. The orphan asylum was his favorite thing, my mother reminisced the other day, when I was asking her about her father’s trip to Israel and certain other things. Which is why that’s the one I still send money to. Beth David Zvi. She giggled and went on, I remember he told me,
When I kick the bucket, every yahrzeit and every holiday, every yontiv, you should send them a little money. But you know, those Jews, they’ll take you for everything you got! So just send them a little at a time
! She paused for a moment and then added, unnecessarily, So that’s what I did.

So my grandfather continued to be himself, during the year he spent in Israel. What is odd, given how much my grandfather talked about his great journey to Israel, and his long stay there, is that I knew very little of Itzhak himself when I was growing up. Long after my grandfather jumped into the cool water of the swimming pool at 1100 West Avenue in Miami Beach, I realized I had no notion of what Itzhak’s personality was like, what dramas had filled his life, apart from the drama of having had the foresight to leave Bolechow, impelled by his fervent wife’s ideologies; it was always as if it was
enough for us to know simply that he was the One Who Had Been Smart Enough to Leave Just in the Nick of Time. About Itzhak I knew exactly two specific things. One of these I learned from Elkana, when I finally went to Israel: that like my grandfather, his father had a certain jokey nonsensical expression that he’d smilingly use as a reply whenever his small children (and, later, grandchildren) asked him for money to buy an ice cream or a candy:
What do you think I am, grafpototski
? I myself had no idea what
grafpototski
could possibly mean, when my grandfather offered this silly-sounding response to my pleas for a nickel or a quarter, but it sounded funny; and of course by the time I was studying German, years later, and learned that
Graf
is the German word for the aristocratic title “count,” I had forgotten all about this nonsense phrase of my grandfather’s.

So that was one thing I knew about Uncle Itzhak, long after he and my grandfather had died. It was from my mother that I got the other vivid flash of what Itzhak’s personality might have been like. My mother used to tell me that like his brother, my grandfather, her Uncle Itzhak had had a good sense of humor. Certainly the one photo I have of him (besides the small photograph of him taken in the 1920s, bearing a couple of official-looking stamps, perhaps for a passport, a photo in which he is slender and looking off a bit dreamily to his left, smiling to himself in a preoccupied way) shows a solid, fleshy middle-aged man grinning with an apparently perennial good humor. (Well, I think now: look how lucky he’d been.) My mother would recall how, when she was a young woman, she would dutifully write letters to this uncle whom she’d never met, and when addressing them would carefully copy out the address her father had given her:
ITZHAK YAGER
, at such-and-such address in Kiryiat Hayim,
ISRAEL
.