The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (45 page)

My mother laughed about this, recently. I remember (she said) Uncle Itzhak would write back to me, “Where is the
respect
? You write
ITZHAK YAGER
on the envelope. You should write
MISTER
ITZHAK YAGER
!!”

We giggled—but what I was thinking was this: what the joke was about, really, what the humor depended on, was a certain elevated and imperious sense of self, of who he was in the world.

Which, as we know, was also something that ran in her father’s family.

So that was the first trip to Israel by a member of my family. There are a number of photographs from this trip: not just those my grandfather took as they boarded the ship at the West Side Piers in New York City, the photos of my mother and her mother and aunts and uncle standing in the stateroom before the whistle blew, but photos of my grandparents in Israel, too. There they are on board the ship, arm in arm one sunny day in the middle of the ocean, a picture taken by some unknowable person in which my grandmother is wearing a white sundress looking happy and even healthy, which she was not; another of her, wearing the same dress, sitting pensive on a wooden deck chair; there they are in Israel, posing in front of Greco-Roman ruins with a very young Elkana, or being driven in a horse-drawn taxi on a palm-shaded street in, I think, Tel Aviv. A favorite of mine shows my grandmother, my Nana, walking on an unpaved road beside a Bedouin, who’s sitting on a donkey and leading a camel: on the back of this one, my grandfather wrote
1957 in Israel, Grandma with a camel and an ARAB.
I love this picture because I often think, now, of how difficult my grandmother’s life was, what with her diabetes (
every day she had to boil those awful needles in a shissl,
my mother recently recalled, using—strangely, it seemed to me—the Yiddish word for
pot,
a word I’m used to hearing in discussions about
kasha
and
gołąki
) and what with living with my grandfather; and when I see that picture of her with the camel, I’m happy to think that she, who’d had the most meager of educations, who’d been so terribly poor as a girl, had had a little adventure. As I’ve said, there was a time when I loved no one so much as I loved my grandmother, perhaps because she told no stories, was merely her warm and softly smiling self, was silent and undemanding as she let me play with her earrings while we sat on the front step; and the fact that she has been dead for forty years does not make me any less protective.

There is one more picture, a photo of a small group of people who are standing far from the camera lens, perhaps on a pavement, an image it took me years to decipher. This was partly because it’s somewhat blurry and the faces are impossible to make out, partly because of the strange angle from
which it was taken: an odd diagonal line cuts across the bottom left of the picture. Only recently did I realize that my grandfather took this picture on the day he left Israel, indeed at the moment he was going up the gangplank of the ship that took him and my grandmother back home, after their year in Israel; it was, I saw, the gangplank’s railing that slices diagonally across the left side of the photo. Only after I understood what that angled bar was could I see that the small group standing below was Uncle Itzhak and his family, waiting on the dock for my grandparents to sail away.

I
T WOULD BE
nearly twenty years before anyone else in my family visited the Israeli cousins, and another thirty years after that, exactly, before I myself went, although as I have said what I was interested in was not Israel but Bolechow. But during those twenty years, Israel made itself felt. Occasionally, as those years passed, we would have Israeli visitors to the house, people who to my young mind were interestingly exotic and, for that reason above all, worth attending to. There was, for instance, a certain woman, somewhat younger than my parents, called Yona—another one of those mysteriously curt Israeli names, the clipped, stripped-down syllables of which seemed to me, then, to represent some essential quality of Israel itself: pared down, small, necessarily practical, impatient with sentimental ornament. This Yona would occasionally appear at our house alone, but more often would come with my grandfather who was, for a short time in the mid-1960s, “between wives,” as I once over
heard someone say, before I knew what it really meant—the minds of children being quite literal, I envisioned my grandfather squished between my dead Nana and some other woman—and before I understood the underlying disdain of the comment. It was this overheard remark, perhaps, that made me wonder once, to my mother as she heated a pan filled with the tiny baby peas that were the only peas my grandfather would eat, whether Yona was going to marry Grandpa.

Yona!
my mother laughed, shaking her head. No, silly, Yona is our
cousin
!

Since my mother is an only child, I had learned by then that when she talked about “cousins”—as when she talked about certain “aunts” and “uncles”—she was referring to relatives of mine whose connection to me and my siblings was, in fact, fairly remote—if indeed they were related to us at all. So I took it on faith that this youngish woman, attractive in a remote way, her black hair piled in a bouffant above her languid face, was connected to my Jaeger family somehow, and that I must be nice to her. I wanted to be nice to her anyway, since as young as I was I sensed that the attention she paid to me then was special. Such blue eyes he has! she would tell my mother, rather intensely. And indeed she was quite serious. Only my grandfather, as far as anyone knew, could make her laugh, my grandfather who would teasingly call her
Yona geblonah
! and tell scandalous stories to her in languages I did not, then, understand. But then my grandfather married the first of the three wives who succeeded my grandmother, and instead of Yona there would come to our house in the summers first Rose and then Alice and then, finally, Ray,
Raya
with the tattoo on her forearm,
Raya
who would always take care to occupy my father’s chair at the head of the table every night and then feign surprise when he’d stand next to her, looking down expectantly at the beginning of the meal,
Raya
who, when she finally ate, would hunch over her plate as if fearful, even now, that someone would take away her food; and maybe it was because of all those wives that we somehow lost track of Yona, who by the end of the 1960s had stopped visiting us on Long Island, and we never saw her again.

Also in the 1960s we had our first visit from Elkana. He was, then, young, dark, rather dashing; his ability to get the local police department to fly him over our house in a helicopter seemed, to me, to be a reflection of his importance in the world, of his glamour. Elkana wasn’t a very tall man—no Jäger was, or so I thought until I learned better—but he had an expansive and commanding presence, much as my grandfather had had. It was both jarring and pleasing to me to see this familiar personality now worn by someone else, translated, on this younger, subtle, and foxy face, with its amused eyes
and dashing mustache, into something vaguely exotic. When he came to visit us, sometimes alone and sometimes with his beautiful wife, Ruthie, who, we had already heard, wide-eyed, had never cut her hair, and who would let me watch her, sometimes, as she coiled her amazing blond braids around her head each morning in our blue-tiled bathroom, Elkana would promise us that if we would only come to Israel, he would make things easy for us, wonderful, first-class.

With me, he would say (
wiss me
), you won’t have to do anything (
anyssing
) but get off the plane—no customs, no immigration, no passport controls,
nussing
. Just leave
everyssing
up to me! His voice, when he spoke, was even, amused, authoritative, spiced with the English-speaking Israeli’s citrus vowels and thickly buzzing consonants.
Dehniel,
he would call me.
All ze best
! he would say when parting or hanging up the telephone.

In 1973, soon after my bar mitzvah, my parents finally took him up on his invitation. I was happy they were going: my grandfather and Ray were going to babysit for us five kids while my mother and father were gone. Let them have Israel; I had my grandfather.

My parents had been planning this trip for a long time, because my grandfather had always wanted my mother to meet his brother, his adored brother whom he loved best of all. In the fall of 1972, which is when the plans for my bar mitzvah the following April were getting under way, my parents were also beginning to plan their first trip abroad, the long-postponed, long-awaited trip to Israel. But in December of that year, Uncle Itzhak died. Born with the century, he was seventy-two. It was a devastating blow to my mother to have come so close to meeting this storied relative—a mere four months would have made all the difference—and then to be denied, forever, the possibility of connecting to him. A couple of months after his death, close family friends happened to be traveling in Israel and, because they were close friends, then, ended up spending some time with Elkana there. They returned to Long Island from this trip with a precious cargo: among the many slides that they’d taken during their trip, a few were of Itzhak’s gravestone. One night, not too long before my parents themselves went to Israel, we set up the slide projector in our living room and there, on the immaculate white-painted walls of our house, there appeared what was to be my first-ever glimpse of the name “Jäger” as it looks when spelled out in Hebrew characters on a gravestone—a sight I would not see again for nearly thirty years, when in the overgrown cemetery in Bolechow we so unexpectedly came across the tombstone of my grandfather’s and Itzhak’s distant cousin, Chaya Sima Jäger, née Kasczka.

On the wall of my parents’ living room, vastly enlarged, what you saw was this:

It was soon after my bar mitzvah, the occasion on which my voice so humiliatingly broke on the final few words of my
haftarah
, that my parents flew to Tel Aviv. From this trip there are, of course, many stories. My mother likes to tell, for instance, about how, just as Elkana had promised years before, she and my father were spared the arduous line at customs and were, instead, whisked away in a waiting car; about the instantaneous affection between my cerebral father and old Aunt Miriam, the multilingual intellectual whose fiery Zionism, we knew, had been responsible for saving her family; about the secret nighttime trips to Arab neighborhoods where the restaurants were unequaled, the late nights out in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv with friends. (It was shocking for me to hear this, since—my curiosity having never been engaged enough to read very much—I still thought of the entire country as a sea of brand-new two-story concrete apartment blocks.) And she would talk about how they then went to Haifa, where Aunt Miriam and her other child lived, Elkana’s sister, Bruria: Miriam upstairs and Bruria and her family downstairs, and about how as different groups of friends and relatives, some belonging to Miriam and some to Bruria, would come by to visit the American cousins, my mother would, like a character in a farce, race up and down the stairs, up and down all day, in order to make sure that she’d spent enough time with each group of relatives. One detail in particular snared my interest. Oh,
Daniel,
my mother said, when she and my father called from Israel very quickly to see how we were all doing, you should see Aunt Miriam’s photo album! She has Aunt Jeanette’s wedding picture, it’s the one I lost, she’s in a gown made entirely of lace that the Mittelmarks bought for her. She’s so
beautiful
. As she said this, it seemed both odd and thrilling to me to think that these far-off relatives had photographs of
my
family.

And there was, most famous of all the stories, the tale of my mother’s attempt to explain what cholesterol was to a group of distant cousins, in the only common language they all (more or less) spoke, which was Yiddish. My mother still loves to tell this story, and even now I can’t help smile as I hear her repeating it, as she did just the other day: