The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (51 page)

As it turned out, this was not to be the final shock, the final disappointment, the final necessary readjustment to the family story.

Because we were tired, because I thought we’d gotten everything we could reasonably hope for, given how emotional all this was for Anna, that morning, I was starting to think about moving the conversation to an end. And anyway, I had to get ready for the enormous family reunion Elkana was planning for that afternoon, the gathering at which “all the cousins” were going to be present to meet this unknown American relative who was, they had been told, writing a book about the
mishpuchah
. So I asked a question that I thought would help wrap up our long discussion.

Did she remember any other Jägers in Bolechow? I asked. Having talked to the Sydney group three months earlier, I knew about the distant Jäger cousins who owned the
cukierna,
the Jäger brothers, one of whom was named Wiktor, the son (I was sure) of the Chaya Sima Jäger whose gravestone Matt had, so improbably, seen from the window of Alex’s car that day, the Wiktor whose sister was the mother of Yulek Zimmerman, the boy who, until today, I’d thought had been Lorka’s only boyfriend. Maybe she would know about that, I thought.

Instead, while she was talking to Shlomo, she mentioned something about
Yitzhak Jäger. Uncle Itzhak! It was strange to think that there were people here in Israel who remembered him from his Bolechow days, before he—or rather, Aunt Miriam—had the foresight to get out.

She talked a little while and then Shlomo turned to me and said, Itzhak Jäger had a butchery, but not in the Rynek—

(the Rynek was where the store had stood in my grandfather’s day, I knew, and Shlomo knew that I knew that: I had the picture from the Yizkor book, a picture of one side of the Rynek with the town hall building and, just across from it, a low building under which my grandfather had drawn an arrow to identify where his family’s store had been)

—not in the Rynek, Shlomo was saying, but opposite the mill. It was there. And from this store he must run away from Bolechow.

Knowing by now about the difficulties of working in several languages at once, I said, You mean he left the store when he left Bolechow?

Shlomo shook his head.

I said, You mean he didn’t want to be there? I was confused.

Shlomo looked at me.

He must
run away,
he said.

I said, Why was…what does that
mean
?

Anna was watching this exchange, and said to Shlomo,
Er vill vissn?

He wants to know?

Shlomo turned to me and said for her, although I didn’t need the translation, You really want to know?

And I said,
Yes
.

At this point Anna launched into a long story. I knew it would be long from the way she took a breath, from the rhythms of her Yiddish sentences, those ripe vowels and gurgling consonants that unraveled across the room like thick wool from a spool. She talked for a few minutes, sitting at the edge of her chair and looking from Shlomo to me. When she had finished, she sat all the way back in her chair with the sigh of someone who’s finished a difficult job.

Shlomo said: OK. They were customers of Itzhak Jäger’s butchery. (Anna’s family, he meant.) So there was a time when Itzhak built himself a nice house, not far from Shmiel, and they had a big celery.

Cellar,
I said.

A big cellar, yes. And she said that there was a certain time, one year, you couldn’t get veal meat. No no no—you couldn’t get veal.

I wasn’t quite following this. You couldn’t get veal, he’d said. Why? I wondered aloud if there had perhaps been some blight on the cattle, slightly embar
rassed, for reasons I still can’t quite isolate, at the thought that this ridiculous, old-fashioned, biblical word, “blight,” might have occurred to me because I was now in Israel. He said maybe that was it; maybe the cows weren’t calving that year.

Shlomo continued with the story. Suddenly, he said, one woman came to another woman and saw in her kitchen that she had veal. So she asked,
Where did you get the veal meat?
and the other woman said,
By Itzhak Jäger.

Because I grew up hearing Yiddish, I know that his
by
was the word
bay
, the same as the German
bei,
“at the home of,” like the French
chez
.
Zey zent behalten bay a lererin.
They were captured at the home of a schoolteacher.
Bay Itzhak Jäger.
At Itzhak Jäger’s place.

Bay Itzhak Jäger,
he repeated.

Bay Itzhak Jäger,
I repeated.

Shlomo said, So the information came from one to another, one to another—it was a small city. So everyone was buying veal meat from Itzhak Jäger. And then they found out
how
he was getting veal meat—that he used to go out deep in the country and buy a young calf, and then he would take the calf in his cellar to kill it by himself, and so he had veal meat to sell.

Even if you didn’t come from a long line of kosher butchers, as I had, you’d know what this meant. Because the calf hadn’t been killed by a
shochet,
a ritual slaughterer, it wasn’t kosher.

Shlomo was watching my face, and nodded. He said, loudly, So! It was not kosher! He was beaming with the excitement of this story, which he had been too young at the time, perhaps not even born yet, to know about. He went on, A professional person must do it to kill it kosher! So the rabbis, so the rabbis of Bolechow put a sign saying that this store is not kosher, is not selling kosher meat! And all the religious women had to break all the dishes in their home. And it was a big scandal!

He added, on his own, You know, kosher meat used to cost double what other meat cost. So this is how Itzhak could build his big new house with this!

I didn’t say anything for a while. Then I asked, What year was this? Shlomo asked Anna, and then said, She was about ten years old.

Nineteen thirty, I thought. Just before Itzhak came to Palestine.
Just in the nick of time! She was a Zionist!

I thought that was the end of it, when suddenly Shlomo rose forcefully from his seat and cried out.

You
see
? he said, excitedly, You
see
? You see? I want to tell you a very important thing.

I had no idea what he was going to say.

Shlomo looked at me. He said, barely controlling his emotion, I want to tell you something very important. My mother was a
frum,
a religious woman. She was in hiding because she had information that the Germans wanted to take her. But she came
out
of hiding to make Pesach, because of God!

Shlomo took a deep breath. As with many big men who are also unafraid to show their emotions, he seemed somehow to inflate, to get bigger, as he spoke, his voice trembling.

He said, And she came out, and she was killed.

He looked at me meaningfully, and I knew, then, exactly what he was going to say. I said, Shlomo, I know what you’re going to say.

But it was as if he didn’t hear me. He looked at me, pointing his big finger right at me, and he went on. He said, For being
frum,
my mother was killed! And Itzhak Jäger did a thing that was
against the religion completely
! So God saved him, he sent him away to Palestina! You understand?

I understood. I thought of my grandfather, years earlier, saying about another meal of unkosher meat,
But if life is at stake, God forgives!
But he had eaten that meat to stay alive; this was different. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Instead, I listened as Shlomo translated what he’d just said to me for Anna. The second time around he was no less agitated.

Itzhak hut gemakht a zakh duss iss kegn Gott
, Shlomo cried out, again.

Itzhak did a thing that is against God.

Unt Gott hut ihm gerattet!

And God saved him!

At this point, Anna, who I suppose had had many years to ponder certain ironies of history, to think about how, or indeed whether, God intervened in human affairs, interrupted Shlomo, shaking her head with that smile she had, which this time mixed with its usual sadness a certain weary amusement. She gestured vaguely heavenward.

Vuss, kegn Gott?
she said, admonishing him.
Kegn di
rabbunim!

I didn’t need Shlomo to translate this. What she had said was, What, “against God”? Against the
Rabbis
.

If life is at stake, God forgives!

S
OON AFTERWARD, SHLOMO
dropped me off at Elkana’s sleek apartment complex for the festive family reunion. My mother’s cousin was expansive over the gigantic late-afternoon lunch, served in the dining hall of the com
plex. After the twenty-five or so cousins, second cousins, first cousins once-and twice-removed, third cousins, the Ramis and Nomis and Pninas and Re’uts and Gals and Tzakhis had been laughingly introduced (those strange, truncated Israeli names again!: sitting there, I remembered how we’d laugh and say YONA YONA YONA when we were little and my grandfather would come with that dark-haired young Israeli woman, until he started coming with those other women); after the bashful smiles and mute nods and grins, after all these people had taken their seats, Elkana rose to his feet and made a toast of welcome. Embarrassed because I couldn’t reply in Hebrew, I smiled stupidly and nodded to everyone. In English, I said I was happy to be in Israel and finally meeting the whole
mishpuchah
. Thoughtfully, Elkana had put me next to his sister’s granddaughters, young women in their late twenties who both spoke fluent English. We got to talking and after a while started sharing family gossip and comparing family secrets.
In
this
family?
Gal said incredulously at one point, in response to something I’d asked.
Are you kidding?
She looked at Ravit and started laughing. I grinned and said,
Yeah, lots of us, too.
At the other end of the table, Elkana had kept his son Rami’s son, Tzakhi, a darkly handsome young man who was by now nearly thirty, at his side.
Rami,
a nickname for Abraham: my grandfather.
Tzakhi,
the diminutive of Itzhak. Rami was off in the Far East somewhere; like his father, he was a somebody. Elkana was holding forth in front of his grandson. The papers had said that the search was on for the deposed leader of Iraq; Elkana, who although he was long retired still had the sleek aura of someone who had special access to rarefied information in high places, nodded his head in my direction and said, with a certain largesse,
You will find him in Tikrit, I’m telling you. That is where his home is, his people.
To my right was Ruthie, her braids now a mixture of straw-blond and white; she was translating, as fast as she could, whenever I tried to communicate with the others, whenever she thought it was worth repeating. It was in this fashion that I learned that most of the younger people there were unaware of the fact that this large and buoyant family had come from a place called Bolechow, and that their name had once been

Abram’s initial encounter with a foreign culture is not, at first glance, terribly successful. Relatively early in
parashat Lech Lecha
, we’re told that although God had led Abram to Canaan, the territory that had been promised, there was, soon afterward, a famine in that land that caused Abram to flee with his family into Egypt, a land of plenty. Before arriving in Egypt, Abraham hatches a plan. She is a beautiful woman, he tells Sarai, and because of that the Egyptians will want to abduct her and kill him; accordingly he instructs her to tell a lie and say that Abram is not her husband, but her brother. This
way, Abram tells her, “it will go well with me for your sake, and I may live on account of you.” As it turns out, the former part of Abram’s prediction is borne out: the moment they arrive in Egypt, Pharaoh’s officers praise her beauty to the king, after which “she was taken to the Pharaoh’s house.” And indeed it did go well for Abram, who was rewarded for his lie with “flocks and cattle and donkeys and slaves and maidservants and camels.” Abundant blessings indeed.

As to the second part of Abram’s nervous prediction—that the Egyptians would have killed him if they’d known he was Sarai’s husband—there is no evidence to support this, and indeed the text suggests that the opposite, if anything, would have been true. After Sarai is taken into Pharaoh’s house (and we are not told what transpires there), God afflicts Egypt with “severe plagues” as punishment for what we must assume is Pharaoh’s (unwitting) insult to a married couple. In a passage remarkable for what it doesn’t tell us, Pharaoh himself deduces, presumably from the nature of the plagues, which is left unspecified, that he’s being punished for taking Sarai as his wife when she is, in fact, a married woman, and angrily summons Abram. “What is this you’ve done to me?” he cries. “Why did you not tell me that she is your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister’ so that I’d take her as my wife? Now here is your wife, take her and go!” Abram does go, we are told at Genesis 13:1, “up from Egypt,” loaded down with his booty: livestock and silver and gold.