The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (84 page)

So, in a way, at the very moment I had found them most specifically, I felt that I had to give them up again, let them be themselves, whatever that had been. It was bitter and it was sweet; and indeed, when, later, I would describe this moment to Jack Greene, to whom in a way I owed everything, he said to me, making an analogy to his own emotion on emerging from his hiding place so many years before, Yes, I know how it feels, it is a feeling of
accomplishment
but not a
happy
feeling. I had traveled far, had circled the planet and studied my Torah, and at the very end of my search I was standing, finally, in the place where everything begins: the tree in the garden, the tree of knowledge that, as I long ago learned, is something divided, something that because growth occurs only through the medium of time, brings both pleasure and, finally, sorrow.

I suppose it was concrete facts, specifics, that I was somehow trying to grasp when, out of some instinct that even today I can’t quite identify, I reached down and thrust my hands into the earth at the base of the tree and filled my pockets with it. Then—since this is the tradition of the strange tribe to which, although parts of that tradition make no sense to me, I know I belong, because my grandfather once belonged to it—I groped around in the earth for a large stone, and when I found one, I put it in the crook where the branches of the tree met. This is their only monument, I thought, and so I’ll leave a stone here. Then I turned and walked out of the garden, and soon after that we said good bye and got into the car and left.

It was while we were driving away that I made the last of my many mistakes. I had promised myself that this time, when we left Bolekhiv, I would do something I’d meant to do years earlier, on our first trip to the town, because back then I’d thought that it would also be our last trip to this place, this little town, this bustling
shtetl
, this
happy
place, a place that
was and will never be again
: I had promised myself that as we drove out of the town and back up the little hill toward L’viv, I would turn around, as I somehow knew my grandfather had done on an October day eighty years before, turn around for the reason we always turn around to stare at what lies behind us, which is to make an impossible wish, a wish that nothing will be left behind, that we will carry the imprint of what is over and done with into the present and future. I told myself that I’d look through the back window and stare at the little town as it receded, because I wanted to be able to remember not only what the place looked like when you were arriving there, but what it looked like when you were leaving it forever.

But as Alex maneuvered the blue Passat out of the complicated little streets that an epoch ago had given the inhabitants of that place, very few of whom are left now, none of whom will be alive when I am Jack Greene’s age, the nickname that nobody knows or cares about anymore,
Bolechower crawlers!
—as Alex navigated those twisty streets, we all started talking at once, telling the remarkable story of what we had found and where we had walked, and by the time I remembered to turn around and take that one last look, we had traveled too far, and Bolechow had slipped out of sight.

Frances BEGLEY, née HAUSER

Rzeszów 1910—New York 2004

Elkana EFRATI, né JÄGER

Bolechow 1928—Kfar Saba 2006

Josef FEUER

Bolechow 1920—Striy 2002

Boris GOLDSMITH

Bolechow 1913—Sydney 2005

Salamon GROSSBARD

Bolechow 1908—Sydney 2004

Bob GRUNSCHLAG

Bolechow 1929—Sydney 2005

Dyzia RYBAK, née LEW

Bolechow 1923—Minsk 2004

Solomon (Shumek) REINHARZ

Bolechow 1914—Beer Sheva 2005

T
HE EVENTS RECORDED
in this book are true. All formal interviews were recorded on videotape, and nearly all other conversations, including telephone conversations, were either recorded by the author or reconstructed on the basis of notes taken by the author during those conversations. Some but by no means most of the dialogue recorded in these pages was edited for the sake of coherence and in order to avoid repetitions; occasionally, this editing has necessitated the chronological rearrangement of some remarks. Several names have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals, at their request.

Because this book is, among other things, the story of distant travels across many countries and continents where I was often speaking with people who themselves had migrated from country to country, a word about the use of language is in order. In cases where English was the language used in my interviews, I have reproduced the spoken English of my subjects, however awkward, since the habits of speech, accents, and forms of expression of the people I spoke with during my research are part of the culture, now almost vanished, that was to some extent the object of my search; I’ve treated the English of the translators I occasionally employed in the same way. I have generally transliterated Yiddish according to YIVO standards, except when those standards are at odds with my memory of certain pronunciations. Quotations from witness statements in Polish obtained from Yad Vashem are given here in an English translation commissioned for the purposes of this book.

With respect to place-names, for the most part I use present-day Polish and Ukrainian spellings when referring to towns and cities I visited, but—
partly for the sake of historical accuracy, and partly to suggest the flavor of a lost era—I have resorted to older spellings in passages describing events that took place in the past. Hence, for example, I write about my trips to L’viv in 2001 and 2005, but refer at times to the Lwów School of mathematicians that flourished between the two world wars, since the Ukrainian city now known as L’viv was properly known during that period as Lwów, a Polish city. The one more or less consistent exception to this norm—a forgivable one, I hope—is my use of the old German spelling for the name of the town that atlases today give in its Ukrainian form,
Bolekhiv
, and which most of the people I interviewed referred to by its Polish name,
Bolechów
; but to which my family, who dwelled there for well over three centuries, has always referred as
Bolechow
—a habit I have found impossible to break.

N
O BOOK THAT
has been five years—indeed, more—in the making can have been written without the support and encouragement of many people, and it is a pleasure to mark here my gratitude to those who so richly deserve it.

This book is a book about family, and my greatest debt in every way is, and has always been, to mine: first and foremost to my parents, Marlene and Jay Mendelsohn, who encouraged my odd childhood enthusiasms (“Athena’s table”; photography excursions to the cemetery) and who since then have unstintingly lavished their time, memories, and much else on me; and then to my siblings and in-laws, who, as these pages will have shown, were not only enthusiastic supporters of but active and ongoing participants in the Bolechow Project: Andrew Mendelsohn and Virginia Shea; Matt Mendelsohn and Maya Vastardis; Eric Mendelsohn; Jennifer Mendelsohn and Greg Abel.

It would be an injustice, however, not to mark especially my deepest gratitude to Matt above all, since he has been a full collaborator in this project from start to finish; the tale told in this book owes as much to him as it does to me, and not simply because so many of its pages give evidence of his extraordinary talent. If I say that he has a beautiful way of seeing things, I am referring to more than his professional eye; in the end, his profound humaneness made itself felt in the words as much as the pictures. Of all that I found during my search, he is the greatest treasure.

The Bolechowers whom I met and talked with over the course of two years are not, technically speaking, family, but by now it is very difficult not to think of them as such; there is no need to repeat their names here, since
this entire book is a record of my gratitude to them for their superb and abundant hospitality, for their generosity with their time and with memories the sharing of which was not, I know, always a happy task. I do, however, want to mention here the names of certain other friends and relatives connected to the Bolechower group to whom I owe a debt of hospitality or friendship or both: Susannah Juni; Malka Lewenwirth; Debbie Greene in Sydney; and in Stockholm, our Mittelmark cousin, Renate Hallerby, and her husband, Nils, whose warmth and generosity were all too plain despite the brevity of the time we had together. Friends and relatives in Israel were constant and treasured sources of hospitality, encouragement, and enthusiasm, and I’m profoundly grateful to them. To Linda Zisquit in Jerusalem I owe a particular debt of thanks for her loving persistence in helping me find something small but crucial. At home, Allan and Karen Rechtschaffen and Marilyn Mittelmark Tepper shared many vital memories over a long and delightful “cousins” weekend, and Edward (“Nino”) Beltrami guided me to an important insight.

It will be clear to anyone who has read this book that I have been the beneficiary of extraordinary hospitality in Bolekhiv, Ukraine, for which I am as grateful as I am for that shown me everywhere else. Of all the Ukrainians who have helped me, however, none has been as generous, eager, and, finally, as instrumental as Alex Dunai in L’viv, who for nearly ten years now has been my right-hand man in the project of which this book is the culmination. For his tireless efforts on our behalf, I am more grateful than I can say. He began as a valued colleague, and together with his family has become a valued friend.

Invaluable archival and technical assistance came, too, from a group of talented young people whose contribution I’m happy to note: Nicky Gottlieb, for his calendrical wizardry; Henryk Jaronowski, to whom I owe some crucial photographs; Arthur Dudney, without whose Polish translations I would have been lost; and my
benjamins,
Morris Doueck and Zack Woolfe: “from your students you will learn.”

I am also deeply grateful to Ariel Kaminer at
The New York Times Magazine
for seeing my first writing on Bolechow so successfully into print.

A small circle of cherished friends close to home were crucial in seeing me through to the end of this long project: Chris Andersen, Glen Bowersock and Christopher Jones, István and Gloria Deák, Diane Feldman, Lise Funderburg and John Howard, Bob Gottlieb and Maria Tucci, Renée Guest, Jake Hurley, Lily Knezevich, Laura Miller, and Stephen Simcock. Donna Masini has been everything anyone could want in a best friend; Patti Hart was an invaluable
support. Myrna and Ralph Langer, together with their extended family, have always provided a bedrock of affection and encouragement to me and mine, especially valued by me during this project; I’m particularly happy to have Karen Isaac as a supportive and loving IM correspondent. My debt to Froma Zeitlin, one that I am happy to continue acknowledging whenever possible, should be evident in these pages; this book quite literally couldn’t have been written without her—and indeed without her husband, George, a generous host from days of old and, more recently, an indefatigable travel companion in Vienna, Israel, and Lithuania. My travels with Lane Montgomery have, it is safe to say, run the gamut of the comfort spectrum; I’m so grateful to her for her contribution to the second and very emotional journey that we took together. From the start of this project, Nancy Novogrod and her husband, John—who have listened to my tales of Galician travel (if not leisure) with a uniquely sympathetic ear—have been the sources of treasured friendship and encouragement. I am grateful to Nancy as well, wearing her editor’s hat, for her forbearance and patience in letting me take time off from my obligations to her in order to complete this book; Bob Silvers at
The New York Review of Books
has also been enormously generous to me in this respect, as indeed he always has been in many others.

No friends, however, have been as vital to the writing of this book as have Louis and Anka Begley. It would be an understatement to say that they shared with me much that was so important; only a small part of it was a crucial week of hospitality during which I brought my work to an end.

That work has, from the start, been a terrifically pleasurable collaboration with my editor, Tim Duggan, and what merits it has are owed largely to him. His initial enthusiasm for the project, his patience as it grew in scope and size (and duration), his immaculate professionalism, the skill with which he balanced an acute editorial sensibility with a deep sensitivity to my aims, have made the writing of this book a joy to me and, in the end, an experience from which I’ve learned a great deal. For that I am thankful. I should add that not the least part of the pleasure of working with him has been the excellent help, unflaggingly cheerful and unfailingly efficient, given me by his assistant, Allison Lorentzen, to whom I’m also very grateful.

I will once again end where I began. I was just out of graduate school when Lydia Wills more or less scooped me up and pointed me in the right direction, and our professional collaboration has, ever since, brought me great pride and many satisfactions—as indeed has our friendship. It was she who knew all along that this book was the one I had to write, and she who made it happen
in just the right way; for that reason it, like so much that I’ve accomplished, is as much hers as mine.

T
HOSE READERS WHO
have gotten this far in the book will have become familiar with one of the dedicatees, Mrs. Frances Begley, née Franciszka Hauser, my feelings for whom will have been made clear in these pages. The other deserves to be commemorated by more than a mere name. Sarah Pettit was, at first, my editor, in the days when I first began writing; but she soon developed into a cherished friend, while continuing for a long time to be a supportive colleague. Her many extraordinary qualities—her intellectual brilliance, her editorial gusto and professional acumen, the superb taste, the wry humor that barely masked a sentimental, even poetic heart, her beauty and her passions—have been duly eulogized elsewhere, as befitting a person who achieved so much in the public world in so little time. Her death from lymphoma in January 2003, when she was thirty-six, was and continues to be a tragedy for a world much larger than that constituted by the circle of her intimate friends. I will say here only that she was the earliest and most enthusiastic champion of this book, and for me it is indeed an unhappy proof that
there are tears in things
that she cannot see the end result of a project whose birth she greeted with such selfless enthusiasm, at a time when a lack of interest in anything but her own condition would have been more than forgivable. She was, and will always be, my darling girl.