The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (43 page)

What? she said, staring at me with mock ferocity. You don’t know? Sure there are others who knew them.

I looked at Matt and took my pen and notepad out of my bag.

Who? I said.

She smiled with satisfaction and started talking. One friend of Frydka, her name was Dyzia Lew, she’s going now by Mrs. Rybek. She married a Russian. After the war I said, I’m going to the West. And she said, what for, there’s 350 million beggars in the Soviet Union, two more won’t matter. But I went to the West, and she stayed behind. And then she went to Israel, and she met Shlomo. His sister was my girlfriend, she added.

The others? I said, writing as I spoke:
DYZIA LEV
?
LOEW
?

And there is one in Stockholm, Meg said. Her name is Klara Schoenfeld, no, sorry, Schoenfeld was her maiden name. Her husband was the one who escaped, the only one who escaped on the way to the execution in the cemetery. His name was Jakob Freilich. Klara Freilich is her name, she’s in Stockholm. She wasn’t so close to us, we were on friendly terms but she didn’t go to high school. But sure, she knew Frydka.

I grinned and turned to my brother.

What do you say, Matt, I said, loudly enough for her to hear, since I wanted her to approve of us, to believe how serious we were. We’ll go to Stockholm?

Meg’s eyes widened.

What, really? she said. I can give you the address.

She took the pen and pad out of my hand and, after searching through her bag, started writing. She tore off a sheet and handed me a piece of paper on which she’d written, in an old-fashioned hand,
KLARA FREILICH
, and then the address, the visual oddness of whose spelling and letters, which I contemplated in the strong sunlight of a New South Wales early autumn afternoon, already spoke of very distant places, further travels.
EDESTAVÖGEN
, she had written, a name that meant absolutely nothing to me.
SVEDEN
, she had written, a kind of misspelling I had stopped even noticing long ago because I was so used to the orthography of Jews from Bolechow.
This is the public school I attendet. Sitting down is my dear brother
SHMIEL
in the Austrian Army, this picture was taking in 1916
. Well, I thought, maybe we will go to “Sveden.”

What else do you want to know? Meg said, her voice growing noticeably lighter as I put the square of paper on which she had written
EDESTAVÖGEN
in my pocket. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.

She smoothed a strand of copper hair that had flown upward in the warm summery breeze, and smiled faintly. No, I won’t tell you everything. Some things cannot be told.

That’s OK, I said, although I was already thinking that at least one of these
others, whose names I had never heard before, was bound to tell me about Frydka and Ciszko Szymanski.

And? I asked.

Reinharz! Jack said to Meg. He should talk to them.

Who is Reinharz? I asked.

It’s two people, a couple who survived, I’m sure they knew Shmiel and the others.

Just as my grandfather would have done, Jack pronounced it
surwived
.

And? I said.

Also you should go to Tel Aviv, Meg said, there is Klara Heller. She was Lorka’s friend.

Lorka’s friend
? For some reason, I had never imagined her as having any—never imagined, in any case, that there would be any left.
LORKA FRIEND
!! →
CLARA HELLER
→
ISRAEL
, I wrote in my pad.

It’s enough for you? Meg said, reaching out her arm to herd everyone into the restaurant at last.

It’s enough, I said. We went into the restaurant.

Three months later, we flew to Israel.

B
UT THE DISADVANTAGE WITH SOURCES, HOWEVER TRUTHFUL THEY TRY TO BE, IS THEIR LACK OF PRECISION IN MATTERS OF DETAIL AND THEIR IMPASSIONED ACCOUNT OF EVENTS…THE PROLIFERATION OF SECONDARY AND TERTIARY SOURCES, SOME COPIED, OTHERS CARELESSLY TRANSMITTED, SOME REPEATED FROM HEARSAY, OTHERS WHO CHANGED DETAILS IN GOOD OR BAD FAITH, SOME FREELY INTERPRETED, OTHERS RECTIFIED, SOME PROPAGATED WITH TOTAL INDIFFERENCE, OTHERS PROCLAIMED AS THE ONE, ETERNAL AND IRREPLACEABLE TRUTH, THE LAST OF THESE THE MOST SUSPECT OF ALL.

José Saramago,

The History of the Siege of Lisbon

Parashat Noach
, that terrible tale of extermination, is in many ways a story about water. By contrast, the next weekly reading in the Torah,
parashat Lech Lecha
, is very much preoccupied with dry land. Like
Noach
, it is, in a way, also a narrative about traveling, with the difference that the landscape (or seascape) through which the characters in the earlier
parashah
must travel is mysterious and unknowable, whereas the heroes of
Lech Lecha
—Noah’s distant descendant Abram, a Chaldean from the city of Ur, and his family, the first worshippers of the Hebrew God—move through spaces that are described in careful detail: their appearance, dimensions, their unfamiliar inhabitants. Indeed, it’s possible to see
Lech Lecha
as the first travelogue, a story that takes its hero from his “homeland, birthplace, and father’s house” to the land of wonders in which he and his people will henceforth live.

This preoccupation with land and territory is not accidental: for as is well-known,
Lech Lecha
is the
parashah
in which God explicitly names his covenant with Abram: “Go out from your land, your birthplace, your father’s house,” God says to Abram, “to the place that I will show you. I will make you into a big nation, and I’ll bless you and make your name great. And be a blessing! And all the families of the earth will be blessed through you.” (Friedman, whose translation this is, is not the first commentator to point out that it’s never made clear just what the nature of this blessing, this benefit to the whole human race, will be.) For this reason,
Lech Lecha
is, among other things, the most obviously political of all the early
parashot:
again and again, it introduces into the ongoing narrative of the human race advertisements, announcements, and warnings intended to legitimize the claims of the people of Abram to a specific patch of land. The name of that square mileage was Canaan. From the moment Abram arrives in this land, we feel that trouble lies ahead, for as the text is unembarrassed to acknowledge, “the
Canaanite was in the land then,” too. Still, God makes his promise, and keeps reiterating it throughout
Lech Lecha:
“I will give this land to your seed.” The coordinates of the property to be shifted thus from the Canaanites to the people of Abram—the details of the transfer are not worked out in the text of God’s promise—are carefully spelled out: as far as the place of Shechem, as far as the oak of Moreh, Beth El to the east and Ai to the west, the Negev, and so forth.

The text’s increasing specificity about land mirrors a grander narrowing process, nicely analyzed by Friedman in his commentary: the first eleven chapters of Genesis, he writes—that is,
Bereishit
and
Noach
—are about the relationship between God and the entire human community. That relationship clearly soured, with the result that after ten generations God destroyed humanity except for Noah’s family. (This is the first “narrowing.”) After another ten generations, God focuses on one of Noah’s descendants, Abram. (The second “narrowing.”) The rest of the Bible will, essentially, be a story told in exhaustive detail about that one virtuous man’s family as it struggles to maintain a hold on the property God has promised them.

I myself have no interest in the territorial aspect and political implications of
Lech Lecha,
although it goes without saying that the promises cited in this
parashah
have been often cited for political purposes, even (as incredible as it may seem to secular people, for whom the Torah is nothing more than a work of literature) today. To be sure, certain more general themes of this
parashah
are intriguing for someone like me, a person deeply interested in the rich and complex culture of certain now-vanished civilizations, such as the culture of pre–World War I Austria-Hungary, or the multilayered urban life of interwar Polish cities like Lwów. Not the least of these themes is the way in which different groups of people can either coexist in a certain place or (more often) try to expel each other from it. Another might be this: what it means to feel at home in a country in which you are, by rights, a stranger, and yet to which you’ve been told you have a profound and inalienable claim.

But what interests me far more about this
parashah
, however interesting its implied commentary about territory and culture may be, are, as usual, certain details of the diction and narrative, the sorts of things that are of interest to (say) bookish adolescents and library-bound scholars rather than to prime ministers. For instance, the very title of this
parashah
is itself the object of no little controversy. The first word of the Hebrew title,
lech,
means “go”; it is the strange usage of the second word,
lecha,
that has confused commentators. The sense of
lecha
is something like “for yourself”: but what, exactly, does “Go for yourself” mean? As Friedman points out, it’s been translated as “Get you” or “Go you”; he himself, disdaining what he calls “clumsy English,” simply writes “Go,” while another new translation offers “Go forth,” which has a nice archaic ring. Rashi lingers, as usual, on this problem. He suggests in the end that “for yourself” has a twofold impli
cation: “for your pleasure” and “for your benefit.” Why does God promise Abram pleasure and benefit? Because, Rashi goes on to note, the awesome travels to which Abram commits himself will have terrible costs. Such extensive journeying, he notes, results in three negative things: loss of reproduction (because it is improper for couples to engage in marital relations when they are guests in another’s home, and Abram and his wife, Sarai, won’t have a home of their own until the end of their travels); loss of money (this hardly needs explanation, even today); and loss of reputation—this latter, because in each new place that Abram comes to, he must work to reestablish his own reputation for goodness from scratch.

It is, the text implies, as a compensation for the losses involved in traveling the world over that God promises Abram great rewards: his name will be great, he will be blessed (“blessing,” as Rashi points out, being a word that suggests material goods, too), his progeny will be as numberless as the dust or the stars. He will, in time, have sons of his own: first Ishmael, by the Egyptian slave-woman Hagar, and then Isaac, by his lawful wife, Sarah. (More politics.) Even his name will grow, by a single syllable: halfway through
parashat Lech Lecha
, God declares that Abram’s name will henceforth be “Abraham.”

Perhaps it is because I am a classicist that, as I read this
parashah
, a tale of a man who sets out on a great journey through strange lands filled with unexpected friends and terrible foes, lands both highly civilized and violently primitive, of a man who enjoys the special protection of a god who guides him without, however, making things too easy, a tale, in the end, about a man’s desperate struggle to get to his home—as I read this, I think less about Hebrews and more about Greeks. I think about Homer’s
Odyssey
. In that epic poem, the hero also endures dreadful adventures and confusing travels in order to reach home, and in it, too, he is rewarded for his hardships by the gods: by the end of the poem, he has acquired material goods, power, family. What surprises me is that in comparison to his Greek counterpart, the biblical patriarch—indeed,
Lech Lecha
itself—seems bizarrely uninterested in the lands through which he passes, bizarrely incurious about the cultures he encounters (and, of course, eventually displaces); it occurs to me that the difference between Abraham and Odysseus is the difference between a dangerous and terrifying emigration and a return to the home one already knows. For whatever reasons, in any event, the
Odyssey
emphasizes something to which
Lech Lecha
seems indifferent, which is that there is another and greater reward to be gained from journeying all over the world and observing new lands, new cultures, new civilizations, from coming into contact for the first time with different kinds of people and customs: knowledge. Knowledge, then, is another blessing that increases the farther you go.

Or sometimes not. For anyone who’s traveled extensively knows that, although you may think you know what you’re looking for and where you’re going when you first set out, what you learn along the way is often quite surprising.