The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (52 page)

Much of the scholarly commentary on this peculiar detour in Abram’s far-flung travels has been on the way in which the episode, which features a confrontation with Pharaoh, punishing plagues on Egypt, the Egyptian king’s anger at the man of God, and the king’s impatient order for this Hebrew to “go!” out of Egypt with his family and “all that he had,” is a self-conscious foreshadowing of the later and central episode narrated in Exodus. And there has, of course, been much discussion of Abram’s strange plan, based as it is on an assumption about Egyptian behavior that is never actually borne out by what transpires; in particular, what looks to many commentators as the deliberate prostitution of his wife, coupled with an instruction to lie, has made many scholars of this passage uneasy, and many have taken pains to exculpate Abram. “He cannot be faulted for choosing to put Sarah in a compromising position,” Friedman writes, “because, in his understanding, Sarah would be taken either way.” Still, there is something unpalatable about the patriarch’s behavior. Friedman, the California-based modern, is willing to entertain the notion that perhaps Abram “is not perfect,” but Rashi suggests that Abram was not interested in the gifts per se, but—aware that the episode in which he was now an actor was merely the forerunner of a grander biblical drama—was eager for his future progeny in Exodus to leave Egypt similarly laden with gifts.

These and other attempts at exculpating the father of all Jews cannot help but appear rather flimsy to me, now. I think of the story often, the man and his wife and family, the
homeland from which they are forced to flee during a time of crisis. The exploitation of a lie for (there is no other word for it) self-enrichment, the use of the wife to provide a kind of cover story for an escape that became, however improbably, a vehicle for self-enrichment, for the propagation of a successful new progeny in the new land. I think of these, and I think that whoever wrote
parashat Lech Lecha
knew something about the way people can behave in troubled times.

O
N
S
UNDAY, THE
twenty-ninth of June, Shlomo picked me up at the Tel Aviv Hilton, which, because of the six-month-old war and the threat of increased terrorism that was one of its inevitable by-products, was rather empty. At the famous breakfast smorgasbord, about which Froma had excitedly told me, the fabulous spread with its many kinds of lox and smoked fishes, the giant electric juicer engorged with intensely colored Israeli oranges, the cheeses and herring and bagels and breads, six or seven people were wandering around that morning. I leafed through the papers. A fifteen-year-old terrorist had killed an Israeli telephone repairman. Israelis were skeptical about a cease-fire that had been announced by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. A naval commando had been killed during an Israeli crackdown on Hamas. Leon Uris, the author of
Exodus,
had died. I put down the papers and drank my orange juice.

Soon afterward, at ten o’clock sharp, Shlomo navigated the security checkpoint at the entrance to the hotel and pulled up in front of the vast, vacant lobby. He had eagerly offered to drive me the two hours or so south, deep into the desert, to talk to Solomon and Malcia Reinharz. We needed to get there at around lunchtime, Shlomo had told me, per the couple’s request.

The husband don’t like to take too much time away from work, Shlomo explained.

Work?
I repeated, incredulously. Based on what Shlomo had told me, this Mr. Reinharz must be nearly ninety.

Sure, Shlomo said, grinning broadly. They have now a shoe store for over fifty years, they are still working there.

What I thought was, At least their memories must be good.

As we drove out of Tel Aviv, down through Jaffa—where Elkana had taken me for dinner, on the night I arrived, in an unprepossessing Arab restaurant where the food was extraordinary and where he chatted in Arabic with the owner, his old friend—and then out onto a highway that soon was nothing more than a thin line cutting through a great deal of sand, Shlomo and I talked. Not since my grandfather had died had I felt so at liberty to indulge
my desire to ask questions about Bolechow. We discussed with excitement the revelations of the day before; in particular, Anna’s insistence that Frydka had been in hiding with Shmiel—a version of events that owed no small part of its appeal to the fact that it dovetailed with the version that Aunt Miriam had heard, so many years before. Once again, I felt the urgency behind Shlomo’s enthusiasm, the energy that irradiated every new fact related to Bolechow, even if it was a fact about a family that was not his. It was he, after all, who had made himself the head of the “ex-Bolechowers,” who would be gathering in the autumn, as they always did, for their annual reunion. It was Shlomo who enjoyed telling me about famous people who had their origins in Bolechow or the surrounding area.

You know who is Krauthammer, the American journalist? he asked me.

Yes, I said, I did.

A Bolechower family!
Shlomo cried triumphantly.

No kidding, I said.

He asked me if maybe this Krauthammer had gotten in touch with me when the article I’d written about our trip to Bolechow in 2001 had appeared.

No, I said, smiling, he hadn’t. I told him, however, that another well-known figure in American publishing, a man whose father had been born in Stryj, had contacted me after he’d heard about my first trip to Ukraine, two years earlier.
Wieseltier,
I said, when Shlomo asked me the name.

Ah! he said, I think yes, there was a family Wieseltier in Bolechow too.

I nodded and explained that this famous editor, Wieseltier, who lived in Washington, D.C., had told me that he knew for a fact that his mother’s family, called Backenroth, were connected to Bolechow, and that he also thought he had had relatives on his father’s side who had lived in Bolechow before the war, although he didn’t know their names. He had thought that maybe they owned a bakery, as his father had done in Stryj. Shlomo nodded again, and we agreed that
Wieseltier
was a rare name, not the kind you’d be likely to confuse with something else, or forget altogether.
Of course I knew Wieseltier,
Mrs. Begley had told me after I’d returned from Ukraine,
he had the bakery. I knew the father,
she added, knowing that I was likely to know of the son from an entirely different context. Then she had pushed a white bone china platter across the tablecloth toward me and said,
Take another cookie, you think
I’m
going to eat them?

Look! Shlomo suddenly cried. He pointed out the window at a figure walking beside a camel.
Bedouins!

We’re certainly not in Bolechow, I joked. I thought of my grandmother in 1956,
with a camel and an Arab.

He asked me to tell him in more detail about the interviews I’d done in Australia. As I told him, as best I could remember, about each of the long conversations I’d had with everybody, he would nod slowly, relishing each story, each fact, although of course they were stories and facts that he himself knew well by now. At one point I asked if he’d ever heard the story that my mother had somehow heard, all those years ago: that her cousins had been raped before they’d been killed.
They had four beautiful girls, they raped them all and killed them.
Where had she heard this? I used to wonder; but when I finally asked my mother she said, I can’t remember anymore, there were so many terrible stories, I used to have nightmares. So as Shlomo and I drove toward Beer Sheva I asked him what he might know, might have heard. No one in Australia had had any specifics, I told him as the desert sizzled around us. He grimaced a little and shrugged sorrowfully. So many terrible things happened during the Aktionen, Shlomo said, it could be possible, sure. Could be. But to know for sure, it’s impossible as far as I know.

I nodded but didn’t say anything. Maybe it was better not to know some things.

After a pause he said, You know that also Regnier was there in Australia? Anatol Regnier was the author of
Damals in Bolechow,
the book that told the story of how Shlomo and his cousin Josef, how Jack and Bob and the rest, had survived. I thought of Meg Grossbard, telling me how strange she had found it that a German had called her one day, asking to talk about Bolechow; and of how she had refused to talk to him, refused to let her story be written down.

Yes, I replied to Shlomo, I know he was there. And then, continuing the unspoken thought that had risen in my mind, I said, half smiling, It’s different to write the story of people who survived, because there’s someone to interview, and they can tell you these amazing stories. As I said these words I thought of Mrs. Begley, who had once looked coldly at me and said,
If you didn’t have an amazing story, you didn’t survive
.

My problem, I went on to Shlomo, is that I want to write the story of people who didn’t survive. People who had no story, anymore.

Shlomo nodded and said, Aha, I see. He kept driving. You know, he said after a while, this Regnier, he’s a German, but he married a famous Israeli singer, a very big star, Nehama Hendel.

I apologized, said that I had never heard of her.

She’s very big in Israel, he told me. But she died a few years ago.

It suddenly occurred to me to ask Shlomo a question that had been on my mind for some time. My grandfather, I told him, used to sing me two songs when I was a little boy; I wondered if maybe they were songs from his own youth, songs his father or mother had sung to him. Bolechower songs.

How did they go? Shlomo asked.

Well, I said, somewhat embarrassed, the first one he used to sing to us at bedtime. And it was true: when we were little and my grandfather would be visiting, he’d sometimes come into our rooms when we were being put to bed and would sing this song, a song whose lyrics alone will, no doubt, seem quite odd, seem very flat on the page, much more so than, say, the lyrics of “Mayn Shtetele Belz,” “My Little Town of Belz,” which after all are rather sentimental. If I wanted to convey what was so special about the song my grandfather used to sing to us, I would have to do much more than transcribe the lyrics:

Oh why did you hit my Daniel,

My Daniel did nothing to you.

Next time you hit my Daniel,

I’ll call a policeman on you!

Hoo hoo!

I might, for instance, try to transcribe it slightly differently, so that it would be possible to get a sense of the rhythm of this song, which to me, when I was a child, was both soothing (because it was, ultimately, a promise of protection and retribution) and frightening (because it raised the incomprehensible notion that someone would want to hit me, a child). That transcription might look like this:

Oh WHY did you HI-it my DAN-iel,

My DAN-iel did nothing to YOU.

Next TIME you HI-it my DAN-iel,

I’ll CALL a po-LICE-man on YOU!

hoo-HOO!

But of course, even then there would be no way to convey the particular inflections of my grandfather’s almost vanished voice. (I say
almost vanished
, because my grandfather killed himself before the advent of videorecorders,
and hence the only recording we have of his voice is the cassette tape I made of him in the summer of 1974 when he told us the story of how he’d run out of his house during a Russian attack without his shoes. Voices are among the things that vanish first, in the case of people who lived before a certain moment in the evolution of technology: no one will ever know, now, what Shmiel and his family sounded like.) To convey more than just the lyrics of this song, which I have sung, rather self-consciously, to my own children now, although I doubt they will sing it to theirs, I would have to try to approximate that special Bolechower pronunciation, like this:

Oh VAH-EE did you HI-itt my DEHN-iel,

My DEHN-iel ditt nuttink to YOU.

Next TIME you HI-itt my DEHN-iel,

ehl KOLL a poLICEman on YOU!

hoo-HOO!

And even then there is the tune, the sad, sepia, minor-key inflections that made me wonder, briefly, whether this was a translation of some old song of his childhood. Quite recently I asked my brother Andrew, who plays the piano so well, whether he remembered this tune of my grandfather’s, and when he said,
Of course I do,
I asked him to transcribe it for me. A week or so later I opened the file that he sent me and grinned when I saw that he’d titled it
Oh Why Did You Hit My Andrew
. When I mentioned this to him, he said, quite genuinely, It never occurred to me that he sang it to anyone else.

So I sang this song to Shlomo, as we drove south into the desert toward the Reinharz apartment, and he shook his head and said, No, I can’t say I have ever heard such a song.

I was disappointed. But there was another song I wanted to know about, another rather melancholy song, and perhaps it was because it was so sad that I, who know so little about popular music, thought it, too, might be a song from my grandfather’s lost childhood as the son of a family of butchers in a town a hundred years and four thousand miles away. I sang it, too, to Shlomo in the car:

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain

I wish I were sixteen again.

Sixteen again I’ll never be

Till apples will grow on a cherry tree!

I didn’t bother putting in the accent this time:
vish,
my grandfather had said.
I vish in wain. Till ehpples vill grrohh
…Shlomo listened and made an apologetic face. I have never heard this song before neither, he said.

Oh well, I said. It’s no big deal. It’s just a song.

I looked out the window; the desert had turned into buildings.