The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (56 page)

How had Grandpa learned this?
I thought again.
And why?

Then Shlomo grinned even more broadly.

You know something else? he said. Something it’s another coincidence?

I shook my head no. I couldn’t imagine anything more uncanny than what had already happened.

Shlomo looked at me and said, You know who it is singing? It’s Nehama Hendel, the wife of Regnier, the one who wrote the Bolechow book.

I suppose my face was legible. Shlomo exhaled heavily, gestured broadly with his hand in a way that took in both the radio/cassette player of his car and the desert, and said, You see? You
see
? Israel is a country of miracles!

Not being a believer in miracles, I simply smiled and nodded silently. Then, when I got back to the Hilton, I did an Internet search for the following cluster of words:
I WISH I WISH I WISH IN VAIN
. Instantly, dozens of citations appeared on my screen, which is why it was a matter of just a minute or two before I learned the name of the song my grandfather had always sung to me when I was a child, a song that I’d always assumed was a song from his youth but that, I now realized, he must have learned at some unknowable point after he’d left Bolechow forever, and that must have touched him profoundly nonetheless for reasons I can only now guess at, among which may have been, simply, its title, a title that I’d never have known if I hadn’t come to Israel, and which was
The Butcher Boy.

T
HAT WAS
S
UNDAY.
On Tuesday I had scheduled an interview with Shlomo’s cousin Josef, who indeed came to my hotel room that day, a wiry, fit, military-looking man in his seventies, handsome and unsmiling, and in a steady and unsentimental voice talked for ninety minutes, more or less without interruption, about the fate of Bolechow’s Jews. I listened carefully, although it was a story I knew well by then, not only from my previous interviews but from the crisply informative chapters in the Bolechow Yizkor book about the war years, which had been written by Josef Adler himself. There was something about his demeanor that made me want his approval: perhaps it was his crisply creased tan pants and fresh khaki-colored short-sleeved shirt, which seemed impressively military to my eyes. When we sat down in the narrow hotel armchairs that I’d clustered around the desk, Josef Adler acknowledged right away that he hadn’t known my own family particularly well; but he wanted to make sure I knew what had happened. I nodded and let him speak. The arrival of the Germans. The first Aktion. The second Aktion. The
Lager
. The
Fassfabrik
. The final liquidation in ’43. The remarkable details of how he and Shlomo, two young boys, had survived. How he had come to Israel; how important Israel was. As he made this last point, this soft-spoken but emphatic and rigorous man, I felt ashamed of my long-standing lack of interest in modern-day Israel; I wondered if every American Jew traveling in Israel ended up, at some point, feeling like a draft dodger. When Josef was leaving, I thanked him fervently for driving all the way to Tel Aviv from Haifa, which he had insisted was no problem when we made the appointment to meet a few days earlier. It’s very important what you’re doing, he told me as we shook hands at the door of my room. It’s very important that people know what happened.

But that, as I’ve said, wouldn’t be until Tuesday. On Monday, we stayed in Tel Aviv. Froma, who’d been busy seeing relatives since we arrived in Israel, wanted me to see the Beth Hatefutsoth, the Museum of the Jewish Disapora, which is located on the starkly modern campus of Tel Aviv University. There’s tons to see there, she told me, We should get there early. We got there on a blazing late morning, just after the museum opened. The scattering of palm trees in front of the museum building itself did little to alleviate the almost aggressive monumentality of the building.

Inside the cavernous entrance hall it was cool. We paid our entrance fee and began to walk through the permanent exhibition, which begins with a reproduction of a bas-relief from the so-called Arch of Titus in Rome, which depicts the triumphant return home of the Roman legions who conquered Judaea in A.D. 70 and destroyed the Second Temple. On it, you can see what is recognizably a menorah, the great candelabrum used in the Temple, being borne away on the shoulders of sturdy Romans. This is a rather somber introduction to what the museum literature describes as its founder’s desire “to emphasize the positive and creative aspects of the Diaspora experience.” The latter are far more noticeable as you pass by the bas-relief and enter the exhibition proper. As with the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna, your experience of the Beth Hatefutsoth is organized around a series of “gates,” although in this case the gates are metaphorical: The Gate of the Family, the Gate of the Community, the Gate of Faith, the Gate of Culture, and so on. We passed through them, looking. I was particularly enthralled, as we walked through the various gates, by the splendidly large and astoundingly detailed scale models and dioramas with which the creators of the Beth Hatefutsoth have sought to evoke various aspects of Jewish life throughout the centuries of the Jews’ wandering. There are, for instance, remarkable models of synagogues throughout the world, from the eighteenth-century double synagogue of Kaifeng, China, which to my uneducated eye looked indistinguishable from any other Chinese building I’d ever seen, with its upward-curved eaves and slender painted columns, to the Tempio Israelitico in Florence, a grandiose domed Moorish affair that reminded me of something, as I stood there—some other doll-like restoration of a great Jewish place of worship for the edification of attentive if not necessarily Jewish visitors—until I realized that what I was thinking of was the Spanish Synagogue in Prague.

There was, too, a beautifully detailed re-creation in miniature of the Great Synagogue of Vilna, in Lithuania, which was built in 1573, around the time that Jews first arrived in Bolechow, and consisted of a vast complex of schools, yeshivas, and places for prayer—which was only fitting, when you think about
it, given that the Jerusalem of the North at one time boasted three hundred and thirty-three scholars who claimed to be able to recite the Talmud by heart—a vast complex that was destroyed in 1942, the same year that most of the Jews of Bolechow disappeared.

(After Froma and I left Israel, we flew, as it happened, to Vilnius, as it is now called, and it was toward the end of the week we were there, seeking out the few remaining traces of this greatest city of European Jewish scholarship, that we visited the tomb of the famous Vilna Gaon, a man so renowned for his learning during his lifetime in the eighteenth century that congregations from as far away as Portugal would anxiously but patiently wait for years to receive his responses to their questions about scripture or law. And it was while we stood at the grave of this great man that our guide informed us that in this tomb were also buried the bones of a Polish Catholic, the scion of an enormously rich and aristocratic family, a count, a
Graf
, who, under the Gaon’s tutelage, converted to Judaism and for that reason had been burned at the stake by the Catholic authorities. We politely scrutinized the Polish inscription on the tomb, and I read the name of this
Graf
aloud rather haltingly, pronouncing it phonetically. Poetahkee? I said, a bit tentatively, and the guide smiled and said No, no, the
c
is like a
ts
, it’s pronounced
Pototski
.)

To me, even more wonderful than the models were the equally detailed and beautiful dioramas, such as the one to be found in the section of the permanent exhibition called “Among the Nations,” which depicts the great tenth-century A.D. Babylonian sage Saadia Gaon holding forth in the palace of the caliph in Baghdad. Standing beneath the ornate and beautiful vaults of the
palace, draped in a white robe, the tiny figure of the gaon has his left arm extended, as if making an important rhetorical point. And no wonder: the career of this remarkably learned man, who was Egyptian by birth—his real name, Said al-Fayyumi, hints at his origins in the Fayum in Upper Egypt—and became the star of the Babylonian gaonate, was peppered with important doctrinal, cultural, and intellectual controversies. Before he was forty, Saadia had brilliantly quashed an attempt by his archrival, Aaron ben Meir, the gaon of the Jewish community in the territory of Palestine, to challenge the authority of the Babylonian gaonate; the Palestinian’s efforts to introduce a new calendar soon disintegrated. Saadia also struggled against the widespread assimilation of the Arabic-speaking Babylonian Jews, a suave elite to whom the enlightened rationalism of the Greek philosophers, reintroduced through translations into Arabic, was proving seductive. In his groundbreaking work
Kitab al-Amanat wal-l’tikadat,
“Book of the Articles of Faith and Doctrines of Dogma” (now better known, for reasons that will be obvious, by the title of its Hebrew translation,
Emunoth ve-Deoth
, “Beliefs and Opinions”), Saadia—much influenced by the Motazilites, the rationalist dogmatists of Islam—for the first time laid out a systematic explanation of Jewish thought and dogma. Written in an elegant Arabic bound to appeal to his cosmopolitan audience, Saadia stressed the rational aspect of Judaism and suggested that the Torah had an intellectual appeal not at all different from the writings of the increasingly popular Greeks. As part of his project of clarification and elucidation of Jewish texts for the tastes of his assimilated, Arab-speaking fellow Jews, he also translated the Bible into Arabic, and added to it a lucid and appealing commentary: an achievement of enormous importance.

It occurred to me, as I learned all this, that to me, part of the appeal of Jews like Rambam and Saadia Gaon was their immense cosmopolitanism, which was in turn a reflection of the richly layered imperial cultures in which they lived. Cultures in which, say, Arab-speaking Jews wrote treatises meant to combat the popular intellectual appeal of ancient Greek philosophers; cultures not that different, in their way, from the richly layered one in which my grandfather grew up, another imperial culture in which Jewishness was, for a while, one of many vivid strands woven into a complicated but beautiful pattern, a pattern that is now, as we know, in tatters. It will seem odd, but when I read about Saadia, I thought of my grandfather, who of course was not a man of immense learning or great intellectual subtlety, but who was an Orthodox European Jew who spoke seven languages and who, even after the Second World War, would go to Bad Gastein in the heart of Austria to take the waters,
because that was what you did if you were a certain kind of European person, a subject of a certain vanished empire. Two years after Froma and I walked through the Beth Hatefutsoth, ogling the diorama of Saadia Gaon, we sat in a café in L’viv talking avidly about the remarkable richness of that city’s prewar culture, in which Jews and Poles and Austrians and Ukrainians had coexisted, in which Ukrainian priests would lunch regularly at a certain famous gefilte fish restaurant cheek by jowl with Polish bureaucrats and Jewish merchants. Now it’s just completely
homogenous
, Froma said, rather forlornly, perhaps even with a tinge of disapproval, as she looked at the slender and quite pretty blond Ukrainian women walking up the avenue, past Beaux-Arts and Secession buildings that had been built, a hundred years earlier, by Austrians. I looked at her and said, mischievously, I know, it’s like having a country only of Jews. She gave me a look and I took another swallow of my Ukrainian beer, which was called
L
’
VIVSKAYA
.

To return to the tenth century A.D.: the most vital struggle that Saadia conducted during his scholarly career was his ongoing attacks on the sect known as the Karaites. Starting in the ninth century A.D., these “People of the Scripture” distinguished themselves from mainstream rabbinic Judaism in important ways: unlike most Jews, they do not regard the immense body of oral law to have been handed down, along with the written law, by God, but instead see it as merely the work of sages and teachers, and thus subject to the errors of any human teaching. As a result of this rejection of rabbinic interpretation, which is after all the basis of all contemporary Jewish practice, certain Karaite practices differ importantly from those of mainstream Jews. Karaites, for instance, will not light candles on the Sabbath, a practice universal among all other Jews. (Nor will they engage in sexual intercourse on the Sabbath, although other Jews believe that the Sabbath is particularly propitious for that activity.) Because of these and many other errors, Saadia argued in the three treatises that he devoted to refuting Karaite belief (grouped under the title
Kitab al-Rudd
, “Book of Refutation”) that the Karaites were not, essentially, Jewish at all. This is interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that, twelve centuries after Saadia made this argument, the leaders of the Karaite community themselves argued as much before the Nazi authorities in 1934, and—gesticulating, perhaps, in the same heated way that the Beth Hatefutsoth figurine gesticulates—persuaded the Reich Agency for the Investigation of Families that they were not, in fact, Jewish, and therefore ought to be exempt from Nazi racial laws; which is why the admittedly small population of Karaites in Eastern Europe, for instance the community in the
town of Halych, which is, today, perhaps an hour’s drive from Bolechow, were left unharmed while the Jews around them were vanishing off the face of the earth.