The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (8 page)

She shook her head and I flushed like the teenager I was when I first became obsessed with this place. With a sour expression she said, You must say
Buh-LEH-khooff
. It’s a
Polish
town. You say it the
Yiddish
way!

I found myself embarrassed and defensive, having suddenly detected a whiff of long-dead gradations of class and culture that are of no importance to anyone, anymore: the condescension, perhaps, that the secular, urban, assimilated Jews of a certain era in a certain place, Jews who grew up in a free Poland and spoke Polish at home, displayed to the countrified Jews of the rural shtetls, Jews like my grandfather, who although not even ten years older than this Mrs. Begley had grown up in a wholly different world, Austrian, not Polish, who spoke Yiddish at home, and for whom a trip to even a small city, like Stryj, was something of an event.

In any case, because of all this, of the way I pronounced or mispronounced Bolechow, my secret fantasy suddenly was ashes in my mouth. Which is why, when Mrs. Begley asked me what my relatives’ name had been, after she’d corrected my pronunciation, and I’d replied
Jäger,
and she had shaken her head and told me she’d never heard the name, I couldn’t bring myself to mention the photography atelier of the family Schneelicht, my great-uncle’s in-laws who had lived in her city, in Stryj, where perhaps, once before, there had been the smallest chance that they and she would have met. A chance that, for me, would have been a way of connecting the remote past, in which my relatives seemed to be hopelessly, irretrievably frozen, to the limpid present in which this meeting was taking place, the transparent moment that, as anyone could see quite clearly, held me and the old woman with her white hair and her cane, held the noise and the party and an ordinary early evening in autumn in a city that was at peace.

D
ESPITE MY OCCASIONAL
errors, however, I learned a lot, over the years of letters and queries and interviews and Internet searches, a lot about Bolechow that wasn’t mistaken. For instance:
They were there since before there was a Bolechow!
How long was that, exactly? It is possible to know almost to the day.

If you are an American Jew of a certain generation, the generation that, like mine, had grandparents who were immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century, you probably grew up hearing stories about the “Old Country,” about the little towns or shtetls from which your grandpa or grandma or nana or
bubby
or
zeyde
came, the kind of little town celebrated by Yiddish authors like Isaac Bashevis Singer and in
Fiddler on the Roof,
the kind of place that no longer exists; and you probably thought, as I thought for a long time, that they were all more or less alike, modest places with maybe three or four thousand inhabitants, with a vista of wooden houses clustered around a square, places to which we are, now, too willing to ascribe a certain sepia charm, perhaps because if we thought about the Ping-Pong games and the volleyball and skiing, the movies and the camping trips, it would be that much more difficult to think of what happened to them, because they would seem less different from us. The kind of place so ordinary that few people would have found it worth writing about, until of course it and all the places like it were to be wiped out, at which point their very ordinariness seemed to be worth preserving.

This, at any rate, is what I thought of Bolechow. Then, one day not too long ago, my older brother, Andrew, sent me as a Hanukkah gift a very rare volume, published by the Oxford University Press in 1922, called
The Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow
. (I say “Hanukkah gift” but as I write this I am aware that the words are not really true, and certainly not as close to the truth as my grandfather would have liked: since my two sisters-in-law are not Jewish, and my nieces and nephews are enjoying the kind of eclectic religious upbringing now very common, the gift I received was something I undoubtedly thought of at the time as a “holiday” gift. No: let me be really honest. I’m sure I just thought of it as a “Christmas present.” The fact is that in my own house, when we were growing up, we didn’t have a really thriving Hanukkah tradition. What I remember mostly was my mother, whose Orthodox upbringing clung to her despite the erosive force of my father’s disdain for religion, putting a kitchen towel or a doily on her head in our kitchen, the first night of Hanukkah, and as we kids gathered around the table somewhat self-consciously, singing the half-remembered blessing over the candles in Hebrew. When her memory as to the exact words failed her, she would lapse, with no embarrassment at all, into Yiddish filler:
Yaidel-daidel-daidel-dai,
she would say. The brass menorah she used was tiny and old-fashioned and plain, and had belonged to her mother; at some point her father gave us a more imposing one with rampant lions of Judah supporting the central candle. That was after most of us had gone off to
college, and so I imagine that there was a time when my mother performed her annual ritual in front of this imposing object alone; although while my grandfather was still alive she would, I remember, call him in Florida just as she was getting ready to light the candles, and she would sing the blessing over the phone to him, so in a way she wasn’t really alone after all…. But for the rest of us, as I was saying, it wasn’t really a very big holiday, and the giving of gifts dwindled away after we were very small children. So I was surprised and impressed when my older brother started sending carefully chosen gifts to all of us, a few years ago.)

The Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow
is the first English translation of a manuscript of some ninety-five sheets crammed with a good Hebrew cursive script, typical of educated Jews of the eighteenth century, that was written at the turn of the nineteenth century by a Polish Jew called Ber Birkenthal, an inhabitant of Bolechow. Reb Birkenthal, who lived from 1723 to 1805, a tumultuous period in the history of Poland and, as his memoirs show, of Bolechow itself, was a remarkable man—a sage of great repute whose grave, in the Bolechow cemetery, would become the site of pilgrimages. Ber was the son of a forward-thinking, broad-minded wine merchant who encouraged his son’s precocious intellectual appetites from his earliest childhood—even allowing the boy to study Greek and Latin with the local Catholic priests, an unheard-of thing that would later cast suspicion, briefly, on Ber’s allegiance to his religion. The precocious boy grew up to be a precocious man: a successful wine merchant but also a scholar of enormous breadth and depth, a man who could read easily in Polish and German and Italian, as well as in Hebrew and Greek and Latin, a man who delved as happily into the great Italian work of world history known as the
Relazioni universali,
first published between 1595 and 1598 (which he began to translate into Hebrew), as he did into the arcane Kabbalistic texts that fascinated him, such as the
Hemdat Yamim
, by Natan Ghazzati, the so-called prophet of the false messiah Shabbtai Zvi. Ber of Bolechow, therefore, was a man who exemplified the liberal, worldly energies that helped to create the
Haskalah,
the great Jewish Enlightenment movement, during the eighteenth century, a movement that flourished, as it happened, under the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the grandfather of the composer.

From the twentieth-century editor of Ber Birkenthal’s memoirs, a man called Vishnitzer, we learn that the town of Bolechow, where Ber was born, is situated in the eastern part of the province known as Galicia, which stretched from Kraków in the west to Lemberg (now L’viv) in the east. This part of Galicia is quite close to the Carpathian Mountains, which constitute a formidable
natural barrier to Hungary, which lies to the south. (One that, however, can be breached, as I learned from an old woman who, as a young girl in 1943, walked barefoot over the Carpathians from Bolechow to Hungary, where the local Jews, to whom war had not yet come, found it hard to believe the reasons for this girl’s desperate flight.) The specific plot of Galician land on which the town of Bolechow was established had been owned by a Polish nobleman called Nicholas Giedsinski; in 1612 Giedsinski laid the foundations of the town and granted it a charter. In this charter the Polish lord laid down the laws that were to govern the three communities that coexisted in the place: Jews, Poles, and (as the charter puts it), “Ruthenians,” which is what Ukrainians used to be called. Vishnitzer points out that Jews had settled in this area before the place became a proper town, but a regular community arose only after 1612, when the charter granted by Giedsinski provided equal rights and liberties for the Jews.

Vishnitzer goes on to describe the rare privileges the Jews of Bolechow enjoyed upon its founding almost four hundred years ago. They were, he writes, allowed to acquire landed property in the center of the town and to build houses there. (
It was right there on the Ringplatz,
my grandfather would say to me when I was a boy, referring to his family’s store: right there on the main square.) The town’s Jews were ceded a plot of land for the erection of a synagogue and, across the little river that runs through the town, a plot for use as a burial ground. If you go there today, one of the first things you see, as you hop across a little creek onto the grounds of the cemetery, is a big headstone on the back of which is written the name
JAGER
.

The Jews of Bolechow, the author of this book goes on, could vote in the election of the Burgomeister (who, on taking office, had to swear to protect the rights of all three nationalities who lived in Bolechow) and of the aldermen of the Municipal Council. They enjoyed legal protections: the Polish municipal court could not settle a dispute between a Jew and a Gentile without the assistance of representatives of the Jewish community. (My grandfather told me that his father had once quietly intervened with the Austrian authorities, with whom he apparently enjoyed excellent relations, perhaps because of all those bottles of Tokay, in order to help an impoverished Jew get out of jail.
A word from him was worth something,
my grandfather told me.) So it is no wonder that, as Vishnitzer puts it, “harmony prevailed in the relations between the Jews and their Gentile neighbours.”

Not surprisingly, given his scholarly enthusiasms and his success as a merchant, Ber Birkenthal’s memoirs oscillate between the arcane and (far more
frequently) the mundane. There are, to be sure, learned allusions to biblical verses. “One night,” he writes, “a sentence from the Bible came into my head. It was from Psalm 58, verse 5: ‘Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear; which will not hearken to the voice of charmers…. As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away: like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun.’” But more often, Ber goes on about ordinary things, from politics (“After Poniatowski had been appointed Commander-in-Chief…”), business irritations (“I was very disappointed at not being able to obtain any of the old wines. I discussed the matter with my partner on our way from Miskolcz, as I had no other opportunity of doing so, because I had to return to Lemberg…”), local dramas (“With great difficulty, and by dint of tireless efforts and many intercessions, they were released from prison…”), and domestic matters. (“When my sister and sister-in-law, Rachel, learned of my desire to marry this widow, they talked to Yenta, so that the match might soon be made.”)

An ordinary life, in other words, despite the extraordinary intellect of the memoirist. Still, it must be said that by the time Ber of Bolechow was prominent in Bolechow, the world was a less stable place than it had been a century and a half before, when the foundations of the little town were laid down by the Polish nobleman. Political instability was rife throughout Poland during the eighteenth century, and incursions of Russians and Tatars and Cossacks inevitably wreaked havoc on the Jews of the little town. And so it was that, in July 1759, Ber Birkenthal of Bolechow dreamed a terrible dream, a dream of pain that turned out to be a premonition: a dream, he writes with anguish, that his wife had gone into “severe labor.” He knew this to be a sign, and sure enough he learned, the next day, that twenty-eight Ruthenian ruffians had descended from the timbered hills above the town and, taking the Jewish neighborhood by surprise, laid waste several Jewish homes and killed a man. Ber’s property and family were not exempt from the destruction, which Ber himself vividly describes in his memoir. Given the existence of this eyewitness account of events that are so distant from anything I could ever have experienced, and which therefore I have a difficult time “imagining” or “envisioning,” I prefer to avoid paraphrase and instead will simply cite his description:

The surprise attack, the Gentile informer, the robbery and the violent assault, the greedy appropriation of rare diamond rings: all this would happen again. (The Polish nickname for
Leah,
the name of Ber’s wife, is, I should mention,
Lorka
.) But there were, too, unexpected and inexplicable kindnesses. Ber goes on to commend the thoughtfulness of a Gentile maid who stayed behind to rescue her master’s books from the conflagration. “She took pity on the books,” he writes, “because she knew that I was fond of them.” Such acts would also be repeated, centuries later.