The Turk Who Loved Apples (40 page)

I
nstead of being at home at home, I was at home everywhere else. The process of arriving, setting up camp, and exploring took on a rhythm that my New York life never had. In late 2009, I followed video directions on my iPhone to a spacious apartment I'd rented in Shibuya, one of Tokyo's churning epicenters of fashion, nightlife, and foot traffic. Then I drank a coffee, had a shower and a bath in the voluminous tub, and stepped outside to look for the first of what would amount to nearly thirty bowls of ramen that week. Around me rose a forest of towers, and I could communicate with almost no one, and I could read but a handful of Japanese kanji, and even then I knew only their Chinese equivalents. I'd spent a little time here before—Japan had been my first stop after the 2007 road trip—but this was still a foreign place, unfamiliar and new.

But it didn't feel foreign. As I walked down the street toward Shibuya Station, I was as relaxed as I would have been on St. Marks Place. I was exploring, and I'd always been exploring. Back when I'd lived in Manhattan's Lower East Side, I used to take the opportunity, one weekend night every month or two, to walk almost every block and just see what was going on. New hotel? Synagogue collapsed? There was no project involved—I wanted only to see and to know, and that was what I was doing now in Tokyo. And ah! Here was a ramen shop—not on my list, but I had to start somewhere. I walked in, sat at the counter, pointed to something tasty-looking on the laminated menu, and prepared myself to slurp. Wait, “prepared”? I was born ready to slurp.

And in a similar way, my Lower East Side strolls were not preparation for my trips abroad, home-based experiences I could translate into new contexts in Playas del Coco or Ouezzane. Rather, the overseas explorations came first, and the exploratory walks in New York merely recalled that foreign behavior, allowing me to exist at home (such as it was) exactly as I had abroad: with a clearly defined purpose.

That, I think, explains how comfortable I felt in countries and cities and situations seemingly designed to discomfit a traveler: I had something to do—a cultural phenomenon to understand, a money-saving strategy to test, a difficult journey to undertake, the lay of the land to mentally map. In Osaka, a city obsessed with takoyaki—battered balls of octopus slathered in mayonnaise and other sauces—I had to find the best. And in Sadec, in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, I was tracking down traces of Marguerite Duras, who'd lived (and loved) there eighty years before.

In New York, where I had permanent lodging and access to all my possessions, I had the freedom to do whatever I chose, but that freedom bred confusion and laziness. I could do anything, but what? And why? And couldn't I do that later? I'd be back here eventually,
right? Naturally, there were some constraints. I had to write my articles and pitch new ones and go shopping and cook dinner and wash clothes. But those were flabby errands, infinitely delayable, inconsequential when compared with walking from Vienna to Budapest, a 160-mile trek that left my feet shredded with blisters, my back and knees buckling, my psyche in tatters. Every step was torture, and yet I couldn't give in—this was the route taken by one of my idols, the war hero, polymath, and travel writer Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, who'd trekked from Rotterdam to Istanbul in the 1930s. Now that was a life with purpose! And I had to measure up to his example, blisters or no blisters, in cozy pensions or under starry open skies. Every morning I'd awake knowing exactly what I had to do, whether I wanted it or not: put one foot in front of the other, again and again, until I just couldn't walk any more. What might happen along the way was yet to be determined, but the structure was there, and it told me one thing only: Onward!

“W
ould you like to know your name?” Regina Kopilevich asked me in a courtyard café in the old town of Vilnius, Lithuania. A pile of folders and papers on the table lay before us, promising to answer, perhaps, the mystery of my family's origins. Regina, a multilingual genealogist of Russian Jewish extraction, looked at me eagerly, her blue eyes wide.

Her question was a funny one. When you grow up with a name like Gross, you never forget it—no kid at school will let you. Early on, I'd had to learn to embrace my Grossness, to understand its many meanings—large, excessive, a dozen dozen—and to shrug off insults with a yawn. “‘Matt is gross'? Seriously? That's the best you can come up with?” Gross dominated my life, just as it had edged out three other, duller grandparental names: Chadys, Goldman, Miller. Gross was all that remained.

But I had, in my twenties, started to hear rumors—via my father and his father, Samuel Gross—that our name had once been different.
Grosshüt
, they said, was what it had once been, back in the old country: “big hat.” I imagined an ancestor of mine who wore his big hat so often that whenever he walked down the street, people would say, “Hey! Here comes Mr. Big Hat!” Or maybe it was a reference to the wide-brimmed hats that my Orthodox Jewish ancestors wore—although why, of all the big-hat-wearing Orthodox in their community, my ancestors got the name was unclear.

This was, historically, unsurprising. Millions of immigrants to this country had their names changed on arrival, whether by accident or intentionally, by authorities or by their own assimilationist selves. But in my family, this was surprising, as we had virtually no stories at all about life in the old country. We didn't even necessarily know which country
was
the old country. Russia, they sometimes said when I asked. Or Poland. Same difference—Russia controlled that whole area, including what would become the Baltic states. It was as if our family did not exist until the great-grandparents' generation arrived on this soil.

The only story I'd ever heard about our past was that my great-great-grandfather on my mother's side had had twelve children and had died when his beard got caught in the family's mill. His son, the one who came to America, took the last name Miller.

But on my father's side, nothing. For years we didn't even know where precisely they'd originated, not until my father dug up my great-grandfather Morris Gross's World War II draft card on
Ancestry.com
and saw his place of birth listed as “Marijampolė, Lithuania,” a town near the Polish border. All we had beyond that was this vague allusion to a former name—a name that Regina now offered to reveal to me.

I nodded. Regina opened a folder and pulled out a piece of paper, a photocopy of a form from an ancient ledger.

“Can you read that?” she asked, pointing to a word handwritten in Cyrillic.

Remembering the Cyrillic alphabet was one thing, but making out the handwriting quite another. The first letters I could kind of understand, and I tried to pronounce them. “Gross—” was how it began, but the rest was gibberish. I looked up questioningly at Regina.

“Grosmitz,” she said.

I looked more closely at the Cyrillic ending:
-myc
, which could be pronounced
-mitz
or even
-mütz
, a kind of cap. So, my grandfather had been right! We had been Big Hats! But how had we lost our caps? And where had the name come from? And who were the Grosmützes before they became Grosses?

Dammit. I didn't want to care about this stuff, this question of origins. For thirty-five years, the Gross past had been a mystery to me, and I hadn't cared. Okay, I had cared a little, when it came time in school to make a family tree (always frustratingly short of branches), or when Jean's family had wanted to know about my background, but maybe only because my inability to describe my past revealed the ignorance I'd been trying for so long to conceal and destroy. But the great-grandparents' generation, by their silence, had achieved their aim: The family began in the New World, and only in the New World. My father had even become a historian whose first book told the story of the birth of the American Revolution in Concord, Massachusetts, and I'd grown up acutely aware that I'd been born in Concord, too. What did the doings of my ancestors in Lithuania matter to my life in New York and my travels abroad?

At the same time, I craved this knowledge out of simple, raw curiosity. Where and how did the Gross family's story begin? So when I'd begun planning a Frugal Grand Tour of Europe in the summer of 2008, I knew that I'd have to get to Lithuania and investigate. After all, wasn't genealogical travel the kind of thing that regular travelers did? They went to Ireland and saw the potato fields their
great-great-great grandparents had abandoned, and they saw the ports in Senegal where their ancestors were forced aboard slave ships. My Lithuanian detour would be no different—an exploration, you could say, of other people's desires for completion, not my own.

E
ven the Grosmützes, Regina explained the next day in the sunlit reading room of the Lithuanian National Archives, were once someone else. For centuries, she said, Jews in the Russian Empire did not have family names—just patronymics. But sometime in the early-nineteenth century, the czar decreed that Jews, too, would have family names, and the process of naming began. As I would later learn, it wasn't necessarily a process of self-naming. Often, imperial officials would bestow epithets on their Jewish subjects, sometimes logically, sometimes cruelly, sometimes randomly. “Big Cap” felt a bit like the latter.

Regina had reserved several ledgers for us to look through—these were the records tracking births, deaths, and marriages in the Jewish community of Marijampolė throughout the nineteenth century. And there, in an entry dated February 9, 1829, the Grosmütz family's recorded history begins. A joyous day! Mowsha, son of Berko and Freyda Grosmütz, married Dobra, daughter of Berko and Sora Braskowicz. Mazel tov! On December 15 of that same year, they had a daughter, Freyda, and over the next twenty years had many more children—Abram Itzko, Berko, Gabriel, Esther, Liba, and Jankiel Judel—not all of whom survived.

“This is a sad page,” Regina said as she pointed to the 1840 deaths of seven-year-old Abram Itzko and two-year-old Esther.

Sad? I guess. Personally, I was just excited to unearth any fragments of our past at all; learning that my ancestors' kids had died was, well, ancient history. But the fact that Mowsha was a tailor, and his nephew Chaim a shoemaker—those were details that resonated more strongly.

Regina and I flipped slowly through the pages, dust coating our fingers as we neared 1885 and the birth of Moshe Grosmütz, who would leave Marijampolė at the age of sixteen and arrive as Morris Gross in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

1859: Gabriel and his wife, Golda, have a son, Abram Leib.

1864: Mowsha's son Berko marries Chana Yenta Fertynsztein.

1865: Chaim has a daughter, Mera.

1874: Mowsha's wife, Dobra, dies at the age of seventy-three.

And that was it. From there on out, until well after Moshe had left the village, the ledgers were missing—as was the vital link between myself and these Grosmützes. Were these Big Caps really my ancestors? Probably—Regina said they were the only ones in Marijampolė whose surname approximated my own—but then why had Moshe left them behind?

The easy explanation was pogroms, the violent ethnic cleansing campaigns that periodically struck Jewish communities throughout Europe. But Regina, as well as histories I read later, described the beginning of the twentieth century in that part of Poland and Lithuania as relatively pogrom-free. Regina's theory was that Moshe fled to escape conscription into the Russian army, but without further research (which I couldn't yet afford) we couldn't be certain.

Where, I also wondered, had the other Grosmützes gone? The name had disappeared from the Lithuanian archives, and while a number of Grosmitzes appeared in the online databases of Holocaust victims, they were from hundreds of miles away, in Poland. Nor did the name have much Internet presence, although the existence of Grossmutz, a German village an hour north of Berlin, hinted at a possible ancestral homeland. If other members of my clan had made it to England or America, they might have become Grosses as well—and therefore unGoogleable.

For the next few days, I pondered my family's background. I walked the streets of the Old City, so well-preserved that my great-grandfather might have felt at home among them, and I inspected
the Jewish museums for clues to Jewish life in Lithuania, and Regina and I trekked out to the Paneriai, the woods where almost all of Vilnius's Jews were killed during World War II, their bodies thrown into pits. While interviewing a rabbi from Chabad, the Orthodox Jewish outreach center, I even allowed him to wrap
tefillin
, leather prayer straps, around my arm and lead me in reciting Hebrew verses I half-remembered from Sunday school twenty-five years ago.

It left me cold, all of it. To be fair, it was enlightening to learn about the history of Lithuania's Jews, but why did I really care? I considered myself as much (or more) an atheist and an American as a Jew, and the cosmopolitan Jewish world presented at the museums didn't seem to have much to do with the lowly small-town shoemakers and tailors I'd descended from. The Chabad rabbi's religiosity might actually have had more to do with the lives of the Grosmützes, but Judaism as a religion had had nothing to offer me since I was eleven. I felt no spiritual connection.

What touched me in Vilnius, by contrast, were the wild strawberries growing among the trees of the Paneriai, and the fry-up of bacon, mushrooms, potatoes, and cream I ate as a hangover cure one morning. When I wasn't with Regina, I was hanging around with a friend of a friend who'd recently, for fun, gotten licensed as a tour guide and was excited to show me around his stunning city. This was a human connection, not the fading ink of the past.