As a child growing up in a white-bread enclave of Westchester County,
I devised a secret algorithm for deciding whom to befriend, based on a
single stark question: If the Nazis come, would she hide me and my family?
It was, of course, the overheard snatches of family history—the stories
from my maternal Hungarian side, affluent and cosmopolitan, and the
paternal Polish side, rabbinic and otherworldly—that suggested to me, even
before I’d started school, that this was a reasonable criterion for
someone like me in choosing her friends: Will you save us? Will you betray
us? Who can I count on if the Nazis come to White Plains?
Daniel Mendelsohn’s extraordinary The Lost brought my
childhood conviviality test vividly back to me, as well as the haze of
confused quasi-knowledge that surrounded it. Like many of us (his memoir
made me wonder how many), Mr. Mendelsohn reveals himself, cultural critic
and public intellectual though he may be, as not completely contemporary.
A large portion of his edgily attentive psyche is haunted by nightmare
events that transpired long before his birth, so that his memory struggles
to impossibly reverse itself, to gather up the details of seemingly
irrecoverable lives and tragic ends.
What distinguishes Mr. Mendelsohn from the rest of us semi-haunted
quasi-contemporaries is that he actually undertook the task of
relentlessly tracking down those lost lives and deaths: his family’s own
six among the six million. He succeeds in carving out the shape of
individuals from the block of marmoreal martyrdom we call the Holocaust.
He traveled the world, interviewing very old people and—through the
combination of the research skills of a classicist and the sheer luck that
often dictated who among the hunted succeeded in eluding the
hunters—recovers the members of his family from that jumble of
indistinguishable corpses.
The resulting book is a memoir, but it’s also something more. It
accomplishes what many of us would do if we had both the skill and
obsession required to recover our own nameless lost. When Mr. Mendelsohn
succeeds in his unspeakably sad and yet also triumphant and therefore
joyful project of recovery, it feels to me like a success for all of us—by
which I mean the kind of people whose psyches were partly formed by
overhearing such stories as would make a child wonder who among her
friends would hide her.
In his earlier memoir, The Elusive Embrace (1999), Mr.
Mendelsohn described himself as a hybrid character, symbolically suspended
between two geographical locales: a suburb of New Jersey, where he was
helping to raise the young child of a friend, and the corner of Manhattan,
23rd and Eighth, dubbed “The Intersection of Desire” by Chelsea’s gay
habitués. In The Lost, he gives us another geographical location
laying claim to him, one more distant from the Intersection of Desire than
even suburban New Jersey. The name of this place is Bolechow, as the Jews
who had once lived there called it, though now, Judenrein, it’s
called exclusively by its Ukrainian name, Bolekhiv.
His mother’s family—his grandiloquent grandfather, whose
author-adored presence is prominent in both of Mr. Mendelsohn’s memoirs,
as well as his grandfather’s family—had come from this little corner of
the former Pale of Settlement, and Mr. Mendelsohn’s project of recovery
takes him back to Bolekhiv often enough so that it begins to feel almost
familiar. His project also takes him to Israel, Australia, Sweden and
Denmark, interviewing former “Bolechowers,” constructing, deconstructing
and reconstructing the narratives of the six he’s seeking.
It takes an obsession to undertake Mr. Mendelsohn’s task, and perhaps
the scene with which he begins his book goes as far as it’s possible to go
to explain the origins of his: “Some time ago, when I was six or seven or
eight years old, it would occasionally happen that I’d walk into a room
and certain people would begin to cry.” The tears of these elderly Jews
were caused by the young Daniel’s reputed resemblance to his grandfather’s
oldest brother, Samuel Jäger—Shmiel in Yiddish. Shmiel had reversed the
trajectory of most immigrants, going back to the old country, to Bolechow,
the town in which the Jägers had lived for “as long as there had been a
Bolechow,” because Shmiel, a “kingly” sort of a man, a man with the family
flair for self-dramatization (a necessity, too, for a memoirist) wanted to
be “a big fish in a little pond.” And so it was that Shmiel and his wife
Ester and their four daughters, Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele and Bronia, were
murdered by the Nazis.
Their four beautiful daughters, I should add, since the
overheated family romance insisted that they were beautiful, even though
their names weren’t known until Mr. Mendelsohn began his quest. One of the
rewards of this book, which is illustrated by photographs (some taken by
the author’s brother, Matt Mendelsohn, who accompanied him on a good part
of this odyssey), is watching the author being overtaken by the
seriousness of his story, so that the sense with which he’d started—that
his six, being his, would turn out to be more fabulous than the other
5,999,994—is subtly discarded for something far more humane and universal.
“The real story was that they’d been ordinary, and had lived, and then
died, like so many others.”
The rhapsodizing about the death of young beauty and about the beauty
of young death that had sounded a repetitive theme in The Elusive
Embrace is here silenced by the awful nature of the truths uncovered.
The aestheticization of death is obscene in the face of genocide. There is
no beauty to be found in the degradations to which these Nazi-slain were
subjected, no aesthetics in these lives reduced to the sheer animal
instincts for elemental survival: hiding in haystacks, in holes dug with
fingers in the earth. Though I’m not certain the author would agree, it
seemed to me that the story he works toward in The Lost gradually
renders him less a Hellenist, enthralled to an image of heroic, beautiful
death, and more Hebraic, cherishing life for life’s sake and seeing death
as defilement.
One can, of course, imagine the effect on an imaginative boy of being
linked in the tears of his relatives to his murdered great-uncle. The
epitaph to the book is the poignant response of Virgil’s Aeneas, the young
Trojan prince who is one of the few survivors of the destruction of Troy,
when, wandering far from the city, he visits a temple and sees a mural
depicting the Trojan War. What is material for Carthaginian decorative art
is the stuff of tragedy for the Trojan Aeneas, a deep truth that Virgil
gives utterance to in the immortal line Sunt lacrimae rerum, which
the author translates as “There are tears in things.”
There is a brief, lovely passage in which Mr. Mendelsohn links the
story of Aeneas to his own quest in The Lost, and this linking
reminded me, too, of the use that Louis Begley made of the Aeneas myth in
his celebrated first novel, Wartime Lies. As it happens, Louis
Begley plays a part in Mr. Mendelsohn’s book, but mostly for being the son
of the indomitable “Mrs. Begley,” with whom the author, in the service of
his recovery project, comes to share a quirkily loving relationship. Mrs.
Begley had come from Stryj, a town neighboring Bolechow, and she helps the
author to grasp her lost world. She accuses him—both dismissively and
indulgently, he says—of being a “sentimental person.” She was—she died in
2004—the very opposite of a sentimental person. The survivors’ “amazing
stories” elicit her leveling response: “If you didn’t have an amazing
story, you didn’t survive,” she tells the author coldly.
Though Mr. Mendelsohn does occasionally avail himself of his Greek
scholarship in this book, it’s the first few chapters of the Hebrew Bible
around which he creates the book’s structure. He only utilizes the
sections that go up to the chapter called Vayeira—literally, “He
will appear”—since, as Mr. Mendelsohn frankly confesses, that’s as far as
he got in his “Jewish homeschooling program.” But despite the seeming
haphazardness of the framing device, leaving off where Mr. Mendelsohn
tired of his Bible study, it works—at least for the most part. Perhaps
this is because the nature of The Lost’s story, of those who
survived and how they did and those who didn’t and how they didn’t, is one
that highlights the sheer contingencies upon which everything depends. The
mirroring tale of Mr. Mendelsohn’s quest to track down his lost is also
replete with coincidence and accident.
The Biblical artifice is meant, of course, to place his family’s
story in the context of one of the most significant family narratives that
mankind has ever told itself. In this case, the tone of fraught
significance is earned, finally carrying the tale of one man—obsessed in
his particular way with his own life and family—beyond the bounds of the
memoir.
I finished The Lost late at night, after returning from an
end-of-summer dinner party given by some Truro neighbors. It’s a measure
of the degree to which I was affected by Daniel Mendelsohn’s stunning
achievement that I woke up the next morning with a single question
condensing itself out of the haze of my dreams.
Would those charming people hide me and my loved ones if ever the
Nazis came to Cape Cod?
Rebecca Goldstein is the author of five novels; her
most recent book is Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us
Modernity (Schocken).
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