The great unknowing

SHMIEL JAGER was a prosperous businessman, a macher, in “a small town of a few thousand people, located halfway around the world in a landscape that belonged first to Austria and then to Poland and then to many others.” The town was called Bolechow. It’s now in Ukraine. You’ve probably never heard of it. After reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million,” you’ll never forget it.

For centuries, the family of Mendelsohn’s maternal grandfather, Abraham Jaeger, owned and ran a butcher shop in Bolechow. Abraham and his siblings emigrated from Poland in the early 1900s. They enthusiastically embraced their new lives in Palestine and America but retained fond memories of what his grandfather called “a place where a person could live, a beautiful spot near the mountains.”

Shmiel, the oldest of the seven Jager (later Jaeger) siblings, tried America for a year from 1912 to 1913, found it not to his taste and returned to Bolechow, convinced it was the key to his success. He parlayed the butcher store into a thriving meat-shipping business. He owned two trucks and employed several drivers. He and his wife, Ester, had “four beautiful daughters.” By the late 1930s, as the right-wing Polish government was enacting restrictions on Jewish businesses, Shmiel was desperate to get his family out of the country.

“Shmiel. Killed by the Nazis ... was, we all understood, the unwritten caption on the few photographs” Mendelsohn’s grandfather possessed of Shmiel and his family. Those photos and others more recent -- most taken by Mendelsohn’s brother Matthew -- provide rhythmic intervals of contemplative rest throughout the mass of text.

Mendelsohn adored his dapper, funny grandfather; more important, he listened to him. He soaked up “hundreds of stories and thousands of facts” about Bolechow and its inhabitants. As a child, he writes, “I already had an oddly scholarly bent: the desire both to know and to order what I knew.” By 15, he was the official family historian.

It was not just the content of his grandfather’s stories that so profoundly shaped Mendelsohn’s destiny, it was also the way they were told: “in vast circling loops, so that each incident, each character he mentioned as he sat there, his organ-grinder baritone seesawing along, had its own mini-history, a story within a story, a narrative inside a narrative, so that the story he told was not (as he once explained it to me) like dominoes, one thing happening just after the other, but instead like a set of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls, so that each event turned out to contain another, which contained another, and so forth.”

Mendelsohn, a classics scholar, credits his grandfather with creating his “lifelong taste for the pagans.” Homer, he tells us, used the same storytelling techniques as Abraham Jaeger from Bolechow: “often interrupt[ing] the forward motion of ‘The Iliad’ ... spiraling backward in time and sometime space in order to give psychological richness and emotional texture to the proceedings, or to suggest, as he sometimes does, that not knowing certain stories, being ignorant of the intricate histories that, unbeknownst to us, frame the present, can be a grave mistake.”

“The Lost” tells of Mendelsohn’s quest to discover what happened to his great-uncle Shmiel, Shmiel’s wife, Ester, and their daughters: Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele and Bronia. He digresses into the story of Genesis, where the tale of Creation is illuminated by the story of one family -- Adam and Eve. We learn about the Tree of Knowledge and the apple tree in the yard of the house in Bolechow where Shmiel and one of his daughters were hidden. He ruminates on the Flood -- a story of annihilation again told through the story of an individual, Noah.

In its own vast circling loops, “The Lost” mediates between history and the present, the living and the dead, between the story being told and the emotional life of the storyteller. “One by one, the Chinese boxes opened,” Mendelsohn writes of listening to his grandfather, “and I would sit and gaze into each one, hypnotized.” He could be describing his mesmerizing hold on the reader through some 500 pages.

The brother and sister-in-law and the four girls his grandfather would never talk about seemed, to Mendelsohn, “not so much dead as lost, vanished not only from the world but -- even more terrible to me -- from my grandfather’s stories.” His grandfather’s silence, he writes, “irradiated the subject of Shmiel and his family.” That silence, that “uncomfortable ripple in the air” around the subject of lost, unnamed, unknowable relatives -- was a phenomenon familiar to many of us growing up Jewish in postwar America. Adult voices lowered, switched from English to Yiddish. I always assumed the adults didn’t want to burden the children with the specifics. Reading Mendelsohn’s book made me realize they didn’t know the specifics. That “unknowing” is what tortured the parents and grandparents. How could anyone “know,” in the chaos of World War II and its aftermath? What anyone did know was usually by inference and hearsay. There were so few left to ask.

And there was another issue: Did one want to know? As Mendelsohn cautions early: “Once you know a thing you cannot unknow it, and ... certain kinds of knowledge are painful.”

Mendelsohn’s grandfather died in 1980. Among his effects was the wallet he carried in his breast pocket. Inside was a sheaf of letters, written in German, from Shmiel to his American relatives in 1939, before the Nazi invasion of Poland, “while he could still write.” The stories Mendelsohn had been longing to hear from his grandfather “had been there, right in front of me, and I hadn’t seen a thing.” The letters are heartbreaking, the voice of a drowning man.

Mendelsohn applies the same rigorous and inspired analysis to these letters written by a Polish meat merchant that he brings to Genesis, Job and “The Iliad.” Like the medieval Talmudic scholar Rashi, with whom he is on intimate terms, he is ever alert to nuances of word order, syntax and diction. He reads carefully between the lines of Shmiel’s letters, which provide him with his “first experience of the strange proximity of the dead, who yet always manage to remain out of reach.”

From these letters, his genealogical research and archival data available on the Internet, Mendelsohn amasses more information about his family than he had thought possible. But he runs up against an uncomfortable truth, thinking “about everything I could have known, which was so much more than anything I can learn now and which now is gone forever.” He makes a bold move, abandoning his computer and the “safety of books and documents” and sets off for Bolechow on an epic journey that will ultimately take him to a dozen countries on three continents to talk with anyone still alive who might know what happened to the Jager family. The clock is ticking.

All Holocaust survivors -- and there are fewer and fewer of them each day -- can tell amazing stories in which chance inevitably played a vital role. As one survivor pointed out to Mendelsohn, the inverse was also true and is well worth pondering: “If you didn’t have an amazing story, you didn’t survive.” Telling the story of those who didn’t survive, who had no story, is a difficult, even improbable, undertaking. In this magnificent and deeply wise book, Mendelsohn succeeds in doing just that. His accomplishment is enormous, and it is personally costly.

Over the years of his search, Mendelsohn thirsted after details. At the end of his tale and his long labor, he knows the specifics of what happened to Shmiel and his family and where it happened -- the place “where the life that I would never know had gone out of the bodies I had never seen.” He has tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, an act that, he writes, “is something divided, something that because growth occurs only through the medium of time, brings both pleasure and, finally, sorrow.” *