The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn

Author:Daniel Mendelsohn [Mendelsohn, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780732285302
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
Published: 2008-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

AND THAT IS all I can tell you. After lunch was over, we repaired to the living room, where, for hours, she talked, and where her brother-in-law talked, too, to my delight, about growing up in Bolechow during World War I, about the house on Dlugosa Street in Bolechow that he was born in and eventually inherited and lived in with the wife and child who did not, like him, survive, Dlugosa, the street onto which Shmiel Jäger had moved, at some point in the 1930s, with his wife and four daughters (the butcher? he was a very tall, a strong man, a very nice man, of course I knew him, very often we crossed each other’s paths, the children I don’t remember so well); about how, when he volunteered for the Polish army when war broke out in 1939, he had been turned away because he was Jewish. (And I was an engineer, and they needed engineers! he exclaimed, laughing with surprising heartiness for a person who had lived nearly a century. He paused for a moment and then cried, That was Poland!) Although I can’t tell you in any great detail about what was said that day, I can tell you that I was happy that, for whatever reason, Meg had had a change of heart, and talked to us about a great deal, and that her brother-in-law had been strong enough that day to put on his robe and walk so painstakingly down the hall and sit with us for a few hours.

Just before we adjourned from the lunch table, Mr. Grossbard leaned in to me and said, in his reedy voice, Bolechow was a place with three cultures, and we all got along.

I nodded.

It was a human place, he said.

I nodded again.

It was a human place, he repeated, where there was no anti-Semitism.

He pronounced it, antisemi-TIS-m.

No anti-Semitism? I asked. Sentimental I may be, but still, I know the dangers of false nostalgia.

Well, there was, but everyone needed everyone else, you see. A Pole needed the Jew for shops, a Jew needed a Pole for offices. Ukrainians, they lived in the surrounding area but they brought food and timber every market day, every Monday.

This I knew. And every Kol Nidre, the Ukrainian woodsman would get so frightened, because the town was so quiet and the mountains were so dark, that he would come down from the mountain and stay that night, that one night each year, with a Jewish family, he was so afraid of Yom Kippur.

So there was the Ukrainians, Mr. Grossbard said. And each needed the other: after market day was over, the Ukrainians went to drink the beer at the Jewish hotels. And it was Jewish beer! And the Ukrainians brought the timber for the houses. And the Jews had the center of Bolechow, they lived above the businesses, or close by. And all the shops were Jewish. So they respected each other. It was a respect, the attitude.

He talked about the parks, when

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