The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn

Author:Daniel Mendelsohn [Mendelsohn, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-09-17T12:00:00+00:00

1

THE PROMISED LAND

(Summer)

IT WAS MY grandfather’s fault that I had always avoided going to Israel.

It wasn’t that he didn’t love Israel. He did, and he told many stories about it. There was, to begin with, the story, by now almost a myth, of his brother’s journey to Palestine in the 1930s. “Just in the nick of time!” we would say in unison, whenever my grandfather would tell about his older brother’s fabulous and prescient emigration a mere five years before the world locked down, not quite realizing, as we said it, that by reacting in this way to the story of the brother my grandfather was willing to talk about (the one whose Hebrew name, Yitzhak, or Itzhak, we pronounced the Yiddish way: ITZ-ik), we were alluding, however tacitly, to the fate of the brother that he would not talk about. My grandfather would explain to me how, at the prodding of Aunt Miriam, that fervent Zionist, his brother Itzhak, too, had finally escaped from Bolechow’s gravitational field, from the pull of the past, the attraction exerted by so many centuries of family connections and family stories, and made a new life for himself and his small children, my mother’s cousins, who would grow up to take a new, Israeli name, with the result that the only Jäger of my grandfather’s generation who had sons ended up with sons and grandsons and, now, great-grandsons who do not have the name Jäger; and indeed, more than a few of Uncle Itzhak’s numerous descendants, as I learned when I finally did go to Israel, do not know that their family’s name was once Jäger.

So Uncle Itzhak and Aunt Miriam had gone to Israel. There, we knew, they had settled, just in time to avoid the conflagration that consumed everyone else. There they had had their children and, later, the innumerable grandchildren with the odd names that sounded, to us American cousins, like the names of characters in science-fiction movies, guttural and clipped and oddly lulling: Rami and Nomi and Gil and Gal and Tzakhi and Re’ut. And there, in Israel, they did the kinds of things that to my ear sounded at once exotic and, since I had been brought up on a different kind of family story, unappealing: lived on communes in drab houses, worked in the fields, picked oranges, fought in the endless wars, got married very young, were fruitful and multiplied. Every six months or so, when I was growing up, we would get another flimsy, almost transparent aerogramme from Aunt Miriam in which (against the postal rules; but then, she was a fiery socialist) shiny Kodacolor prints of someone’s wedding had been enclosed, and what struck me, in those days, was the fact that these Israelis never seemed to wear neckties or even jackets at important family events. A small thing, you will say, but one that to my mind seemed obscurely to confirm the fact that these people weren’t, in the end, really Jägers. For to me,

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