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

biggest doctor in town ), and, her natural reserve dissolving, saying something charming to the little boy, who is wearing a woolen cap from beneath which strands of his fair hair, which may or may not help save his life later on, escape. My fantasy is that the sudden warming of this serious-looking girl makes an impression on the Mrs. Begley of 1938—she is herself a serious and deeply shrewd woman—and because of that impression, Mrs. Begley will remember her, remember the murdered girl Lorka Jäger, remember her so many years later and in that way will help me rescue her.
    But what happened was this:
    I finally met Mrs. Begley for the first time in 1999, at a reception for one of Louis’s sons, who is a painter. The party, which was held in an upstairs room at an impressive-looking uptown gallery in New York City, was noisy, and Mrs. Begley was sitting, very erect, with an expression that mixed a grandmother’s prideful pleasure and a deaf person’s isolated irritation—she had a bad enough time hearing in general, she told me soon after we met, without all that noise —in a chair at the back of the room.
    So you had family there? she said to me after I’d taken her hand and crouched down to talk to her, slightly disoriented by the way in which she’d spoken, as if we’d been in the middle of a conversation, and not quite sure whether “there” meant eastern Poland or the Holocaust.
    Yes, I replied, they lived in Bolechow.
    BUH-leh-khuhv is what I said. This Mrs. Begley had a long, intelligent face with a high, clear forehead, the kind of face a person of another place and generation would have described as the face of a Rebecca, a soulful beautiful Jewish woman’s face; crowned by an immaculate coif of pure white hair, it was dominated by a tenacious, wry, covert gaze that was not diminished by the fact that it emanated from one eye alone; the other was opaque, and slightly hooded, and I never asked why. This gaze would hold your own and not let go during conversations, a gaze that even after I’d known her for a while struck me as unnerving, not least because it always seemed as if the eye, watchful, remote, assessing, was reacting not to the conversation that was taking place, but to a hidden conversation, a conversation about what happened to her and what she lost, a loss so great that she knew I would never understand, although she was sometimes willing to talk to me about it. On the night I met her, she was sitting there, elegant in a black velvet pantsuit, grasping the head of a walking stick in one hand and leaning toward me, partly to suggest she was interestedand partly because of the terrific noise, and when I said that my family was from Bolechow— BUH-lehkhuv —her good eye flickered with amusement, and for the first time she smiled.
    What, BUH-lekhuhv ? she said, disdainfully.
    The first word sounded like vawt .
    She shook her head and I flushed like the teenager I was when I first became obsessed with this place. With a sour expression she said, You must say Buh-LEH-khooff . It’s a Polish town. You say it the Yiddish way!
    I found myself embarrassed and defensive, having suddenly detected a whiff of long-dead gradations of class and culture that are of no importance to anyone, anymore: the condescension, perhaps, that the secular, urban, assimilated Jews of a certain era in a certain place, Jews who grew up in a free Poland and spoke Polish at home, displayed to the countrified Jews of the rural shtetls, Jews like my grandfather, who although not even ten years older than this Mrs. Begley had grown up in a wholly different world, Austrian, not Polish, who spoke Yiddish at home, and for whom a trip to even a small city, like Stryj, was something of an event.
    In any case, because of all this, of the way I pronounced or mispronounced Bolechow, my secret fantasy suddenly was ashes in my mouth. Which is why, when Mrs. Begley asked me what my relatives’ name had been, after she’d corrected my