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

pronunciation, and I’d replied Jäger, and she had shaken her head and told me she’d never heard the name, I couldn’t bring myself to mention the photography atelier of the family Schneelicht, my great-uncle’s in-laws who had lived in her city, in Stryj, where perhaps, once before, there had been the smallest chance that they and she would have met. A chance that, for me, would have been a way of connecting the remote past, in which my relatives seemed to be hopelessly, irretrievably frozen, to the limpid present in which this meeting was taking place, the transparent moment that, as anyone could see quite clearly, held me and the old woman with her white hair and her cane, held the noise and the party and an ordinary early evening in autumn in a city that was at peace.
     
    D ESPITE MY OCCASIONAL errors, however, I learned a lot, over the years of letters and queries and interviews and Internet searches, a lot about Bolechow that wasn’t mistaken. For instance: They were there since before there was a Bolechow! How long was that, exactly? It is possible to know almost to the day.
    If you are an American Jew of a certain generation, the generation that, like mine, had grandparents who were immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century, you probably grew up hearing stories about the “Old Country,” about the little towns or shtetls from which your grandpa or grandma or nana or bubby or zeyde came, the kind of little town celebrated by Yiddish authors like Isaac Bashevis Singer and in Fiddler on the Roof, the kind of place that no longer exists; and you probably thought, as I thought for a long time, that they were all more or less alike, modest places with maybe three or four thousand inhabitants, with a vista of wooden houses clustered around a square, places to which we are, now, too willing to ascribe a certain sepia charm, perhaps because if we thought about the Ping-Pong games and the volleyball and skiing, the movies and the camping trips, it would be that much more difficult to think of what happened to them, because they would seem less different from us. The kind of place so ordinary that few people would have found it worth writing about, until of course it and all the places like it were to be wiped out, at which point their very ordinariness seemed to be worth preserving.
    This, at any rate, is what I thought of Bolechow. Then, one day not too long ago, my older brother, Andrew, sent me as a Hanukkah gift a very rare volume, published by the Oxford University Press in 1922, called The Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow . (I say “Hanukkah gift” but as I write this I am aware that the words are not really true, and certainly not as close to the truth as my grandfather would have liked: since my two sisters-in-law are not Jewish, and my nieces and nephews are enjoying the kind of eclectic religious upbringing now very common, the gift I received was something I undoubtedly thought of at the time as a “holiday” gift. No: let me be really honest. I’m sure I just thought of it as a “Christmas present.” The fact is that in my own house, when we were growing up, we didn’t have a really thriving Hanukkah tradition. What I remember mostly was my mother, whose Orthodox upbringing clung to her despite the erosive force of my father’s disdain for religion, putting a kitchen towel or a doily on her head in our kitchen, the first night of Hanukkah, and as we kids gathered around the table somewhat self-consciously, singing the half-remembered blessing over the candles in Hebrew. When her memory as to the exact words failed her, she would lapse, with no embarrassment at all, into Yiddish filler: Yaidel-daidel-daidel-dai, she would say. The brass menorah she used was tiny and old-fashioned and plain, and had belonged to her mother; at some point her father gave us a more imposing one with rampant lions of Judah supporting the central candle. That was after most of us had gone off tocollege, and so I