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

narratively satisfying conclusion, of course, at the end of Genesis, chapter 3, which is the culmination of the story of Creation: the story of Adam and Eve and their eating of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The story begins with Creation, which as we’ve seen is the story of acts of distinguishing one thing from another; it ends by alluding to the most crucial distinction of all, the distinction between Good and Bad, a distinction that becomes apprehensible to humans only by eating of the Tree of Knowledge, a tree about which the Torah tells us that it was (like light) “good,” that it was a “delight to the eyes” of Eve, and that it was “desirable for comprehension,” and it was because of this goodness, this delightfulness, this desirability that Eve ate of it.
    I want to linger for a moment by this strange Tree, whose fruit, though so good, was, as we know, to prove poisonous to mankind; for the eating of it is what, according to Bereishit , caused humans to be expelled from Paradise, to be forced, ultimately, to experience death. But it is the pleasure and delight of the Tree of Knowledge that I want to explore briefly, because the connections, in Bereishit , between creativity, distinguishing, knowledge, and pleasure are, for me, utterly natural. As a child, I already had an oddly scholarly bent: the desire both to know and to order what I knew. This, I have no doubt, was the by-product, or perhaps I should say the fruit, of my father’s intellectual gifts—he is a scientist—and my mother’s passion for order, the taste for rigorous neatness and organization that she would only half-jokingly attribute to her “German blood.” It’s my German blood, she would say, the once-blond product of families that had fully German—not German-Jewish—names, names like Jäger and Mittelmark (the latter, as I have learned, being the name of a county in Prussia); she would say this, sometimes with a laugh and sometimes not, whenever she remade a sloppy bed or reorganized a shelf full of our schoolbooks or tried to impose order on things that properly belonged to my father’s somewhat sloppier sphere of influence, with sometimes comical results, as for instance when she finally gathered together all of the various broken objects, toys andlight fixtures and small gadgets, that he had laconically promised to fix but had never managed to get around to, and put all these orphaned objects in a box that, using a heavy navy blue Magic Marker, she labeled, in her bold, loping handwriting, THINGS TO BE FIXED ALEVAY —“ alevay ” being the Jewish word that expresses a sort of hopeless, battered optimism: “it should only happen (but it won’t).”
    So my father loved knowing things, and my mother loved organizing things, and perhaps this is why I, at an early age, discovered in myself an acute pleasure in organizing knowledge. It wasn’t merely reading about (say) the ancient Egyptians and, later, the Greeks and Romans, about archaeology and the Romanovs and Fabergé eggs that gave me pleasure; the pleasure lay, more specifically, in the organization of the knowledge I was slowly accumulating, in the making and memorizing of lists of numbered dynasties and vocabulary charts and hieroglyphic tables and chronologies of numbered Catherines and Nicholases and Alexanders. This, I now realize, was the first expression of an impulse that is, ultimately, the same as the one that drives a person to write—to impose order on a chaos of facts by assembling them into a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
    If an early, though admittedly eccentric, pleasure of mine lay in the ordering of hitherto messy masses of information—a combination of my father’s and my mother’s natures—then it was also true that I felt a kind of pain, a form of anxiety even, when confronted by masses of information that seemed resistant to organization.
     
    I T WAS MY bar mitzvah, at any rate, my bar mitzvah that