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

Saturday afternoon when my voice so excruciatingly cracked, the bar mitzvah that was the culmination of the spotty Jewish education I’d had, that made me curious about my Jewish family, made me begin to ask questions. Naturally I’d always been curious: How could I not, I whose face reminded certain people of someone long dead? But the fervent interest in Jewish genealogy, which became a hobby and, much later, almost an obsession, began on that April day. This, I have to add, had nothing to do with the ceremony itself, with the ritual for which I’d been preparing for so long; it was, rather, the reception at my parents’ house that was the beginning of everything. For as I was passed from relative to relative to be kissed and slapped on the back and congratulated, the confused mass of unknown and similar-looking faces bothered me, and I began to wonder how it was I came to be related to all those people, to the Idas and Trudys and Juliuses and Sylvias and Hildas, to the names Sobel and Rechtschaffen and Feit and Stark and Birnbaum and Hench. I began to wonder just who theywere, what their connection to me could possibly be, and it was because I didn’t like being confronted with this undifferentiated mass of relations, was irritated by the mess, that I thereafter devoted hours and weeks and years to researching my family tree, to clarifying the relationships and ordering the branches and sub-branches of genetic connection, to organizing the information I eventually gathered on index cards and charts and in folders. It is of course silly to think that anybody “becomes” a man at the age of thirteen, but it is probably fair to say that, however inadvertently, my bar mitzvah made me more aware of what it was to be Jewish than any comprehension of the words I was saying, that day in April 1973, could have done.
    And so the questions I began to ask, immediately following my bar mitzvah, were about not just the mysterious Shmiel, but about all of them. These questions led me, at first, to write letters to the relatives who were, in 1973, still alive—a number that was already far smaller than it had been six or seven or eight years earlier, when I’d go with my family to Miami Beach. I would write to these old relatives in Queens and Miami and Chicago and Haifa, and sometimes the replies frustrated and confused me. ( I’m not telling you the exact date I was born, my grandfather’s unhappy sister Sylvia told me one afternoon in 1974 over the phone, because it would have been better if I’d never been born .) But more often, these elderly people were gratified that someone so young was interested in something so old, and they answered eagerly and told me whatever they knew in reply to my questions. My father’s aunt Pauline, for instance (always “Aunt Pauly”), banged out nearly a hundred letters on her rickety old Underwood between June 1973, when I first shyly wrote to her, and June 1985, when her formidable brain, which had furnished me with so many crisp and critical details about my father’s side of the family ( I also seem to remember someone saying the name of a town called …), collapsed on itself. By the end, the a ’s and o ’s and e ’s of her ancient manual typewriter were completely indistinguishable, a parallel, maybe, for what was taking place in the confused and hardening tissues to which I owed so much.
    Or there was my great-aunt Miriam in Haifa, the wife of my grandfather’s brother Itzhak, the woman who, because of her lusty Zionism, had persuaded her husband that, despite the fact that their butcher business was prospering so greatly, the future of Jewry lay in Palestine, which is why she and he and their two small children escaped the fate that swallowed Shmiel and the others. I came to write often to her, and she had much to say on the subject of Bolechow as it once had been, before she left it. I would welcome the sight of her flimsy aerograms with their exotic Israeli stamps, the