Holocaust Remembrance Day: One family's story

In honor of Holocaust Memorial Day, I'll share with you a section from a book about daily life in my father's shtetl. The book is called Memories of Ozarov, by Hillel Adler. Second-generation survivors owe a great debt to authors such as Adler, who died in 1996. In addition to this (possibly exaggerated) account, the book contains the only existing photograph of my father as a child.

My grandfather frequently served on the local rabbinic court. Here is what Adler writes about him:

Pinchas lived with his family at 21 Main Street. He was one of the most talented Talmudists. You could often see him at his table by a window immersed in the study of his holy books. His wife Faiga had a little milk and cheese business. Every morning she would make deliveries to her Jewish customers. And if one of those customers actually came to their house to fetch a liter of milk while Faiga was away, Reb Pinchas was displeased. He would have much preferred to avoid opening the door so as not to lose precious time away from his portion. Despite Pinchas' entire days spent in prayer, the good Lord never seemed to send down enough from Heaven to feed his three [MiI: four] children, of whom the eldest was a girl named Hendel.

This daughter Hendel shone in her studies of Yiddish, Polish and Hebrew. She also learned Talmud with her father, very rare for a girl of that time, and took part in the settlement of disputes with her father.

With such Talmudic knowledge, Reb Pinchas regretted that she was not a boy, who might in that case have one day become a rabbi. Who would have thought at that time that by the end of the century there could be such a thing as a female rabbi! But in Ozarow Hendel had to be content with giving lessons to a few children whose parents were well-off. One of these children was Chana, the daughter of Rabbi Reuven Epsztein, a girl who had been allowed to forgo the public Polish school. Hendel taught her the required seven-year curriculum.

On September 6, 1939, the sixth day of the war, Hendel was shot by the first German patrol in Ozarow. (pp. 56-57)

In 1942, when Germans decided to liquidate the town, my father escaped with false papers. My grandfather was concerned about whether my father should take the tefillin made according to the opinion of Rashi, or Rabbenu Tam. My father realized that carrying tefillin (phylacteries) was out of the question. He cut off his peyot (sidelocks) and removed his thick glasses. Then he walked away as if he knew where he was going. No one stopped him (at that point).

After wandering around Poland, he worked in a German factory along with other foreigners brought to replace the dwindling German workforce. Only after the war did my father learn that his parents, younger sister, and brother, were murdered in the death camp of Treblinka.

The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn

I've been reading Daniel Mendelsohn's book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. Mendelsohn grew up in an assimilated family in New York. In the background of his visits to his older relatives in Florida lay a story about a great uncle who remained in the family's ancestral town of Bolechow, Ukraine, only to be murdered during the Holocaust along with his wife and four daughters. The writer's grandfather and the other siblings had already emigrated to Israel and the US.

The author intersperses his story with an analysis of Rashi's commentary on the Torah and that of the modern commentator Rabbi Richard Elliot Friedman. Mendelsohn continuously revisits the theme of sibling rivalry-- in the Torah, within his grandfather's family, and among his own siblings (he broke his own brother's arm as a child). I'm only about a third of the way through, but we can already see that the relationship between the brother in Bolechow and his American siblings is central to the story.

When Mendelsohn travels to Bolechow, Ukraine with his family, a man named Alex serves as guide and translator. Is this the same garrulous Alex with the hysterically convoluted English that appears in Jonathan Safran Foer's book, Everything is Illuminated? Everything is Illuminated is a (semi-fictional?) book about an American Jew's search for information about relatives from the Ukraine.

Mendelsohn gives Henry James a run for his money with his sentence structure:

And I might add that virtually all of the information provided by the same important source, the central database at Yad Vashem, for "Shmuel Yeger" (or "Ieger") and "Ester Jeger" (and the three daughters the database attributes to them: "Lorka Jeiger," "Frida Yeger," and "Rachel Jejger") is demonstrably wrong, from the spelling of their names to the names of their parents ("Shmuel Ieger was born in Bolechov, Poland in 1895 to Elkana and Yona," an error which, I thought when I first read this, eradicates my great-grandmother Taube Mittelmark from history,* and with her the sibling tensions that may well have resulted in Shmiel's decision to leave New York in 1914 and return to Bolechow, a decision to which his presence in this error-filled archive is attributable) to the years in which they were born and died.

*Presumably he figures out that Yona is a Hebraicized version of Taube (my own mother's name), meaning dove.

Despite its length, the passage is readable, and is an example of the way the author maintains suspense by hinting at later-to-be-revealed surprises.

I'm looking forward to reading the rest.