Some time ago, when I was six or seven or eight years old, it would occasionally happen that I’d walk into a room and certain people would begin to cry. The rooms in which this happened were located, more often not, in Miami Beach, Florida, and the people on whom I had this strange effect were, like everyone in Miami Beach in the mid-nineteen-sixties, old. Like nearly everyone else in Miami Beach at that time (or so it seemed to me then), these old people were Jews, Jews of the sort who were likely to lapse, when sharing prized bits of gossip or coming to the long-delayed endings of stories or to the punch lines of jokes, into Yiddish; which of course had the effect of rending the climaxes, the points, of these stories and jokes incomprehensible to those of us who were young.

Daniel Mendelsohn gave a talk at Vassar last evening. He began by reading the first few paragraphs from his last book, The Lost. Mendelsohn said that he didn’t–doesn’t–think of the book as the Holocaust book; instead, it has been for him a book about his search for the members of his family. And yet, because of the numerous, inevitable accidents and missteps involved, Mendelsohn described the book also as a search for a method or a plan. So, the talk was about the Holocaust (his grandfather had written Killed by the Nazis on the back of every photograph of his relatives murdered in Bolechow) but it was also an often wry report on the writing of history (his grandfather always had two wallets, one with money and credit cards and the other, lined with crumbling letters for help from his grandfather’s brother, about which Mendelsohn never thought it necessary to inquire till it was too late). Because the goal of those who exterminated his relatives was to erase any sign of their humanity, what Mendelsohn sought to recover were the specific details of their ordinary lives. His Uncle Shmiel owned the first radio in town. The discovery of this animating detail seemed to Mendelsohn like a triumph. As did the detail describing one circumstance of the deaths of Bolechow’s Jews. A current resident of that town told him that on the day the Jews of the town were being taken, two at a time, to the cemetery to be machine-gunned, her mother had brought out her old sewing machine from the closet. The mother had kept her foot on the treadle for many, many hours so that the sewing machine’s loud squeaking could drown the sound of the Jews being shot. Even as Mendelsohn learned more and more about his Uncle Shmiel, he realized that he didn’t know anything about his Aunt Ester. An old woman who had known her when they were all young and alive said something non-descript about Ester being nice but then couldn’t add anything more. When Mendelsohn was leaving, she suddenly remembered something. She said to him, “Oh, everyone used to say Ester Jager has such nice legs.” Mendelsohn’s birthday is today and he said that now he was going to be older than Shmiel and Ester were when they were killed. All that remains of their rich lives is what he had gleaned from his search, “retrieving small things out of a great abyss.”

[I’m a big fan of Mendelsohn’s critical essays and have read with my students in this course the wonderful piece on September 11 at the movies. Mendelsohn’s essays present a rich pattern of stunning juxtapositions: a personal story set beside a reading of an authoritative Western text. These essays are appearing in a collection soon.]

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