The family that Sonia and Chaim started in Palestine when they married in 1933 continues to flourish in the Land. They currently have thirty-two living descendants, and the number keeps growing.
The American family has also been fruitful. The six children of Abraham and Sarah who lived to maturity—Itel, Ethel, Harry, Sam, Hyman, and Lillie—all married and had children of their own, and most of their children have children and grandchildren. At last count, there are 101 of us scattered around the country, mostly on the coasts. My limb of the family tree is a crowded one: my grandfather Sam had four children with his first wife and one child, a daughter named Leona, with his second wife, Gladys. Leona married Meyer Laskin in 1948 and gave birth to four sons, of which I am the third. So Shimon Dov is my great-great-grandfather, Itel my great- aunt, and Doba, Etl, and Sonia my first cousins twice removed.
I thought a lot about the family tree when I traveled to Israel in the spring of 2010 to meet with Sonia and Chaim’s three children. I was fifty-six years old, married, the father of three grown daughters myself, a vigorously secular Jewish American writer embarked on a new book. I had never been to Israel before, but it seemed like the place to begin researching the family story. After all, it was my Israeli cousin Shimon (technically my second cousin once removed) who inspired the idea when he told me that the evil Lazar Kaganovich was not part of the family but that seventeen victims of the Shoah were. Shimon assured me that he and his sister, Leah, and brother Benny would do whatever they could to help. So I bought plane tickets for me and my oldest daughter, Emily.
We landed in Tel Aviv on a warm afternoon in May. Shimon collected us from our hotel in Netanya and drove us to his brother’s house in nearby Avi Hayl. The greetings at the door were cordial but awkward. Benny’s wife, Orna, suggested we sit outside on the patio in the shade behind the house. She served us mint tea (the mint leaves were from her garden), hummus, and carrot cake. For one jet-lagged instant I wondered what I had gotten myself into. Shimon and I had met once, many years earlier, at my grandparents’ apartment, but I would have walked right by him on the street. All I knew about Benny was that he was the baby of his family, born three years before me, and that he liked basketball (“Benny speaks NBA,” a young American relative who had studied in Israel told me when I asked about Benny’s English). I had never met Orna or heard her name. These three were perfect strangers. Yet here we were sipping tea and sharing intimate knowledge about the people and history we had in common.
I had worried, beforehand, that the Israelis would find me intrusive, insensitive, presumptuous. Needlessly, as it turned out. There was never any ice to break. As soon as we got to family, everything flowed naturally and rapidly between us. Benny, a tame bear with a child’s flashing grin and stormy impatience, reminisced about Gladys and Sam playing cards with Sonia and Chaim. “It was very important to Sam and Gladys to see my parents and their children. Gladys liked to take a little drink of whiskey while she played.” (My grandmother—whiskey?) We blew by the small talk and jumped right into the thorny genealogical questions and ambiguities and gaps in the record we’d both been puzzling over. Benny gave me a copy of the memoirs he had written about his parents’ lives based on the interview he and Rotem had done with Sonia in 1992. He had had the memoirs meticulously translated into English before our arrival. Together we thumbed through a sheaf of family photos. By the end of the afternoon, I realized that I had found not only a cousin—I had found a friend and a collaborator.
“We have letters,” Benny let drop right before we went back to the hotel, “many letters from the family in Rakov and Volozhin. The last was a postcard that Doba sent my mother right before the Nazis invaded in 1941. But there is a problem. All of the letters were written in Yiddish [Benny pronounced it “Iddish”] so none of us can read them.” This is a problem we will solve, I was thinking. It took a year and a half, but eventually, between us, the Israelis and I had all 281 letters translated into both Hebrew and English.
In the week that followed, Shimon and Benny took Emily and me on a tour of all the places their parents had lived, the colonies and settlements where they had learned to farm, the house and the fields at Kfar Vitkin, the moshav cemetery where their brother and grandfather and parents are buried under stones bearing the hands of the Kohanim. We stood together over the trickle of salty water that had once sustained the tiny precipitous Kvutza Har Kinneret, where Chaim had come as a boy of eighteen. We drove up the coast as far north as we could and got out of the car at Rosh HaNikra just steps from the Lebanese border, so we could take in the same panorama that had dazzled Sonia when she made aliyah by taxi in 1932. We sat together at kitchen tables amid stacks of photos, bundles of letters none of us could read, notebooks, pages printed off the Web. It was at these kitchen tables in Israel that I felt the presence most intensely of those who came before—not only the impossibly beautiful pioneer couple, but also their anxious families back in Poland and my great-grandfather Avram Akiva sending checks from America, keeping tabs on his niece and nephew in Kfar Vitkin, reading with amazement letters written from a land he knew inch by inch from the Bible but would never see with his own eyes. I felt them bearing down on me, these generations of pious, bearded Kohanim scribes, as I stood by the Western Wall in Jerusalem with the slip of a prayer I folded and stashed in a crack already wadded with prayers. To pray by the Wall would have crowned their lives. Why me and not them?
They would have found the answer to such a question in God—I look to history, family history, family story. Stories arise because something happened—but to close the circle, someone needs to discover what happened and be willing and able to say it. Our parents and grandparents could not bear to tell the story of the branch that was destroyed. But Benny and I, independently and then in partnership, committed ourselves to bringing our shared story to light.
The following year I returned to Israel for a week, this time with my three brothers, my oldest brother’s wife, and their firstborn son: a trip to honor our father, who had died at the end of 2010. Benny picked me up from the airport and together with Shimon we went to the archive and museum of the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz (Beit Lohamei Haghetaot) to research Klooga. I told Benny that I had plans to go to Belarus and Lithuania to see the places where our European relatives had lived and died. Halfway through the week, Benny decided to join me on what he called the “roots trip,” and by the end of the week Shimon and his oldest son, Amir, and Benny’s son Rotem had signed on too. I enlisted my daughter Emily, who speaks Russian. In the middle of May 2011, the six of us met at a small wooden inn deep in the lush green Belarusian countryside. Together we visited Rakov and Volozhin; we walked through the crumbling hall of the Volozhin yeshiva, which has survived two world wars and the death of its students and teachers; we scouted out the street near Rakov’s brick Catholic church where Sonia, Doba, and Etl grew up. We traveled to Vilna—now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania—and searched out the two apartment buildings where Doba and Shepseleh lived and raised their sons. We drove out to Ponar to say kaddish at the cratered pit where Shepseleh and tens of thousands of Lithuanian Jews lie buried. We walked to a hillside at the edge of Volozhin and said kaddish over the pit where Chaim’s brother Yishayahu may have been shot. We said kaddish in the small grassy clearing where the Rakov synagogue burned with Etl and her children inside.
Over dinners, we talked about how this could have happened. How could Germany have changed so radically between the First and Second World Wars? Would the Shoah have happened without Hitler? “One man can change history,” Shimon said many times. But why would God have created Hitler and allowed him to triumph so brutally? The more we knew of the horrors, the less we understood its perpetrators.
In Rakov, after much searching in the tangled grass of the cemetery of exile that had depressed Sonia, we found the grave of our common ancestor, Shimon Dov. Shimon and Benny had come prepared. They scrubbed the headstone with steel wool, placed candles and Israeli flags around it, and we said kaddish for the patriarch as well.
Our parents and grandparents never made this trip. It wasn’t that they couldn’t face what had happened. They were inventors, entrepreneurs, pioneers, explorers, survivors. Tough-minded realists. Courageous fighters. Extravagant givers. But the telling of the story fell to us.
The pulse of history beats in every family. All of our lives are engraved with epics of love and death. What my family gained and lost in the twentieth century, though extreme, was not unique. War has touched all of us. Fate and chance and character make and break every generation. The Shoah was not the only genocide. America is not the first land of opportunity nor will it be the last. Warring peoples have fought over the Holy Land for thousands of years, all of them claiming to have God on their side. In a family history written by Palestinian Arabs, Chaim and Sonia and their fellow Zionists would be oppressors; the Koran, not the Torah, would be the holy book; Jerusalem would be a besieged, stolen city. Open the book of your family and you will be amazed, as I was, at what you find.
My ancestors believed that the book that sustains the Jewish people is the Word of God, but it was they who copied God’s words and kept the book alive. Long ago, I walked away from their book, their faith, and their traditions, but in middle age I have come back to their stories. I used to think these stories could never be mine because fundamentally we had little in common: they were strangers with my DNA, these short, dark, striving men and women with their burning eyes and fierce desires. I had left their path and chosen my own. I don’t pray. I don’t observe the cycle of the Jewish year. I rarely read the Bible. Thoughts of God, when I have them, arise not in synagogue but in wild solitary places. It often occurs to me that my life, my beliefs and irreverent spirituality, would make them snort and shrug. We’re so different. I don’t belong—we don’t belong. But in middle age—late middle age, as my wife likes to remind me—I’ve changed my mind. The last of Shimon Dov’s European descendants was shot and incinerated at Klooga nine years before I was born. I lived fifty-five years without knowing his name, without wondering about his story, without seeing how his story is bound to mine. “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be,” the Bible tells us. My days and the days of my cousin Shimon and the days of my grandfather Sam and his siblings and cousins in Israel are written in that book. My book, this book, is the only way I know to search the radiant lines inscribed for us, to bring into consciousness some glimmer of our light.
In telling their story I have made it my own. Even my own brothers would have different versions. It would be foolish to believe that I, that we, that our generation alone can see and say the truth. I know there are events we refuse to acknowledge, tragedies we steer clear of, facts we deny at our peril, fictions we entertain to deceive ourselves. Our children will laugh—or weep—at the walls we have built and huddle behind. And yet, just as we cannot unblind ourselves, so we cannot will our curiosity or channel its consequences. We don’t choose our stories any more than we fashion the moment in which to tell them.
I have told this story out of reverence for my family but also, to be honest, because I can. It is their story, but in writing it I have claimed it. For now, thanks to Benny, this story is in my hands. But it doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to all of us.