Daniel Mendelsohn — author of the monumental memoir of the family he lost in the Holocaust (“The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million”) — received his B.A. in Classics from the University of Virginia, summa cum laude, and received both his M.A. and Ph.D in Classics from Princeton. On May 15, he gave a Commencement Address at U. C. Berkeley, to those graduating with degrees in Classics, which began as follows:
Exactly thirty years ago today, on a warm day in the middle of May of 1979, at the end of my freshman year at college, I picked up the telephone in my apartment in Charlottesville, Virginia, and called my grandfather in Miami Beach, Florida, to announce that I’d decided to major in Classics.
The news did not go over well.
“Classics what?” said my bemused grandfather, a man whose formal education had ended in 1914, when Austria-Hungary entered World War I; a man who, by the time he was nineteen, as I was on that May day, had lived through a World War, lost a father, crossed an ocean, exchanged Europe for America, one civilization for another; had, from nothing, made a life. “It’s books? Music? Classical what?”, he repeated.
“No, grandpa,” I said, clearing my throat, my fingers, gripping the plastic receiver, starting to sweat. “Classical literature. The Classics … You know, like Greek and Latin.” There was only a confused silence on the other end, and so I blurted, rather helplessly, “Plato!”
There was a fumbling noise on the other end of the line, and when the conversation resumed, it was not my grandfather but his wife who spoke — a lady who had been born and raised as what we Jews call a Litvak, a word whose nuances, savoring richly of a world as lost, in its way, as that of Sappho and Sophocles, are inadequately conveyed by the neutral adjective “Lithuanian”; it was, now, my grandfather’s wife who spoke vigorously, incredulously, into the phone on hearing that I was going to be majoring in Latin and Greek.
“Greek! Latin!” she spat. “What good it will do you, Greek and Latin? They are dead, the Greeks, the Romans — all dead, for a thousand years they are dead! A thousand years! I have been to Greece, been to Athens! And I can tell you — they are dead! What good did it do them, their literature, their art?! Plato? What good will he do for you? I have been to the grave of Plato, and I can tell you: he has been dead for a thousand years! Trust me, find something else to study, you’ll make a living at least, you’ll be happier!”
She took a deep breath and wearily ended with a sentence that—as she could not possibly guess, that May afternoon thirty years ago—would give me the title of a book I would write one day, a book about her vanished world, and how it vanished. “Plato, the Greeks,” she muttered. “In a thousand years, it will all be lost.”
The address is worth reading in its entirety – but don’t read it yet.
First, read this story, told by Matt Mendelsohn (whose photos in “The Lost” are as integral to the book as the text itself), when he visited Sinai Temple in 2007, shortly after the book was published, speaking on how the book came to be. It is an anecdote about the last survivor in a small town in the Ukraine, whom Matt, Daniel and their sister Jennifer met on their first trip to Eastern Europe:
Josef Feuer, who has also since passed away, lived in Striy [in the Ukraine]. He was called the “Last Jew of Strij” . . . And the only reason he was the Last Jew of Striy was because he was an army pensioner in the Russian Army. And so, although there were no Jews left in Striy, he continued to live there because of the army pension — that was the only thing he had.
Daniel did a rambling interview in Polish, in Yiddish, in German, Ukrainian — bits of everything. And I sat there taking pictures, thinking for the most part, “I don’t understand a word of it.”
And after the interview was over, Mr. Feuer got up, in this crappy Soviet apartment building where he lived, with drinking water in the bathtub and rusty spoons to eat with. We were going to leave the apartment building, and I said to Alex, our translator, “Please tell him to keep walking, because I’d like to photograph him as he goes down the set of stairs.”
Now I’ll pause here for a second because, as Daniel points out, there were a lot of moments of serendipity in this project, a lot of moments — perhaps not serendipity — but just coming full circle. So I’ll tell you one quick story. I come from Long Island, where every town it seems is named after an Indian name — Massapeequa, Montauk . . . Everywhere you go in Long Island. And when we were growing up, my oldest brother Andrew used to say this same thing all the time, and we would all sort of snicker, and he would say: “Lots of Indian Names. No Indians.”
And so now we’re in Striy and Joseph Feuer is coming down out of this crappy Soviet apartment building and he stops dead in his tracks and he turns to my sister, and he’s standing here and I’m standing right here, and even though we didn’t understand a single word of his interview, in broken English he stops and turns to me and he says: “Call me ‘Last of the Mohicans’.”
And Jennifer and I — we started sobbing. And all I could think of was “Lots of Indian names. No Indians.”
Matt Mendelsohn’s anecdote is told from Daniel Mendelsohn’s perspective on pages 141-142 of “The Lost” and it adds an important element that takes the story even further:
[Josef Feuer] had, he said, written quite recently to the German government about getting them to erect a memorial at the site of the great Aktion in the Holobutow forest outside of the city, where in 1941 a thousand Jews were taken and shot; the site, he said, was overgrown and wild, and bones could be seen thrusting up from the ground.
As he told us this story, Feuer held up a copy of the letter he’d written, in German, to Berlin. Then he picked up another, bearing an official-looking governmental seal. The Germans, he said, had responded with great alacrity, and had proposed the following: that if Mr. Feuer and the other members of Striy’s Jewish community could raise a certain amount of money toward the landscaping of the site at the Holobutow forest and the construction of the memorial on it, the German government would be more than pleased to match the amount.
At this point Feuer brandished a third paper: his response to the Germans’ proposal. It’s difficult, now, to remember the gist of it, since the opening of his letter was so distracting. It said, “Dear Sir, All the other members of the Stryjer Jewish community are IN the Holobutow forest.”
This fact, the accuracy of which we had no reason to doubt, was surely what led this scholarly and gentle man to turn to us, as he was leading us down the gray steps of his building when our interview had ended, and say to Matt, who at that moment snapped his picture, Tell them that I am the Last of the Mohicans.
It is memory, and the study of the past, that preserves a civilization. Lose that, and it is lost. Keep it, and it keeps you. It is true of both a people and a country. And it is a story of individuals, and what they did, and sought to pass on, and why — every one of them, including those whose names we do not know.
Now go read the rest of Daniel Mendelsohn’s extraordinary Berkeley address.
Matt Mendelsohn’s picture of Josef Feuer, one of a remarkable series from “The Lost” that can be viewed at http://www.mattmendelsohn.com. Copyright Matt Mendelsohn. Published here by permission.