Matt Mendelsohn visited
Here is the story with which Matt ended his speech, an anecdote about the last survivor in a small town near Bolechow whom Daniel and their sister Jennifer and he visited on their first trip to
Joseph Feuer, who has also since passed away, lived in Striy. 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.”
Daniel Mendelsohn added another detail to this story in “The Lost” (at pp. 141-142):
Alex drove us up to a decrepit block of apartments on the outskirts of town, and we walked up a few flights of dank concrete steps to Feuer’s apartment. . . . As we sat there listening to his story, it was hard not to gawk, for the entire apartment had been turned into a private archive, a museum of an extinct culture, in which Feuer himself had assembled whatever fragments of Striy’s lost Jewish life he could get his hands on: old prayer books, maps, yellowing documents, kor books, boxes bulging with his various ongoing correspondences with Yad Vashem or the German government. It was from this moldering archive of old papers that he produced . . . a recent exchange of letters that, he said, would provide us with an amusing story.
He 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
. 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. Berlin
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.
The picture is in the book, a permanent memorial to the memory of Joseph Feuer, and all those others we remember on this day. Memory is what keeps them alive.