An American Jew whose grandparents came from Poland, Daniel Mendelsohn was troubled from his earliest childhood by his grandfather’s strange and ill-fitting reactions, as well as by his relatives’ insistence on finding in him a physical resemblance to one of his great-uncles. This great-uncle had left the United States before the Second World War to return to the town in Poland where his family had lived for centuries. There he was exterminated along with his wife and his children. Obtaining only partial information about the circumstances of their disappearance, Mendelsohn undertook a search that led him far beyond what he had imagined. The truth he was pursuing — for his family as well — kept receding, and his quest kept evolving. To the initial question — how did they die? — many others were added: why did he return to Poland? Why could his brothers not bring him back to the United States? Who were his daughters, and his wife, and he himself? Why did the neighbors not protect them and, for many, contribute to the extermination of the town’s Jews?
The witnesses Daniel Mendelsohn was so happy to have finally found often turned out to be peddlers of rumors, even when they were sincerely convinced of having been present at the scene of the drama. The accounts they had reconstructed had helped them to bear the fragmentary memory of the terrible events to which they were so close and yet so far, on account of the radical border that separates those who are about to die from those who will go on living. These witnesses were very often contradicted by others, and each testimony, including the one that proved erroneous, contributed to building a more complex image of this great-uncle and pushed Daniel Mendelsohn further on, toward a goal he could not define but which he knew, without any hesitation, he had not yet reached. His initial question was progressively replaced by an opaque and complex questioning. Driven by a demand he did not always understand but to which he did not refuse himself, he advanced and was profoundly transformed by it. Other questions arose: what do I have in common with my great-uncle, beyond our physical resemblance? Why did my family insist on it, as if it were necessary that I make exist, even in illusion, the person over whom an uncle’s guilt was kept? Who is he to me, and who am I to my family? What is the meaning of what happened, in Poland for him and in the United States for his relatives? It was no longer enough to say that they had been victims of Nazi barbarism; he also had to question the fraternal rivalry between his adored grandfather and his great-uncle, whose image he had been assigned the responsibility of embodying, and the terrible consequences of that rivalry.
He was advancing in two opposite, inseparable directions: toward the scene of the massacre and toward his family. The banal fraternal rivalry between his grandfather and his great-uncle had had, because of the Shoah, tragic consequences. Could the brothers have anticipated them? No. Were they any less guilty for that? He clearly perceived that his relationship to his own brother contained a similar rivalry. The thought that it might have similar consequences terrified him. He sought appeasement in a mythical past: this rivalry, as ancient as humanity, is present in every man, and it is illusory to wish to root it out or to consider oneself exempt from it. What demand drove him in this quest? No doubt the demand to know and understand the history of his family, to find his rightful place in it, between past and present, between exceptional events and banal family relations, and, in the end, to assume what was transmitted to him and what he in turn will transmit. The quest he carried out resembled the work of dream interpretation that the psychoanalyst does with his patient: pushed to the extreme, the desire to know risked arriving at an infinite branching of questions and answers, of hypotheses and certainties, in which the original question was lost.1
The attraction toward this chasm can be a motor even more powerful than the desire to know the historical truth. Life and death drives are intertwined in it, and the fascinated quest can, at any moment, tip dangerously toward unbinding and dispersion, toward madness and death. One must know how to hold the course: to remain available to every surprise, every piece of information, but not without limit; to detach oneself from the initial question but not to forget it, any more than the present, failing which only the mythical past would impose its law. Nor must this quest forget the concern for the future, and one must have confidence in its coming and in its value. Yitskhok Katzenelson, who died at Auschwitz, cried it out: “The beginning is not everything; I want to know the end.”2 In order to imagine it, to prepare for it or to prevent its coming, a sufficient knowledge of one’s history, individual or collective, and of one’s malaise, certainly appears necessary. But there is no single origin, of malaise or of history, only an interlacing of elements of various values that produce their effects only in their relations. One must know how to bring the quest to a halt and to say: “I know enough to construct the narrative that I recognize as my history and that of my family. It suits me, and I can, without malaise or betrayal, transmit it to my descendants or to my contemporaries.”
Daniel Mendelsohn finally discovers the exact place of the murder: in a field, like all the others, where nature has reclaimed its rights. Between the two branches of the tree that has grown there, he places the pebble that Jews, following tradition, lay on graves. A double homage paid to those with whom he wished to reweave the broken bonds: “I know where you died, and I have reintegrated you into my history and into our family. I have found you again, I have given you back your place and your human substance, and you have transformed me. I no longer feel guilty, nor in debt to you. We are even, equal.” It is not this knowledge alone, accepted as sufficient truth, that brings the journey to a close, but also that which reweaves the bond between the living and the dead, between himself and his history, as well as the lucid acceptance of not knowing more. It is good that the dead, like the living, keep their share of opacity.