Generally considered Israel's greatest living writer, A.B. Yehoshua is a portly, imposing figure, still handsome in a curly-haired, silvery way at 68. We met in November 2003, on the Montreal leg of a North American tour promoting his latest novel, The Liberated Bride, a few weeks after we had discussed the book at length by phone, with the author speaking from his home in Haifa. Yehoshua has a ready smile and wit and is immensely articulate, despite a pronounced but endearing lisp. Peppering his conversation with references to Thomas Mann, Dostoyevsky, S. Y. Agnon, Virginia Woolf and the great medieval Sufi poet al-Hallaj, he seems as at home with the backwaters of history as with the day's headlines. He comes by that ease honesty, having devoted a major portion of his distinguished career to exploring the nexus between history, politics, and literature.

Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Yehoshua is a member of the so-called "generation of the state," which also includes such prominent authors as Amos Oz, Aharon Appelfeld, Yoram Kaniuk, and Yehoshua Kenaz. Coming of age after the establishment of Israel in 1948, these writers echoed in their works the existential problems of their country: various wars and crises between Israel and the Arab world, the moral dilemma of holding fast to the Zionist dream at the expense of the aspirations of Palestinians, and social issues such as the emigration from Israel of a younger generation and its loss of faith in the Zionist ideal that had given birth to the state.

From his first surrealist stories that bore the imprint of his admiration for Kafka and Agnon, through historical tours de force such as Mr. Mani and Journey to the End of the Millennium, to his most recent work, The Liberated Bride, a rich comedy of manners set just before the current Intifada, the plight of Israel is an ever present current in Yehoshua's fiction, even as his delicacy as an artist raises his work to universal significance.

A central paradox animates his writing. In an almost uncanny way he manages simultaneously to illuminate life while casting a veil of mystery over it. In person, however, he is transparent and unpretentious, readily admitting that Yochanan Rivlin, the protagonist of The Liberated Bride, is autobiographically inspired, that Hagit, the book's female lead, is modelled on his wife, and that "the wonderful kind of partnership and friendship between the two ... even when they quarrel" is based on their 43-year marriage. Disarmingly modest, he protests that he speaks a mere three languages, neglecting to mention that his command of them is such that he is able to deliver inspired keynote addresses in Montreal on separate topics in English, French, and Hebrew - all without notes.

Yehoshua's genius as a writer of profound psychological perceptiveness (he alludes frequently to his psychoanalyst wife's approach to character) is matched by his role as a social and political commentator. These concerns are expressed not only through stories, plays, and seven stellar novels, but in frequent essays and interviews in Israeli newspapers and magazines. Central to his thought is a preoccupation with identity, a question that cuts to the heart of Jewish history and experience.

In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel on CBC's Writers and Company in November 2003, Yehoshua observed,

When I started to write in '57, '58, this was a time when Israel was not in turmoil, or at least the conflict with the Arabs ... was locked in a draw. I remember my wife and I spent four years in the '60s in Paris, and there would be day after day when I would not open the newspaper, did not turn on the television to see what was happening in Israel, because Israel was not in the news at all. This was the time when the hard core of the Israeli identity was mapped out in literature by the generation of the state. And especially because we had clear borders. We knew exactly what was Israel, what was under our responsibility, the borders of our state - first of all the physical borders, the territorial borders, and of course this was also helping the borders of the identity. And then in confrontation or in difference with the generation of the War of Independence, we could deal with the private person, with the individual. My first stories were a kind of stating the right of the individual to be outside the collective, different from the collective.

An ardent Zionist and untiring activist in the Israeli peace movement, Yehoshua relishes retelling the tale of how, in 1982, he first became conscious of the past as a source of necessary inspiration. Until then, his story collections and acclaimed early novels - Three Days and a Child (1970), Early in the Summer of 1970 (1970), Until Winter (1974), The Lover (1977), A Late Divorce (1982) - had dealt with political and social realities of the day, brilliantly portraying contemporary Israeli life.

To my great surprise I became obliged to go to history on the very first day of the war with Lebanon. I belonged to the lecturers' unit of the Israeli army - this was my reserve duty - I was part of a special unit whose job was to go from one army camp to another, lecturing the soldiers about whatever we wanted.

The first day of the war my unit was mobilized. We were forty people summoned to headquarters, and were given the program of the war. "We are going to occupy Beirut. We will join the Christian militia and impose peace on Lebanon." For the first time in my life I felt I didn't understand my fellow Israelis. I felt as if I had lost contact with the Israeli code. This was a crazy idea: to occupy Beirut, join the Christians, impose peace.

I was right. We had to retreat, pull out - after leaving there 1,300 dead soldiers, twice the number of the Six Day War, for nothing. This was the time when, in order to understand my fellow Israelis, I had to go back to history for some answers.

A couple of autobiographical elements coincided with Yehoshua's political angst as the inspiration for his masterpiece, Mr. Mani (1990). His father, an orientalist and historian, died. \u8220 My father was a kind of writer himself. He wrote folkloric books in the last twenty years of his life about the Sephardic community of Israel at the end of the nine- teenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. By questioning old people in Jerusalem about the life of the Sephardic community he was evoking all this rich life in twelve books."

Yehoshua with his wife Rivka.

Yehoshua came to these books only upon his father's death. "My father left me his books. In a sense he left them for me. I didn't read them while he was alive. When he was dying, I realized these books would help me to go back to history." He emphasizes that his interest in the past wasn't inspired by nostalgia but by a need to understand the present.

The subtle and enigmatic story of a Sephardic family in Jerusalem, Mr. Mani is the tale of six successive generations of male Manis, set out in a series of historical tableaux, peeled back in reverse chronology by means of five conversations occurring between 1848 and 1982. It is the first of Yehoshua's works - coming relatively late in a writing career that began when he was in his early twenties - that deals overtly with his own Sephardic heritage.

"It was deliberate. I didn't want to be labelled a Sephardic writer. When you are a minority writer - and the Sephardis are considered a minority - people expect you to write in a kind of folkloric way. I wanted to be a writer with all the liberties."

HIS SEPHARDIC BACKGROUND is what Yehoshua has called "the sunken dimension" of his life. Though he has lived in Haifa for more than thirty years, on his father's side he is a fifth- generation Jerusalemite. His paternal ancestors immigrated to Palestine in the early nineteenth century from Salonika, then part of the Ottoman Empire, long before Zionism was a gleam in Theodor Herzl's eye. His mother, the daughter of a wealthy Moroccan businessman, arrived in Jerusalem in the early 1930s as a young woman, inspired by Zionist ideals and leaving behind a life of privilege.

"I will never write my c.v. without mentioning, 'born in Jerusalem in 1936, fifth generation in Jerusalem.' It's very important for me," Yehoshua told Wachtel.

The landscape illustrations in this article show the historic buildings around Kibbutz Merhavia, the first agricultural cooperative in Israel. Photos by W. Turnowsky

It's like putting an anti-element to what I would call the diasporic Jew, to the diasporic mentality. My family was coming from Salonika in the beginning or the middle of the nineteenth century, not because of anti-Semitism, not because of persecutions, not because they wanted to build a state. This was before Herzl, before the big explosion of secular anti-Semitism that started in the 1880s. So I was coming from a family that was returning home naturally, because of the idea "this is home." They came from a city that was majority Jewish, and if 100,000 Jews had come for the first time to Palestine in the middle of the nineteenth century, all Jewish history would be totally different today. Because this was a possibility to create a state before the Holocaust. And it could have been done also at the beginning of the twentieth century, after the Balfour Declaration. So this terrible failure of the Jewish people to save themselves, to solve this problem, to avoid the Holocaust by creating a state before the Holocaust, this is for me the most terrible tragedy of the Jewish people.

Yehoshua views the past as a series of crossroads. At certain moments in Mr. Mani, he plays with history, exploring the path not taken at crucial moments in time. For instance, two of the Messrs Mani have overt political obsessions with modern resonances. In 1918, Yosef Mani, an interpreter with a linguistic ability that has him "acquiring languages as though they were a batch of keys to a house with many doors," seeks to sabotage the British Mandate forces, by inciting Arabs to partition Palestine half and half with Jews. Two generations earlier his namesake suffers from the singular delusion that Arabs are actually Jews who have misplaced their identities.

The most beguiling and the most overtly historical of Yehoshua's books is the sensuously written A Journey to the End of the Millennium. Published in Hebrew in 1997 and translated into English in 1999, the novel is a moral and spiritual quest set one thousand years earlier, on the eve of the first millennium. The main character, Ben Attar, a wealthy merchant from Tangier, pursues a lucrative partnership with his nephew, Abulafia, bringing the bounty of North Africa to the dour and narrow world of Western Europe. When Abulafia marries a pious Ashkenazi woman from the Rhineland, she is scandalized to learn that Ben Attar has two wives and takes him to rabbinical court with a view to having him excommunicated. As an allegory, Journey conjures up the divisive infighting between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews in con- temporary Israel. But it is also the most diasporic of Yehoshua's works, in which he examines the devices that enabled Jews outside Israel to maintain their unity as a people, despite their manifold and often bit- ter differences.

"I wanted to see what was the mechanism of coordinating codes - the social, the religious, the cultural codes - between the different communities of Jews," he told Wachtel.

Meaning that the Jews were living in the Diaspora without an authority over them. There was no Jewish king, no Jewish government, no Jewish pope. And they were dispersed all over the globe, and of course each community was living in a different country, in a different interaction with the Gentile community, in a different code. So the Jewish people could have split into many different kinds of Jewishness and lost their unity. This mechanism of free negotiation and free discussion - and why a certain code is winning and why a certain code is losing -this is what I've done through the very important question of bigamy among the Jews and the monogamy that was declared at the end of the first millennium by the Ashkenazi Jews, who said that the Jewish man who marries more than one woman will be excommunicated. And at that time the Jews in the south were the majority, and they were the wealthy Jews. Ninety percent of Jews then were living in the Islamic world, and in that sphere bigamy was permitted. And there is no restriction on bigamy coming from the Halacha itself. So I was intrigued by how the Ashkenazis managed to persuade them that this is the new code that they have to obey.

A long gap in chronological time separates the setting of Journey from that of Yehoshua's latest book, The Liberated Bride. In fact the differences between these two works illustrate his range as a writer and his unbounded curiosity about both the world around him and the world of the past. For, make no mistake, even though The Liberated Bride is a determinedly contemporary novel, it continues to worry away at the realities and maybes of the bone of history. He began writing the book in 1998, a period he calls "an intermediate time between the Oslo agreement and the Intifada of today."

All of us were thinking that the Oslo agreement- with all the achieve- ments from both sides and despite all the difficulties - finally would be fulfilled. And my concern was: What will happen after that peace? What will happen to the Palestinian identity when we will be out of there? What will be the relationship between us and the Israeli Arabs? What will he the borders?

The question of boundaries - personal and political- haunts The Liberated Bride to such an extent that Yehoshua says he could just as easily have called it Borders. The diffuse plot centres on one year in the life of Yochanan Rivlin, a middle-aged historian and orientalist (like the author's late father) in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Haifa University. (Yehoshua recently retired from his position as a distinguished and longstanding professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at Haifa University.) Rivlin is driven by twin obsessions: on the private level, a desire to track down what went wrong with his son Ofer's marriage five years earlier, and on the professional, a hunt through Arab literature for sources that might account for the violent civil war that has shaken Algeria since 1990.

Why the fixation on Algeria?

Algeria of the late '50s and early '60s is a parallel for Israelis, for what was happening with the Palestinians. Algeria was a territory that the French wanted to annex, and they put settlements of French among the Algerians, and Algeria fought for its independence. There were many, many Palestinians who were taking Algeria as a model for their fight. And there were a lot of books about Algeria in Israel recently, discussing the impossibility of maintaining the territories - and arguing that France, with its population of fifty million, could not hold on to Algeria, even with one million French colons living there. Finally they had to quit, because they could not destroy the Algerian rebels. And during the conflict there was widespread terrorism and many of the same things Israel has experienced. There are differences, of course - the Algerians, after all, didn't want to take Paris for themselves, while the Palestinians are saying that Israel also belongs to them.

I was a little bit shocked, like everyone else, over the past ten years at all this violence in Algeria. And I was asking, What are the sources of this violence? And none of the experts could give me an answer. So I tried to give it as an academic question to Rivlin. I always like very much - and I do it in all my books - to work the profession of the protagonist into the story. It's not only that I put a label on him - a doctor or an engineer - I make his professional life and his professional soul an integral part of the book.

And my concern was, what is happening to a people in which the Other dominates, as we have done with the Palestinians by putting settlements inside the territories? I wanted to put it as a question, an academic concern of Rivlin, in order to understand the past through the present, as he tries to understand the present through the past with Ofer.

The Liberated Bride is a sprawling, immensely moving, hugely entertaining and provocative novel of ideas, action, and tragically missed opportunities. Yehoshua started it with a view to exploring, on the one hand, the boundaries between husband and wife, father and son, father and daughter, teacher and student, and, on the other, those between Jewish and Arab Israelis. Large chunks of the action take place in a village in the Galilee, and several of the most sympathetic characters are Israeli Arabs.

"People forget that we have 1,100,000 Palestinians who are living as full citizens in Israel, and that they are part of our identity. People get confused between them and the Palestinians on the other side of the border." In the year that the novel takes place, between 1998-99, those borders were easily permeable, and Rivlin, in the company of a young Arab Israeli named Rashid, drives to concerts in Jenin and literary festivals in Ramallah, journeys similar to ones that Yehoshua and his wife undertook in real life during that period.

All of us were thinking that the Oslo agreement- with all the achieve- ments from both sides and despite all the difficulties - finally would be fulfilled. And my concern was: What will happen after that peace? What will happen to the Palestinian identity when we will be out of there? What will be the relationship between us and the Israeli Arabs? What will he the borders?

Yehoshua was still at work on the book when the Intifada broke out in 2000. "And immediately I was a little bit caught up - I said to myself, What am I doing? I'm describing a festival of songs of love in Ramallah, and here now is Ramallah with the lynchings and the violence and the attacks. What can I do? But I decided, I'm dealing with the year '98, and this was the reality then, and I will stick to my year and continue to write about the things that happened then, because there were good things - even with all the problems - there was co-existence."

The novel pivots around the question of the limits of intimacy. In the private realm, Rivlin and his wife Hagit are at loggerheads over his insistence that if only he can discover the truth about Ofer's marriage, his son will be freed of the burden of a troubled past. Hagit, a judge. warns him repeatedly not to breach Ofer's privacy. When she discovers that he has gone behind her back, she is wounded to the quick that their precious pact of marital openness has been violated.

In the more public realm, Rivlin befriends an Arab-Israeli student and her family, and gingerly investigates the possibilities of rap- prochement with the Other. "I wanted to create in the book this inti- macy that is indeed existing between them and us, between the minority and the majority .... They know our language. They know our codes, and they live with us."

A few weeks before my conversation with Yehoshua, the Intifada ravaged his own backyard. On 4 October 2003, the suicide bombing of a Haifa restaurant killed 21 people and wounded 60. "Maxim's was our neighbourhood restaurant, about a half kilometre from our house, and this was a restaurant where my family was going every week." Of joint Jewish and Arab-Israeli ownership, Maxim's was frequented by both Jews and Arabs, and the three Arab waiters killed were Yehoshua's friends. Talking about them, reflecting on the awful shambles of both the restaurant and the peace process, Yehoshua's voice thickened with emotion.

"As I say to you, this restaurant was a symbol of our coexistence, and it is still empty and destroyed."

He paused for several moments, and then added. "It's just a house, but there are big signs on it today saying, "We will not let them destroy the co-existence between Jews and Arabs.""

Note

I wish to thank Eleanor Wachtel for allowing me to quote at length from her interview with A.B. Yehoshua on Writers and Company, 17 November 2003. Where not otherwise identified, quotations from A.B. Yehoshua come from conversations with me in November 1992 and in October and November 2004.

Queen's Quarterly 115/1 (Spring 2008)

Daniel Mendelsohn, photographed by Matt Mendelsohn.

Critic, joumalist, and classics professor Daniel Mendelsohn is the award-winning author of three books: The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (1999), a memoir; Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays (2002), a scholarly work on Greek tragedy; and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), a remarkable disquisition on time, memory and the meaning of what it is to be human.

In little more than a year, The Lost has become a runaway success and an international bestseller. It has received widespread critical acclaim and won many prizes, including the US National Book Critics' Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award. Last fall it was published in France, where its reception was rapturous. Les disparus sold 100,000 copies in three months, was nominated for the famed Prix Femina, and won the Prix Médicis Étranger, one of the most prestigious of French literary awards. Previous laureates include Doris Lessing, Orhan Pamuk, Philip Roth, Umberto Eco, and Milan Kundera.

I interviewed Mendelsohn in Montreal on 6 December 2007 in a nook at the back of the dining room of the Hotel Gault, an elegant new boutique hotel in Old Montreal where he was staying. Mendelsohn is erudite, articulate, and charming. By turns funny and wise, he drives a point home with an expressive hand gesture, has arresting pale blue eyes, and is far more handsome than his austere, brooding portraits suggest.

Above: Jewish cemetery, Bolekhiv, Ukraine (before the Second World War the town was part of Poland and was known as Bolechow). Matt Mendelsohn records: "While no one seems to know for sure, it has long been thought that a mass grave exists beneath the barren patch to the right." Photo by Matt Mendelsohn.

The Lost dips and flows in time between the present and the biblical tale of Creation. It loops across the globe as Mendelsohn and his brother Matt (whose striking uncaptioned photographs illustrate the text) track down the twelve remaining Jews from the ancestral Galician town that Mendelsohn's grandfather, Abraham, left in the early years of the twentieth century. Abraham's brother Shmiel accompanied him to America, but returned to Bolechow soon after.

From the outset, we know that Shmiel, his wife Ester, and their four daughters died in the Holocaust. Mendelsohn's aim is to nail down the specificity of their fates and in the process humanize a vast, faceless tragedy. He does this both through the power and complexity of his writing, and through the keenness of his observations and characterizations.

ELAINE KALMAN NAVES: I can't tell you how swept away by The Lost I am. I read it with immense enjoyment and immense pain. There are so many things to talk about, but first up I am going to ask you: what made the French react so positively to this book?

DANIEL MENDELSOHN: I'd certainly have to be a lot smarter than I am to be able to answer that question. I would want to underscore that I'm speculating. This is the wonderful thing about publishing in general: you never know what's going to be a hit, or where or why, because - as my publishing friends always say - if they knew, every book would be a bestseller.

"Absent maliciousness, the children, who have more than likely never met a Jew in their lifetimes, see the area mainly as a make-believe fort." Photo by Matt Mendelsohn.

Well, first of all, although I am a classicist by training (and that's something that pokes out every now and then in the book), all of my formation - as they say in French (and there's no proper English term for it) -is French. I've been reading French literature since I was twelve years old, and that's the backbone of my reading in non-classical letters. From an early age I was very attracted to the French language and to French literature. I had great teachers who kept after me. My reading culminated with Proust, but I read not just Proust - not by a long shot! I read far more Balzac. And also the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries interested me greatly. I think all that makes itself felt very strongly in the book. Obviously there are many explicit Proustian references and recollections and verbal echoes, because I want you to be thinking about Proust when you're thinking about a book about family and memory and history. Obviously. There are two authors I do not refer to by name, but I want the reader of this book to think about - Proust and Sebold. One is verbal and one is visual. Which seems to me appropriate in a book about a photographer and a writer looking for a family story.

So I just wonder if the French have not embraced this book so passionately because that formation is seeping through in ways I don't even know. Also, look - I'm a reader of big nineteenth-century novels that have a certain kind of sweep and are interested in history and cities and people living in cities - Balzac is a biography of Paris apart from anything else! And Stendhal as well. I like big, 500-page sweeping narratives! I really do [laughing], and I wanted to write one. So I think that has made itself felt.

I would also say that there was Les Bienveillantes [Jonathan Littell's 900-page novel about a Nazi perpetrator, which won France's Prix Goncourt in 2006]. And I think it had a big impact in France. I think in some way that prepared the soil for my book. It's a subject everyone is thinking about. And of course, the French journalists want my book to be the anti-Bienveillantes ....Everyone wants to set it up as a concours between me and Jonathan Littell. I don't have any desire for that.

Shmiel Jager in Bolechow, Poland, 1930s.

But I do think that my book in a way inverts the values of Les Bienveillantes. It's like looking through the other end of the telescope. Littell is interested in perpetrators; I'm interested in victims. His is a novel; mine is meticulously only looking for details that I can specify. On the other hand, his attempts to imagine the mind of a killer - I never like to say executioner, un bourreau, the word they keep using, because bourreau implies a legal system, and I think that's misleading - and mine wants to imagine or reconstitute the lives of people who were killed by the people Jonathan Littell writes about.

So I think people were waiting for a book - anyone who felt that Les Bienveillantes wasn't giving them something necessary would automatically be interested in my book.

Those are my guesses. But I would also say that the book had a very modest success in England. It got nice reviews, and then it went away. I think this has to do with national experience. The English didn't have the Holocaust. They had their own war story, which is very different. The Holocaust is more abstract to them. The Holocaust happened on French soil. And the French have struggled with questions that the book raises: about collaboration, betrayal, confronting the past. I think that it's a readership that's trying to think about these things.

And a propos of all this, there was - a couple of years ago - Irene Némirovsky's haunting novel, Suite française, about France in wartime - a book not at all about the Holocaust, but completely framed by it. Impossible not to think about it on every page.

It has come up a lot in France, and all this just fertilized the ground - that and the fact that my book owes so much to French writers. I would think that this makes it appealing. Because I go about telling my Jewish-Polish-shtetl story through the lens of Proust.

I wondered if you would comment on two of the epigraphs: from Virgil, Sunt lacrimae rerum. "There are tears in things." And the quote from Proust: "When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child we were and the souls of the dead from whom we have sprung come to lavish on us their riches and their spells."

Well, let's start with the Proust because it's easier. I have said many times - and I wonder if anyone is actually listening - I never conceived of this as a book about the Holocaust, and I don't think of it as being about the Holocaust. (Except obviously that it has to be.) It's a book about a family. It's about thinking about your family and what that means: family ties, brothers, uncles, cousins. And closeness. What it means to be close: Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, siblings. There are people who want to read it as a Holocaust book. So they say, "There's this long part at the beginning, but then it gets good in Part Two." But I would say they're reading the book wrongly.

This book is written by someone who is both a writer and a critic by profession and is also a scholar of literature. I'm interested in literary questions that have nothing to do with history or the Holocaust .... And a big question is: how do you begin a book? And why do you begin a book?

Shmiel's daughters: Ruchele, Lorka, and Frydka. Along with Bronia, the youngest (who was not yet born when this photo was taken), all would be put to death.

And how do you tell a story?

And how do you tell a story! Which obviously an obsession of the book. And that's why I was moved by the Proust. People always say, "You were always interested in family history from childhood. You loved your grandfather. Why did you only now decide?" [laughing] That's a good question! I think the Proust epigraph somehow is about that. You reach a moment in your life - which is not the same for everybody - when you feel, I would say, at once more connected to and more distant from your childhood and the past that you knew as a child. Which, of course, is how Proust begins.

In my case I couldn't even tell you why I decided this was the project. You have to remember this didn't start as a book. I thought I was only writing a magazine article at the beginning. For whatever reason, and it's not accidental, it started after the quarantaine. I was interested. I felt haunted. Because as you get older, you get farther away from you own childhood and the past that was the past when you were a child. And that's why I was moved by the Proust. Suddenly, there they are: all your ghosts, stretching out their hands, and offering you these things if you're smart enough to hear that they're offering them to you. And there's a moment after which that offer is going to be withdrawn, when you're no longer going to be able to remember the past. So it's a moment you have to strike. And a lot of this book is very self-conscious about time as an element in the search.

This isn't a library search where the books will still be there in thirty years. This is about communicating with living--

- Old -

- people. So there was a moment when, as it were, I woke up one morning and said, "This is the moment to do this." I had been primed in different ways. So that's the Proust. When you have reached a certain age, you want to do justice to your ghosts. Because you don't think about them earlier. Also because when you reach a certain age you realize you're going to be someone's ghost some day. And that affects you.

Frances Begley, New York City: she grew up near Bolechow, and after the war she began receiving letters from someone who had moved into her former house and had found a stash of family photographs. Forced to ransom her own family history, she would send money, and the man would send photos - one or two at a time. Photo by Matt Mendelsohn.

And I would say the Virgil- as you know that quote plays an important thematic note in the book. For all the reasons I explain. But I'm also advertising that this is a tragic book. It's not called The Found. And that was important to me, because we now have a cultural narrative which is about cheap closure. Whatever traumas you've suffered, you'll go on Oprah, and you'll get hugged and it will be fine. And this is not one of those stories. It's not one of those stories in the way it happened to the people it happened to, who didn't have closure, and whose story will never be over. It will never be over because most of these people's stories will never be known. But also my story of my search is not one of happy closure. I didn't want people to read this and say, "Oh, at the end he gets redemption and it's all great, and he has a feel-good moment."

And I think at the end I say, "Even at the moment when I finally find them, I have to give them up again, because they don't belong to me." And the unknowability of their subjective experience is something that I am humbled before.

So I think that it's a deeply tragic book, although it has stories and humour -

- tons of it -

-but you know it's tragic in the sense that it acknowledges the irreparability of pain in the world. Somebody that I was just talking to today [exasperated chuckle] said, "Oh I read your book, and I thought you were going to find that one of the girls is still alive."

I said, "But that's a Hollywood story." And this keeps saying to you that as much as we found, so much more was lost. I think there's a point in the book where I list everything we found out in five years: it's like a page in a 500-page book -

Yes, because so little could be known about these people.

Because that's the significance of what was done to them! They were erased consciously, purposefully from memory and history. The people who killed them wanted to erase them. That was the agenda. Not just to kill them. But that nothing would be left. No memories. No stories .... That's the tragedy of these people. There's a long Proustian passage in the book where I think about everything that no one will ever know. The slaves in the slave ships going from Africa to the New World. You know they suffered, but how many of those stories will you really know?... That's the essential tragedy of life and history that most everything gets lost. So I want to acknowledge that at the beginning. Also, tears are an important motif in this book. It begins with tears, it begins with people crying -

- when they see you as a child [because Mendelsohn bore an uncanny physical resemblance to his great uncle Shmiel, family members regularly wept when Daniel walked into a room] -

And it ends with me falling to the ground and crying, and there are a lot of tears in between. It's a significant leitmotif. So that's why I wanted Virgil. And I also wanted Virgil because I'm a classicist. Although I don't invoke it a lot, the Aeneid is a survivor's tale. It's the story of a man whose civilization is destroyed in one fell swoop and how he wanders the world to find a new home, which is the story of the people I talked to...

You make a very interesting distinction, that its very different to tell the story of a survivor from the story of the people who are lost.

I think I say that to be alive is to have a story. The dead can't tell their stories. They can only be ancillary characters in someone else's story. Because you cannot speak as a subject, as a main character, if you're dead.

But if you're able to find out enough, you can tell the story of someone -

You can tell the story of a person, but one thing that we always know is that the story that we tell about a person is never the story that they will tell about themselves. You know that as a journalist!

What I find really remarkable is the way you use the Bible and use the story of nations and ethnic groups, as well as the stories of your nuclear and extended family, to show that familial relations are not always benign.

One thing I want to be very scrupulous about - it's always a danger in autobiographical writing to heroize yourself. I wanted everything in the book to be about Shmiel. Which it is, actually. As wide as the circles get. It's a book about using everything you're capable of knowing to think about one thing .... You could even say the absolute question it starts out with is, "Who am I, if I am him? If I'm a reincarnation of [my great uncle], who am I?" My whole book is an attempt to fill in his blanks so I can finally be myself, and not just a reminder of him. If you were doing a psychoanalytical reading of this book, that would be one way to go. And I'm mentioning that because it starts out with the question of knowledge and this weird doubling of identities.

I wanted to be very scrupulous in this book, so that everything in this book should be about Uncle Shmiel. And the brother stuff- to get back to what you were asking about - the ugly family things: I wanted to make sure that there was nothing in the book that felt, as stuff in memoirs can feel, like a working out of personal stuff.

When I talk about my relationship with my siblings, and difficult things that happened in my family, and my grandfather - that's all in there because I ultimately have to come back and think about what happened between my grandfather and Shmiel. And so all those rippling circles spread out from that one stone which is - What was his relationship with his brother?

So everything in the book: Greek narrative technique, oral poetry, and so on, is ultimately coming back to - What happened to Shmiel, and how do you tell that story? So it was as if I had to use everything I ever knew in my whole life, including my family history, the tensions, the dramas, the conflicts, the rivalries, to help tell that story ....

I tell the reader exactly what the shape of the book is going to be very early on. I say, "This is how my grandfather told the story: there were the long openings, and you didn't know why he was telling the whole history -"

And the Russian dolls, and one story inside another, and you were thinking, "Why is this?" And then as it got faster and sped to the end, you realized what all the connections were. And I've got news for you: that's exactly the structure of the book. I'm not idly telling the reader this.

Also, you're not idly bringing in the stories from the Bible -

The Bible stories are also about Shmiel. How did all these things happen? The story of Noah: what does it mean to wipe a population off the face of the world with only a handful of survivors? What is their life like? So it's a big book, and it goes lots of places - intellectually, geographically, and temporally, but it always comes back to one thing, which is, How does this stuff help us think about Shmiel ?...

I want to ask you - its very interesting, you're third generation here, I mean you're not even in a direct line-

I have no direct line.

You've taken on Shmiel though. You have a special bond, a special destiny, if you will, because it was cast that way for you by genetics -

It's important that I don't have a direct generational connection to the Holocaust. I have an oblique connection that allowed me to write this book in this way. If I were a child or even the grandchild of Holocaust survivors or victims -I don't have to tell you this - I would have had to write a different book.

Because the interest in and freedom with and exploration of narrativity and storytelling are things I can fool around with because I'm a little bit distant from this tragedy. They weren't my grandparents. It was a great uncle. How well do you ever know your great uncles? I might have been close to him, but I might not have been close to him! So I can come at this from a totally different angle, with more spaciousness in my positioning. And part of what the book has the luxury to explore, and even weep a little about, is distance. And so, honestly, when I experience these terrible moments, it's probably not as loaded as it would have been if it was my grandfather I had been trying to find out about. So I'm aware of the fact that I'm two steps down, but I'm one step horizontal from the epicentre of this trauma. It's part of the theme of displacement in the book, about not being close enough.

The book is as much about distance as it is about proximity. Another thing I want to avoid is falsely claiming a trauma that isn't mine .... And it almost makes me feel guilty. Because one thing I am the heir to is a good storyteller. Because I'm not an heir to the Holocaust, but I am heir to a great storyteller .... And a very smart classics professor colleague of mine at Princeton, when I was in the earliest stages of this story, said to me, "It's a great advantage that this is an oblique and not a direct relationship." I was very struck by that. Because it's not deeply traumatic to me, I'm able to write about it better. Not better than someone else, but better than I might have been able to write it myself.

Once, when we still lived in Budapest, before the Revolution, I asked Shoshanna how a baby gets inside her mother's tummy. Shoshanna was leaning over the kitchen table, which had been covered with a crisp white sheet. She was tugging paper-thin dough closer and closer towards her. A small tear formed in the parchment-like piece near the edge of the table. Shoshanna jerked her head back abruptly in annoyance. There was a smudge of flour on her cheek, ruddy from the heat of the oven or perhaps from emotion.

"Don't ask me about this," she said. "When you're old enough, I will tell you all you need to know about this."


The next day it rained, so Shoshanna sang me her rainy-day song. The song was from a musical version of Cinderella in which she had starred when she was twelve. It started out. "Oh, cream cakes are just so delicious."

A line in this song made tears trickle down my face each time Shoshanna sang
it in her heart-rending soprano. The little
girl in the song mourns the cream cakes she can't have because she has no Anyu and Apu to buy them for her. What a
very terrible thing it must be, to have no Mummy and Daddy to get you a cream puff when you so long for one.

Shoshanna was an orphan and so was Gusti, if you thought about it carefully, though they were not child orphans and Gusti was quite ancient to be thought of like that because soon he would be fifty. They had met in an orphanage. He had been forty-two and Shoshanna twenty-seven. Perhaps they didn't consider themselves actual orphans, only as having been orphaned.

How they had met was like this. Shoshanna told me about it after she had finished the rainy-day song and had begun to comb my hair for the third time that morning. Right after the liberation, she and her sister Lilli had come back from the camps together, to the small Hungarian town where they had been born. But it was so terrible in their house which had been stripped of all its furniture with the sole exception of their sister Ilushka's piano with Ilushka's portrait above it, that they had left this town forever. They took the painting with them, and travelled all the way to Budapest.

Shoshanna was able to get a job in an orphanage since she had been a teacher before the war. Lilli left the country and, after a time, ended up far away in Canada.


One morning when Shoshanna was pouring kerosene on the heads of the orphans to get rid of the lice, Gusti came looking for her. He had a message for her from her brother-in-law who lived in the country in the very same village where Gusti was an important man.

"Your brother-in-law has learned that you are here in Budapest working in an orphanage," Gusti had said to Shoshanna as he watched her emptying a keg of kerosene onto the head of a small boy. "How can he sleep nights knowing his brother's widow has to work among strangers when he and his wife have a roof they can share with you?"

And so, after a little while, arrangements were made and Shoshanna left the orphanage with Gusti and they travelled by truck to the village where her brother-in-Iaw and Gusti lived, and it was not long before Shoshanna and Gusti had fallen in love. And that, Shoshanna concluded briskly, putting away the brush and comb, was all I needed to know about how I got into her tummy.

When the nurses laid me in a bassinet by Shoshanna's bedside right after I was born, she couldn`t take her eyes off me. She had them leave the lights fully blazing though it was midnight. so she could feast her eyes on me. She wasn't disturbing anyone else. it was a private room in a private clinic - it was before everything was nationalized. Gusti still had money.

In the moming he brought her tea roses. Roses in November. The card read in his beautiful script, "Few flowers, much love." Then he slipped the heavy ring with her initials on it on her ring finger, where a wedding ring once used to be. He kissed her finger, then her mouth. He lifted me from the bassinet and started to cry. “To think,” he said, “to think I could have a child again.”

Shoshanna and Gusti kept a diary of my every ingestion. They laid me on the scales before and after each nursing, subtracted the difference, and entered it in a ledger. “2.80 kilos at birth,” wrote Gusti neatly in pencil; 2.70 kilos ten days later when they took me home. Net weight at the end of the month: 2.91 kilos. On this day Shoshanna inscribed in her slapdash scrawl, “ l /4 grated apple + 5 mocha spoonful lightly sugared orange juice once a day.”

Blanka néni, my paediatrician, paid us our first house call. Shoshanna unbound me for her from the polya on the dining-room table and removed my tiny undershirt and diaper.

"Her leg are bowed," Shoshanna said.

"Nonsense," retorted Blanka néni, "all babies have bow leg. It's the way the fetus folds itself up in the womb. Actually," Blanka néni took her eyes off me and fixed them on Shoshanna suggestively, "actually she has the shapeliest thighs l've ever seen on a baby girl."

"I'm not talking about her thighs, " argued Shoshanna who never ceded a point easily, "but her calves. They are so, too, bowed, Blanka néni."

They stood over me, these two women, discussing my baby legs. Shoshanna had the most beautiful legs in the world: long and firm calves, patrician ankles. Gusti called them the legs of a gazelle. In Auschwitz where Blanka néni and Shoshanna had first met, Shoshanna had taken first prize in a beauty contest. It wasn't a formal contest, just something the girls had invented to pass the time. There they were, herded together in a cavernous hall with their bald heads and not a stitch of clothing among about a hundred of them. It was not so long after they first arrived, so they still had shapes. And they awarded each other "prizes" for best shoulders, best breasts, best buttocks. Shoshanna took the prize for best leg. Blanka néni and her special friend Vera, another doctor, had been the judges.

Blanka néni is stout and lumpish. She wears mannish suits of tweed worsted. Her chin-length hair seems shellacked in place; she wears it pushed back behind fleshy, large-lobed ears. Though she is as Jewish as Shoshanna and Lilli, the Canadian aunt whom I don't know, in the camps >Blanka néni had power and privileges on account of being a doctor. Nothing clear cut, of course. To exercise them she had had to take risks.

Once, in the dinner line, Lilli didn't take the bowl of soup that should have fallen her due. The soup had nothing in it, not even the carrot chunk that ought to have floated in its scummy broth. Lilli held back her hand and reached instead for the bowl next in line. A guard plucked her out of the queue and beat her raw.

"Raw," Shoshanna says, "her buttocks were raw."

Shoshanna dragged Lilli off to show her buttocks to Blanka néni. Blanka néni applied salve to them wordlessly. But afterwards it was whispered that Blanka néni had let loose a torrent of invective at the camp commandant. The camp commandant himself. And would you believe, the commandant sent for the guard, chewed him out in front of Blanka néni, and transferred him to another detail?

But it could just as easily have gone the other way, Shoshanna says. Blanka néni had been lucky. She had risked her life over Lilli's buttocks.

Shoshanna looks up from her sewing. She is embroidering a smocked dress that Lilli has sent me from Montreal. "Blanka néni loved women, you know, but she was just a plain good friend to me and Lilli," she says. "That's why she is your doctor now."

Blanka néni carries a doctor bag of dark leather fastened with a metal clasp. The tools of invasion originate in this bag. Shosharma dips stubby round-tipped suppositories in vaseline before inserting them in me with infinite care. The enema bag of rust-coloured rubber has a long tube and a black nozzle that Shoshanna also dips in vaseline. Warm water courses in my insides, fills me, fills me to bursting, as the nozzle is slowly withdrawn. Gusti rushes me in his arms to the toilet down the hall.

Shoshanna bends over me, untying the rags around which my hair is tautly wound. "I hope I can disguise the bald spot," she murmurs as she combs out my hair. In the mirror, my reflection is so fetching I can barely recognize myself. Fluffy curls frame my chubby face, but Shoshanna is still not satisfied. She heats a curling iron on the stove till it's red hot. She wets the ends of my hair slightly so they sizzle at the iron's touch.

Shoshanna parts my hair at the centre and ties silk ribbons on either side of the part. She dresses me in the white smocked dress that Lilli has sent from Montreal, takes out brand-new knee socks, and laces up my freshly polished two-tone boots.

At the studio, the photographer asks Shoshanna to remove my dress and undershirt. He is a young man who makes funny faces at me and when I don't laugh takes a feather duster and touches it to my bare shoulder. That photograph will depict me with an adorable dimple, my tongue between my teeth, head screwed coquettishly around my shoulder. In the other photograph that Shoshanna sends to Lilli I'm wearing the white dress hoisted high to show my panties. My legs are crossed and a large picture book rests on my knees. I gaze at the page, serious and absorbed.

"The photographer posed her so as to disguise the extent to which her leg are bowed, " Shoshanna writes to Lilli. Her letters catalogue my many illnesses, in respites between which Shoshanna drags me to orthopaedic specialists who, though they find no fault with the shape of my legs, have diagnosed flat feet for which the treatment is customized arch supports. I sit with my feet in wet clay, ribbons of gauze wound up to my knees. Plaster moulds are taken, exercises prescribed. All this and more Shoshanna writes to Lilli who, when she finally meets me in person, will clutch me to her heart, smother me with kisses, then hold me at arm's length, her face wreathed in joyous smiles. "Ilushka, my precious," Lilli will say, "You're not a cripple after all.

I lie on the sofa for my afternoon nap. right thumb in mouth, a bunch of soft hair with which I caress my upper lip twirled around my index finger. My left hand slides surreptitiously down the back of the sofa and surfaces with more precious treasure - a secreted hairball which I transfer to my right fist. The rough canvas back of the sofa is upholstered with many additional tufts of hair.

Shoshanna threatens to have my hair shaved if I don't stop pulling it out by the handful.

I glower and say nothing. I'm not conscious of the acquisition of new hair balls. When the booty behind the sofa loses it delicious softness, I somehow obtain a fresh supply. It never hurts. Never.

Above my head the sheep are grazing beneath the benevolent eye of the mustachioed shepherd holding his staff in the landscape on the wall. On the opposite wall, a portrait of Mancika néni, Gusti's first wife, holding Évike, her baby, on her lap. I close my eyes and twirl the hair ball beneath my nose.

When I wake up, I go downstairs to play, first asking Shoshanna to lift me up so I can reach the mezuzah on the front doorpost, as Gusti has shown me to. Shoshanna obliges but without enthusiasm.

Downstairs, my friends are sweaty and hoarse from running around. I tag along as they head for church, a favourite hangout for catching your breath. The boys in the group doff their caps in the vaulted doorway. Following their example I shuck off my kerchief. I dab droplets of holy water from the font onto my forehead like the others and inhale the sweetish scent of mystery compounded of old wood and incense and must. In the chapel I cross myself and kneel. I feast my eyes on the play of sun on the stained glass. The blood-flecked statues and straining, sinewy Christ both repel and fascinate me.

Back upstairs Shoshanna confronts me at the front door. "I watched you from the window, missy. Since when does one kiss the mezuzah and then head for church?"

"I can't believe it," Shoshanna says, as she prepares supper and tempts me with sugared tomato slices. "I can't believe that the namesake of my sister Ilushka would go into church after kissing the mezuzah."

"Your Aunt Ilushka was a remarkable woman," she continues, slicing off small pieces of kolbász and placing them almost out of my reach to whet my appetite. She smiles to herself as I reach for a piece, thinking I don't notice her ploy.

Aunt Ilushka's portrait hangs out in the hall where we eat our meals when Gusti is away on business. Shoshanna continues her monologue below Ilushka's portrait during supper. "Of all my sisters, Ilushka was the most beautiful. I had a reputation for being a beauty, too, but I didn't even come close to her. Her hair was gold and her eyes green as a cat's. The artist really hasn't caught the refinement of her features, nor the flawless quality of her skin."

The original Ilushka was statuesque and large boned. Shoshanna says she was always dieting to keep her svelte figure. She lived largely on apples. Little green apples overflowed her bureau drawers and sewing baskets when she still shared a room with Shoshanna and Lilli. In the old days.

Shoshanna tells me how religious the original Ilushka was, how, after her marriage, the Rabbi sent yeshiva students to her house to eat, a privilege reserved only for the most pious families in town. I slurp my cocoa noisily and punch holes in my bread with my finger till Shoshanna notices and gets mad at me for playing with food.

When I come down with whooping cough, the city lies under a thick pile of snow. Blanka néni nonetheless upholds the view that fresh air is the only treatment for whooping cough. So, despite the bitter January cold, Shoshanna and I act like summer day-trippers. We climb Gellért Hill all the way to the peak. We go to the Zoo. We visit Margit Island.

On the island we follow the most exposed paths along the shoreline, for Blanka néni has decreed that wind in particular is beneficial for whooping cough. When I cough, the cold air enters my lungs with the sure thrust of a blade. Shoshanna stops at a small promontory, and tries to distract me from a bout of wheezing by pointing to a spot in the distance, a bay in the slate-coloured Danube. She says the orphanage used to be located there, the orphanage where she first met Gusti.

Absently she says, "If my parents had lived, I would have waited."

"Waited for what?" I gasp.

"Waited longer to see if Márton would come back."

"Who's Márton?"

"No-one .... I just wouldn't have taken up in such haste with your father. If my parents had lived."

"Why not?"

Shoshanna doesn't answer, doesn't tell me then of that other man, the one whose widow she thought she was when she fell in love with my father. No, she says nothing of that husband who came back from a Russian prison a few months after I was born. It won't be until I'm in my teens, as the two of us fold laundry in a suburban Canadian bedroom, a sheet pulled taut between us, that she'lI hiss, it now seems to me out of the blue, "You decided for me. The fact I got pregnant with you! That's why I didn't go back to Marton, though he still wanted me. Because you were Gusti's child, not his."

I rack my brains now trying to remember what prompted this outburst of hers. I heard it then as a piercing accusation. Still, it may have been a lament.

But way back, way way back, when we stood together on Margit Island, she didn't tell me about how I came to be born, but about how the orphans gave her her name. My mother's real name is Anna, but since that day on the island I have always thought of her as Shoshanna. That's what the orphans called her. The orphans whose hair was thick with lice. The orphans who sobbed in the night and whom she comforted. They thought the name Shoshanna suited her because of her dark hair and her dream of going to Palestine. Shoshanna was a fitting name for a pioneer. That's what she would have become if she hadn't met Gusti. She'd have gone to build a new country with her orphans.

I often dream these days of that scene on the island, of the weak sun glinting on the wave-puckered river, of the howling of the wind. Shoshanna's shoulders slump a bit, but her black hair under a jaunty red beret billows defiantly behind her. Snatches of her words swirl around me as, dressed in my woolly coat and pompommed hat, I struggle for breath. We stand together hand in hand, my mother and I. Once more I feel my fingers in their fuzzy mittens stretch to enclose her larger hand and squeeze it tight.