My wife’s people and mine came from a dozen different shtetls scattered across eastern Poland, White Russia and the western Ukraine. It might be possible, through diligent research, to establish just where these towns existed, some for centuries, until each and all were wiped so utterly out that it was as if they had never existed.
When I was growing up, the names of those places were rarely mentioned. It was said that so-and-so had been born “on the Other Side,” and when I was a child that was how I thought of where we came from: a place totally Other, whose nature was not to be described, only known through doubtful hints of decay, of shame, of contagious disease, of an all-encompassing malevolence.
My father’s eldest brother lied about his birthdate, not for vanity of age, but because he didn’t want people to know he was born on the Other Side.
The old zeydehs came from there — not really grandfathers to living families, just ancient, ruined-looking old men, perched like a row of buzzards on a bench outside the shul on the High Holidays, cackling in Yiddish, rubbing snuff on their sore gums and offering you a pinch, holding out the tin in broken fingers.
In 1948, when I was six, my Uncle Abe’s “baby brother” appeared, a Displaced Person straight from the Other Side: a forty-year-old man with a shy, sweet smile and the bloodless, incurved look of someone in remission from cancer. His visit was brief. He had to go to Montreal, Canada; the American government...
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