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"I know that Ruchele had to have been born after September 3, 1923... I know this because Eastern European Jews only name their children after their dead... I and my four siblings are named after dead relatives, just as my grandfather and his six siblings were, and because of this practice people who are interested in Jewish genealogy have a remarkably reliable method of determining certain dates if the information is otherwise lacking... '
"I know for a fact that Shmiel's daughter Ruchele Jager had to have been born after the death of her father's and my grandfather's sister; The first Rachel Jager born in 1896, the doomed bride whose tragic and unexpected death, also horribly premature, would later become, over the course of many years, my families' greatest story, a mythic narrative at whose heart, or so I believe, stands an even older legend about closeness and distance, intimacy and violence, love and death, that first of all legends, first of all myths, about how easily we come to kill those to whom we are closest. '
(Daniel Mendelshohn is referring to CAIN and ABEL here, from the Old Testament/Torah. His book is masterful and, if he does nothing else in his life, this is an accomplishment of a lifetime.)
THE LOST
A search for six of six million
C 2006
Daniel Mendelsohn HarperCollins Publishers
