Pinchas and Perla wandered up through the Hudson Valley but couldn’t find a town that suited them. They stopped for a few years in Rome, but Pinchas’s tailoring business couldn’t quite support Perla and himself, let alone his baby son, Avram. In 1914, shortly after Avram was born, the family moved to Rochester, where business improved significantly. Indeed, after he finished high school Avram went to work for his father, first to learn the business and then to build on Pinchas’s good-enough success as a tailor. Together they opened a series of dry-cleaning establishments in the city.
When he was twenty-six, and almost solely on the urgings of his parents, Avram married Mina, a very nice American-born Jewish girl he’d met at the Leopold Street shul, the Rochester synagogue his parents belonged to. What everyone who knew her was struck by was that Mina, who’d been raised in an orphanage and never knew the identity of her parents, enjoyed her life so much. She whistled when she was happy and hummed when she ate something she liked. She looked like the heroine of a fairy tale. She was an inventive and instinctive cook. She loved going to the movies. She was an excellent dancer. Her many kindnesses to elderly members of the congregation were legendary. Her father-in-law, Pinchas, adored her, and Perla was effusive in her affection for the young orphan. Having no known relatives of her own, Mina quickly developed a keen interest in Bultmann family history and lore. She spent a lot of time interviewing her in-laws, asking them about their childhoods in the Ukraine and their journeys to America. In pursuit of her new passion for her husband’s genealogy, she bought large sheets of butcher paper and began inking in an elaborate family tree. Letters filled with requests for details of births, deaths, marriages, and other relevant or interesting details flew from Mina in Rochester to the large extended family of Bultmanns who were still in that part of eastern Europe that was variously Russia, Germany, Ukraine, and Poland, and to that much smaller group who’d left their homes for what they hoped would be greener pastures: the Fienbergs in Israel, the Coopersteins in Argentina, the Manns in London’s East End (they’d shortened their name soon after arriving in the 1920s), the Bultmanns in Sydney, and the Litwaks in Johannesburg. There were so many letters going out that Mina had a separate line in her monthly household budget for stationery and stamps.
And the results of her queries were impressive. Mina had to allocate more money in her budget to purchase more supplies. She accumulated so much information that she began papering the walls of what would become Mendel’s bedroom with the family tree. As the 1930s ended Mina started to notice that responses from the German/Russian/Polish/Ukrainian branch of the family slowed down to a trickle and then stopped altogether. This lack of communication became increasingly worrisome. From South Africa to Australia, from Palestine to Buenos Aires to London, the extended family, but especially Mina, the keeper of the genealogy, fretted.
When Avram and Mina read what little there was about the concentration camps in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, it seemed beyond belief that such things existed. Mendel was born on December 27, 1944; when he was a month old the Russian army liberated Auschwitz, and Mina and the rest of the Bultmann clan finally had to accept a new reality. She knew now why her letters hadn’t been answered. The relatives left behind in the shtetls of Vinkovitz and Minkovitz, most of Pinchas’s childhood friends, distant relatives he’d dredged out of his memory for Mina’s butcher-paper family tree, seemingly even Raisa, his wife, his real wife, everyone he’d ever known, had most likely died in Janowska concentration camp. It appeared there were no more Bultmanns in eastern Europe.
The Rochester Bultmanns were in shock, in denial. Pinchas and Perla died of it, Avram believed, one after another, before Mendel turned one. Mina and Avram’s joy at the arrival of their son was overwhelmed by the tidal wave of grief and loss. Mina took a thick black crayon and obliterated the names of all the family members who were gone, something she greatly regretted doing in the years to come. The wall next to Mendel’s crib was a record of a lot of death and the names of the few relatives who’d escaped Eastern Europe before the war. Mina never took the sheets of butcher paper down. It was a far cry from the Mother Goose wallpaper a different sort of family might have chosen for a child’s bedroom.
Mina went a little crazy. Though she’d never met any of the relatives who’d perished, she kept seeing pleading messages from them on license plates around Rochester. A billboard on the side of the road would signal a desperate account of starvation and hardship that only she could see. She believed that on page 27 of every book there was an encrypted description of the endless deaths of Bultmanns young and old. Finally, after she’d refused to eat, couldn’t sleep, stopped washing herself or taking care of Mendel, Avram took her first to the rabbi, who told him to take her to Strong Memorial Hospital, where the doctors treated her depression, somewhat successfully, with electric shock therapy. They couldn’t, however, ameliorate her sadness, which seeped through the Bultmanns’ house like a noxious odor. Nothing would ever cure that.
Mendel and Lydia met each other when they were twelve years old. Syracuse University implemented a summer program for “gifted and talented” kids, those who’d scored high on the standardized tests every seventh grader in the state of New York had to take. They spent two weeks living in a dorm, all expenses paid, taking introductory classes, and spending the evenings sitting around in seminars with real professors and real college students, talking about themselves and what they were studying, or else going to concerts, watching movies, and playing board games.