If you look up Jakob Ehrlich you’ll probably be directed by Wikipedia and other sources either to the biography of the nominatively anglicised Jack Earle, who was a carnival sideshow performer in the early 20th century known for his extreme height, or else the Viennese Zionist Jakob Ehrlich, who died in 1938, having been beaten to death in the Dachau concentration camp.
But in January 2025, another Jakob Ehrlich died, a man in his Nineties who had lived the latter part of his life in Florida. He left behind a life fully lived, which is detailed in his slender autobiography, which I had reason to examine earlier this week.
Ehrlich, unlike his Viennese namesake, survived the Nazis. Born in Sarajevo, he was a child when they came to power and with a degree of foresight his parents fled with their children to live for some years in refugee camps in Yugoslavia and Italy. Eventually, Ehrlich moved to South America and ultimately to the United States.
In his all-too-brief account of his life, the period of the holocaust takes up chapter two of ten chapters in the text. One imagines that to a young boy, displaced repeatedly during a terrifying war, it didn’t feel much like chapter two to him at the time. And yet there were still eight chapters of his life ahead of him.
Looking at the index of Ehrlich’s text thus becomes a numerical lesson in humility, resilience, and optimism in the face of darkness. I suspect many people who find themselves in similar dark periods of their lives, darkened either by personal or geopolitical or even global circumstances, often feel apocalyptic in the moment, and struggle to imagine a brighter future.
But a lot of life revolves around refusing to accept the Chapter Twos as endings or conclusions, and also refusing to allow them to prevent future chapters from being written.
It’s perfectly possible, as Jakob Ehrlich demonstrated, to allow such moments to permanently colour your life – indeed, how could they not? – without also allowing them to be the final word.