The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
by Daniel Mendelsohn
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Book Summary Information
Author: Daniel MendelsohnEdition: Paperback
Published: 2007-09-01
ISBN: 0060542993
Number of pages: 528
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Book Reviews of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Book Review: A Tour de Force
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the best and most treasurable books on the subject of memory and the Holocaust, this is a book in particular of and for the second generation, the children and grand-children of Holocaust survivors who bear--like Mendelsohn who, spitting image of his murdered great-uncle Shmiel the subject of this book, could make his older relatives cry just by walking into the room--so much of the burden of memory and loss. I won't repeat the premise of the book which has been amply covered by the other reviewers, except to add that this book in many ways is designed as a kind of Citizen Kane of Holocaust literature, in which the author finds witnesses who tell their stories, each a slightly different refraction as though through a prism of an ultimately unknowable truth, and thereby pursues the many threads of a mystery buried in the recesses of the past in order to discover, reveal and clarify, to bring closure and permit one to live on. In doing so, the author gives a final, and enduring dignity to the lives of his great-uncle and family who would otherwise have disappeared into oblivion with the simple epitaph, "killed by the Nazis." The writing is very personal, but to see it as self-indulgent as some reviewers have suggested, is mistaken. This is a personal quest as much as it is an archeology, and the author's mental landscape is thus very much a part of the unraveling, and in light of his erudition and expert writing, highly enriching. Yes, the reading demands patience, but that is the nature of a quest, whose value lies as much, if not primarily, in the process--in the arduousness of the pilgrimage, as it were--as much as in the attainment of the destination. A survivor remarks, in one of the vignettes, "There were the Egyptians with their pyramids. There were the Incas of Peru. And there was the Jews of Bolechow." Every personal tragedy is all-encompassing for the one who endures it, every loss of an individual the loss of a world. It is a tribute to the powers of the author that he makes us care--very much--about the life, and the death, of the Jews in the town of Bolechow more than half a century ago, sitting astride modern history, leaving but faint traces in the memories and the lives of the survivors, of a great, vanished civilization.
Summary of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost is the deeply personal account of a search for one family among his larger family, the one barely spoken of, only to say they were "killed by the Nazis." Mendelsohn, even as a boy, was always the one interested in his family's history, but when he came upon a set of letters from his great uncle Schmiel, pleading for help from his American relatives as the Nazi grip on the lives of Jews in their Polish town became tighter and tighter, he set out to find what had happened to that lost family. The result is both memoir and history, an ambitious and gorgeously meditative detective story that takes him across the globe in search of the lost threads of these few almost forgotten lives.A whole culture lies behind the story Mendelsohn tells, and a lifetime of reading as well. For our Grownup School feature, he has given us a tour of some of the books behind his own, in a list he calls 10 Great Novels of Family History, the Holocaust, New York Jewish Life (And Other Things That Helped Me Write My Book). And you can watch his own moving introduction to the book in this short video:
 Watch Daniel Mendelsohn introduce The Lost: high bandwidth or low bandwidth |
In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic—part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work—that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history.
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