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The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn
Book Summary InformationAuthor: Daniel Mendelsohn Edition: Perfect Paperback Audio: English (Published) Format: Bargain Price Published: 2006-09-19 ISBN: N/A Number of pages: 528 Publisher: HarperCollins
Book Reviews of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six MillionBook Review: Took me back to my own search Summary: 5 StarsDaniel Mendelsohn's book took me back to my search for my own family's history of Holocaust experiences (my grandparents were a mixed religious couple in wartime Frankfurt and my grandmother survived 18 months in the Ravensbrueck camp). Reading The Lost, once again I experienced the indescribable thrill of connecting real people and places to the fantastic stories I had heard as a child. I also found the author's description of the capriciousness and luck involved in any successful quest of this kind to be right on the mark (only a chance encounter prevented him from turning away from discovering his ultimate goal). A great story and a must read for anyone contemplating a project of this kind.
Victor Lerch - Author of "Four Wheels to Freedom: A Tale of Survival in Hitler's Germany"
Summary of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million 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. The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust—an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates. That quest eventually takes him to a dozen countries on four continents, and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the small Ukrainian town where his family's story began, and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him. Deftly moving between past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with childhood memories of a now-lost generation of immigrant Jews and provocative ruminations on biblical texts and Jewish history, The Lost transforms the story of one family into a profound, morally searching meditation on our fragile hold on the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time. 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 |
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