The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million |
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| Author: | Daniel Mendelsohn |
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| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
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.
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Reviews
Amazon.com
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.
Barnes and Noble
Among the grainy photographs of the Mendelsohn family from the old country—taken in a village called Bolechow, in what was then Poland but is now the Ukraine—one stood out: that of a dapper father, a proud mother, and four daughters; on the back was the handwritten caption, “Killed by the Nazis.” This was Mendelsohn’s great-uncle Shmiel and his family, who met the same fate as most of the other Jews in town.
Mendelsohn recalls being told stories as a child by elderly Jews with tattoos on their arms—stories that Daniel, a typical boy, infused with a sense of adventure and romance, but that, as a man, he felt a responsibility to investigate. The truth of what happened to each person in the photograph is appalling: shot off a plank over a mass grave, dragged from a cellar and executed, forced to watch as others' eyes are gouged out, and compelled to sit on hot stoves. This is testament enough to the incalculable horror of the Nazi occupation. What is truly unparalleled is Mendelsohn’s determination to travel the globe, seeking out the few Bolechowers still alive and recording their testimonies. In the process, Mendelsohn has created a living record of a small, vanished world.
The Lost is a deeply emotional work of factual and emotional archaelogy: honest, devastating, humbling, and impossible to put down. (Holiday 2006 Selection)
