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 origi... read full description
reviews
Oct 28, 2007
Leanna
rated it: 
My cousin, who I have never been close to, lent me The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
on her recent visit to France. At the time, she had no idea how interested in this book I would be.
The memoir recounts Daniel Mendelsohn’s search for information about the lives and deaths of his great uncle and his family. His journey starts with only one sure fact: his Uncle Shmiel and family were killed during the Nazi occupation of eastern Poland (now Ukraine).
As a Ukraine-p More...
on her recent visit to France. At the time, she had no idea how interested in this book I would be.
The memoir recounts Daniel Mendelsohn’s search for information about the lives and deaths of his great uncle and his family. His journey starts with only one sure fact: his Uncle Shmiel and family were killed during the Nazi occupation of eastern Poland (now Ukraine).
As a Ukraine-p More...
Dec 17, 2009
Lori
rated it: 
The best thing I read last year. It took me many months to finish this book as I would get overwhelmed by the detail, but I always felt compelled to pick it back up after a breather and continue. This book made the holocaust real for me in a way nothing else, including the Washington D.C museum, has. Brilliant the way Mendelhsson addresses the vast scale of the holocaust while at the same time narrowing it down to individual people who are not heroes or villians, but a regular family like any
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Aug 03, 2008
Marci
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So, I just officially finished my book, The Lost, yesterday (big cheers for me!) and thought I’d let you know what I thought about it...I will start with what I didn’t like. It was long (500 pages – a lot for me at this point in my life!) and as I mentioned earlier a little slow at the beginning. There was a lot of detailed discussion on various stories of the Torah which was interesting at first but by the last 50 pages I had begun skipping over to go straight to the actual storyline. Overall,
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(3 people liked it)
Aug 03, 2008
Ruth
rated it: 
This is listed as being a “New York Times Bestseller.” One would think that I should have had my fill of Holocaust stories, but apparently not, as this one jumped into my hand at Borders even though I hadn’t known of its existence. It’s not an easy read. Mendelsohn never used one comma in a sentence were he could insert three or four. I was often lost in sentences wandering through parenthetical phrase after parenthetical phrase until I had to back up and take them out in turn in order to ta
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(7 people liked it)
Mar 14, 2007
Kristen
rated it:
A friend of mine gave me her copy of this book, telling me I should read it because of the intimacy my own life has had in recent years to the Holocaust. My boyfriend's grandparents were both Holocaust survivors who emigrated to the US after the war.
The book focuses on one man's search to find out more about 'the lost,' six members of his family (an aunt, uncle, and four cousins) who perished in the war, but no one knows exactly how. He travels to multiple countries over several yea More...
The book focuses on one man's search to find out more about 'the lost,' six members of his family (an aunt, uncle, and four cousins) who perished in the war, but no one knows exactly how. He travels to multiple countries over several yea More...
Dec 17, 2009
Kay
rated it:
This books takes patience and is not a quick read, but it is well worth the effort. The author makes fascinating use of the Torah to help us understand his journey into his family's past. It is a book that leaves you exhausted-- this wasn't easy to write, and I have great respect for that. The title suggests that it's about searching for the fate of 6 specific Holocaust victims, but it's about so much more than that-- memory, human nature, knowing and history, surviving after Surviving, family,
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Nov 12, 2010
S.
rated it:
This book is sad and beautiful and riveting. The story itself isn't unusual since the fate of this family was the fate of many European Jews in the Holocaust. But the author pursues the story with such loving care, and the uncovering of what happened is handled almost unbearably well. I also enjoyed how the author wove in philology/etymology and biblical reference. I loved it. I cried all over it. I forced it on my mother.
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May 30, 2008
Chelsea
rated it:
A beautifully written, evocative book. Dense, full of tangents, and telling the story of several generations across several continents.
Mendelsohn is the self-appointed family historian who, after an entire childhood of listening to his grandfather's stories, decides to find out what happened to the family members who were left out - his grandfather's brother, his wife, and their four daughters, who were "killed by the Nazis". With little more to go on (when he begins his More...
Mendelsohn is the self-appointed family historian who, after an entire childhood of listening to his grandfather's stories, decides to find out what happened to the family members who were left out - his grandfather's brother, his wife, and their four daughters, who were "killed by the Nazis". With little more to go on (when he begins his More...
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Dec 16, 2009
Nora
rated it:
half this book's wonderful - Mendelsohn's a Classics scholar at Princeton who loves myth, epics, sagas. He became obsessed with his great-uncle's family, all of whom were killed in the holocaust, and spent several years (and several thousand dollars in airplane tickets) getting at the truth of what happened to them. in between the story of his search he pauses to reflect on jewish theology, greek mythology, and the great and foundational symbols of his religion. these are the best parts - the mo
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Dec 23, 2007
Marianna
rated it:
Wow, what a moving read. This book totally reminded me of my own family history, and my own desire to re-connect with and reconstruct a world that has been almost completely lost with the generation of people who lived through the Holocaust. But this is not just another book about the Holocaust -- it's a book about the nature of memory and storytelling, about how our history determines who we are in the present and who we will become in the future. Nevertheless, I can imagine that this is not ne
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Mar 31, 2008
Robyn
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I enjoyed this book. Not so much in that it was a pleasure to read (it was slow, long winded and all around a little tough to finish), but more because it really made me question our past and the accuracy of those stories we've heard and held as true. I did not read this book for the Holocaust aspect - I think the underlying message is universal.
Mendelsohn was a little obsessive about trying to find information, but his story made me remember how easy it is to forget an entire life More...
Mendelsohn was a little obsessive about trying to find information, but his story made me remember how easy it is to forget an entire life More...
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(2 people liked it)
Oct 10, 2007
Kristin
rated it:
If you need to get a hold of me sometime in the next week, I'll be holed up in my room, trying to recover from the mini-depression caused by this book. Which is not to say the book is bad - quite the contrary - it's an interesting, enveloping story of one man's struggle to uncover the fate of his extended family; an uncle, aunt and four cousins all killed during the Holocaust.
This isn't one of those "miracles happen, even in the toughest of times" memoirs though...it's h More...
This isn't one of those "miracles happen, even in the toughest of times" memoirs though...it's h More...
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Feb 05, 2009
Daniel Mendelsohn, an award-winning book critic and author of The Elusive Embrace, tells a magnificent, heartbreaking story that toggles between past and present. Masterfully and lovingly narrated, his story extends Holocaust remembrance past the tragedy itself to rescue from oblivion the vanished world of prewar Poland. Despite the utterly compelling nature of this family history (Mendelsohn's own life included), The Lost is not an easy read. First, there's the difficult subject matter. Second,
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Dec 24, 2011
JimS
rated it:
This is one of the most excruciatingly haunting books I've ever read. It is marvelously told, the story of Daniel Mendelsohn searching for details -- specifics! -- on how six members of his family were "killed by the Nazis" during the Holocaust -- "killed by the Nazis" being about the only information he started with. This is so much more than a detective story. It's an Odyssey. Mendelsohn is a classicist by profession, and his storytelling is a loving adaption (adoption?) of
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Dec 05, 2011
Alyson
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(5 December 2011)
I have been reading this book for months. It was lent to me more than a year ago by a friend in another state, and I feel guilty that I still have it. But it isn't the sort of book you plow through. I rarely can just inhale and digest non-fiction anyway; but this one is unique in my inability to do so.
Daniel Mendelsohn is incredibly self-indulgent in the way he writes this book. The whole thing is told (appropriately, fittingly) as a Jewish grandfather might te More...
I have been reading this book for months. It was lent to me more than a year ago by a friend in another state, and I feel guilty that I still have it. But it isn't the sort of book you plow through. I rarely can just inhale and digest non-fiction anyway; but this one is unique in my inability to do so.
Daniel Mendelsohn is incredibly self-indulgent in the way he writes this book. The whole thing is told (appropriately, fittingly) as a Jewish grandfather might te More...
Jun 28, 2011
Lavonne
rated it:
This is the true story of one man’s search for six relatives lost in the Holocaust, sixty years later.
I liked the parallel of the story side-by-side with commentaries on the Torah. The sections on the Torah were dense and sometimes difficult to read, but they leant a more spiritual flare to the author’s search.
I wondered early on where his editor was, as run-on (and on and on) sentences were abundant throughout. I often had to go back to the beginning of the sentence to More...
I liked the parallel of the story side-by-side with commentaries on the Torah. The sections on the Torah were dense and sometimes difficult to read, but they leant a more spiritual flare to the author’s search.
I wondered early on where his editor was, as run-on (and on and on) sentences were abundant throughout. I often had to go back to the beginning of the sentence to More...
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Apr 30, 2011
This book by Daniel Mendelsohn was an astounding reading experience. It felt like a mixture of mystery, biography, history and thriller. I found myself so swept up in the lives of the people depicted during the harrowing years of World War II and the Holocaust, that I could hardly wait to return to the book each day after work. The author brought compassion and heart to a needle-in-a-haystack search for six family members who perished during the Holocaust. The people he met and interviewed in h
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Jan 01, 2011
Jim
rated it:
The author, who grew up on Long Island, was inspired by the memory of his grandfather and an urge to record his family history. This led him to search out, and eventually travel the globe, to find out the story of his granduncle and his wife and four children who lived in Galicia and died in the Holocaust. These were the only family members whom his grandfather hardly ever told about. Mendelsohn has a roundabout way of telling a story, with many asides, that he inherited from his grandfather. Fo
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Nov 24, 2010
Karen
rated it:
From Bereishit to Vayeira, Mendelshohn weaves together Torah study, the Holocaust, a town in the Ukraine, the stories of the 48 surviving Jews of the 6,000 who lived in that town before the war, a history of a family who were among those 6,000 Jews and his personal history in a quest for understanding the human experience of suffering. The structure and the storytelling are brilliant, although the details are occasionally tedious. I was reminded of reading Bible passages of rules or lists of n
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Nov 20, 2010
Kate
rated it:
I asked myself, while reading The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, while I was reading yet another book about the Holocaust. But I kept reading, and the answer came to me: So I'd never forget.
The author grew up hearing how much he looked like a great uncle, who'd been "killed by the Nazis". There were a few pictures of the uncle, his wife and some of the four daughters, and a few stories, and he started on a multi-year, worldwide search to find out more. His younger More...
The author grew up hearing how much he looked like a great uncle, who'd been "killed by the Nazis". There were a few pictures of the uncle, his wife and some of the four daughters, and a few stories, and he started on a multi-year, worldwide search to find out more. His younger More...
May 25, 2010
Zohar - ManOfLaBook.com
rated it:
This book is a fascinating personal journey for the author to find what has happened to six members of his family during WWII. As someone who is very interested in his own family's past I found this book enthralling and enlightening, as well as personal. The story which the author tells is authentic, rich, deep and engrossing.
The book has its flaws, in my opinion. The author weaves in narrative of rabbinical scholars which I thought distracted from the story (even though interesting More...
The book has its flaws, in my opinion. The author weaves in narrative of rabbinical scholars which I thought distracted from the story (even though interesting More...
Apr 15, 2010
Jeffrey
rated it:
I recently considered climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. I heard that it was "just a hike." After some research, i found that it is "just a hike" over 19,000 feet, and that the surface is sand like, making every step like walking uphill on a beach. Reading this book felt like that. It was a slog. In search for the stories of his family who died in the holocaust, Daniel Mendelsohn flies all over the world, from the US to Australia, Europe and Scandinavia. While he writes about his sear
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Jan 04, 2010
Pamela
rated it:
The amount of work that went into Daniel Mendelsohn's search for the stories and fates of his great uncle and his family, who were Galician Jews stuck in Europe during the Holocaust, is absolutely staggering. Mendelsohn takes pains not to over-sentimentalize their stories, and relates the facts -- just the facts, he reiterates -- as he travels to what is now the Ukraine, and around the world, to find the people who knew or knew of his family.
While I was aggravated by phrase-happy, r More...
While I was aggravated by phrase-happy, r More...
Dec 14, 2009
Jhoanna
rated it:
I wasn't looking for a book about the Holocaust, that most loaded word of words, especially here in Manhattan, where Jewish culture and arts surround and engage you like in no other place in America. But I was intrigued by the premise, the search for "six of six million"--Mendelsohn's great-uncle and his four daughters--who were "killed by the Nazis," according to family legend.
I usually have a hard time with most non-fiction books, my attention drifting after a More...
I usually have a hard time with most non-fiction books, my attention drifting after a More...
Sep 13, 2009
jordan
rated it:
Over the course of recent decades the Holocaust has become a central tool for writers groping to achieve emotional significance, creating a landfill of fiction that runs from the overwrought to the dreadful. None should think the trend unique; one need only look to the heaps of books, now thankfully unread, that featured WWI written in the 1920s and 30s. Into that strew of mediocrity arrives an author of exceptional skill with Daniel Mendelssohn's "The Lost."
Proving that th More...
Proving that th More...
Aug 06, 2009
Isabelle
rated it:
My best book of 2008 !
It begins with a survey about Daniel Mendelsohn own family story, which is part of the humanity History because it takes place during the Second World War in Eastern Europe, and this surveys leads him to meet old Jews all around the world, and meeting them enlarges the circle of his initial interest. So it begins with a little circle, then we reach a larger circle, and then another one, and then still a larger one... and it seems infinite !
He makes such exquisit More...
It begins with a survey about Daniel Mendelsohn own family story, which is part of the humanity History because it takes place during the Second World War in Eastern Europe, and this surveys leads him to meet old Jews all around the world, and meeting them enlarges the circle of his initial interest. So it begins with a little circle, then we reach a larger circle, and then another one, and then still a larger one... and it seems infinite !
He makes such exquisit More...
Aug 04, 2009
Gustine
rated it:
I would have given this 5 stars if only the author had used quotation marks!
Did the author think he's above quote marks, or did his editors talk him into this fiasco because it’s the latest "cool" trend? This stupid trend leads to complete reader confusion.
The author is searching for information about his six relatives who were killed in the Holocaust. He travels to Poland, Australia, and Sweden to interview elderly Holocaust survivors. It’s utterly engrossing… More...
Did the author think he's above quote marks, or did his editors talk him into this fiasco because it’s the latest "cool" trend? This stupid trend leads to complete reader confusion.
The author is searching for information about his six relatives who were killed in the Holocaust. He travels to Poland, Australia, and Sweden to interview elderly Holocaust survivors. It’s utterly engrossing… More...
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Jun 20, 2009
Marcy
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A young boy who becomes a man persists in his quest for knowledge as to what exactly happened to six Jewish members of his family, (out of the six million holocaust victims during World War II). He travels the world to talk to any person who knew of or personally knew those six members. Through pictures, letters, and “oral history” at its best, Daniel Mendelsohn learns as much as he can about his six family members – what they were like, who their friends were, why they stayed in Europe when
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May 15, 2009
Erin
rated it:
This is a mesmerizing and powerful book, certainly one of the best books I've read in quite a long time.
The Lost tells the true story of the author's search to discover what happened to his great-uncle's family in WWII. His relatives can say only that Schmiel, his wife Ester and their four daughters were killed by the Nazis in their small Polish town. Daniel Mendelsohn becomes obsessed with knowing more than that; he needs to have a deeper knowledge of how and when these family membe More...
The Lost tells the true story of the author's search to discover what happened to his great-uncle's family in WWII. His relatives can say only that Schmiel, his wife Ester and their four daughters were killed by the Nazis in their small Polish town. Daniel Mendelsohn becomes obsessed with knowing more than that; he needs to have a deeper knowledge of how and when these family membe More...
Jun 07, 2007
Melisa
rated it:
A good, important, moving book about a man's search for lost relatives and the impact the search has on his family--but I struggled with this book like crazy, fighting the urge to pull out my red pen. The man has a lot to say, but desperately needs an editor. I spent so much time slogging through the sloppy writing that it interfered with the content. I am glad I read it and it was worth the trouble, but I'm sure the story could have been told more nimbly.
