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361st out of 4,072 books
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19,797 voters
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 haunte...more
"The Lost" begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunte...more
Hardcover, 512 pages
Published
September 19th 2006
by Harper
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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-phile, I was particularly in...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-phile, I was particularly in...more
8 likes · like · see review
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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 anyone...more
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,...more
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 tack t...more
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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 years interview...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 years interview...more
4 likes · like · see review
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,...more
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.
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 search, he was unsure ev...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 search, he was unsure ev...more
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...more
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...more
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 (and how easy...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 (and how easy...more
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 heavy and brutal and sad...more
This isn't one of those "miracles happen, even in the toughest of times" memoirs though...it's heavy and brutal and sad...more
Feb 05, 2009
Bookmarks Magazine
added it
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,
...more
I read this twice in the last year. It has an interesting juxtaposition of biblical and philosophical argumentation with the author's experiences seeking information about his relatives who were lost in the holocaust in Poland. Thus, I learned a lot about Jewish culture and thought while I read, as well as being able to relate to the search. I particularly thought of this book in the summer of 2012, when my brother and I found the grave marker of a relative in a tiny, ancient cemetery in the Cze...more
1 like · like · see review
An American Jew's attempt to find out via research exactly what happened to six family members who were killed in the Holocaust.
Even for a Holocaust narrative, this is a particularly brutal story. It's not about the banality of evil or about people rationalizing genocide because they are only signing a paper rather than looking someone in the eye and killing them with their own hands. It's about ordinary people given permission to personally commit horrific acts of violence against people they'v...more
Even for a Holocaust narrative, this is a particularly brutal story. It's not about the banality of evil or about people rationalizing genocide because they are only signing a paper rather than looking someone in the eye and killing them with their own hands. It's about ordinary people given permission to personally commit horrific acts of violence against people they'v...more
2 likes · like · see review
Auschwitz.
Dachau.
Buchenwald.
Those names alone should ring of horrific crimes to the least historically inclined.
Ravensbruck. Sachsenhausen. Natzweiler. Those too, although lesser known, ring of the same horror.
Perhaps the name Mengele brings it to mind. Or perhaps just Hitler.
Beginning with the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht, the pogroms against the Jews are widely recognized to have begun in November 1938. Before the Holocaust, upwards of 7.3 million Jews lived in occupied Europe. By t...more
Dachau.
Buchenwald.
Those names alone should ring of horrific crimes to the least historically inclined.
Ravensbruck. Sachsenhausen. Natzweiler. Those too, although lesser known, ring of the same horror.
Perhaps the name Mengele brings it to mind. Or perhaps just Hitler.
Beginning with the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht, the pogroms against the Jews are widely recognized to have begun in November 1938. Before the Holocaust, upwards of 7.3 million Jews lived in occupied Europe. By t...more
The author's very personal journey to find the stories of 6 members of his family who were killed in Poland during the Holocaust has much to offer about the bigger picture as well. He tells the story much like his grandfather told stories, looping forward and back, away from what you thought was the main action and then back again. We learn about life in a small Polish town before the war and the hell that visited there during the war. But we also learn about the first section of the Torah and i...more
What's to think? It's to feel. This book is just like Mendelsohn's thrilling criticism, in which he wrestles to the ground something around which received opinion mercilessly swirls (phew! I didn't end with the adverb!) Mendelsohn is never a debunker, or a smartypants, but someone who insists on making the journey of discovery on his own. All his work is heroic, and he feels his way forward in the dark. The Lost of the title are both the endless millions in Europe and six of his very own, who ne...more
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 Homer. But it's als...more
Dec 05, 2011
Alyson
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
anyone with a very long attention span and an interest in WWII Polish Jews
Recommended to Alyson by:
Linda Crawford
Shelves:
2011,
non-fiction
(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 tell the story of hi...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 tell the story of hi...more
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 even remember what it wa...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 even remember what it wa...more
Apr 30, 2011
Judy
added it
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 hi...more
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...more
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 nam...more
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 brother, a professiona...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 brother, a professiona...more
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 by its own...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 by its own...more
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 search for the lost 6, h...more
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, run-on senten...more
While I was aggravated by phrase-happy, run-on senten...more
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 few chapters, because they typic...more
I usually have a hard time with most non-fiction books, my attention drifting after a few chapters, because they typic...more
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 there exist some subject...more
Proving that there exist some subject...more
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| Great read | 4 | 21 | Dec 09, 2012 04:42am |
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“Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.”
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7 people liked it
“As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and beautifully economical evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the past we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. (...) Still, perhaps that's the pagan, the Hellenist in me talking. (Rabbi Friedman, by contrast, cannot bring himself even to contemplate that what the people of Sodom intend to do to the two male angels, as they crowd around Lot's house at the beginning of the narrative, is to rape them, and interpretation blandly accepted by Rashi, who blithely points out thta if the Sodomites hadn't wanted sexual pleasure from the angels, Lot wouldn't have suggested, as he rather startingly does, that the Sodomites take his two daughter as subsitutes. But then, Rashi was French.)
It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator's inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel's command to Lot's family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful -which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandoned and lost forever, precisely the way in which, say, relatives who are dead are always somehow more beautiful and good than those who still live- then it seems clear that Lot and his family are commanded not to look back at it not as a punishment, but for a practical reason: because regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempts to make a new life, which is what Lot and his family now must do, as Noah and his family once had to do, as indeed all those who survive awful annihilations must somehow do. This explanation, in turn, helps explain the form that the punishment of Lot's wife took- if indeed it was a punishment to begin with, which I personally do not believe it was, since to me it seems far more like a natural process, the inevitable outcome of her character. For those who are compelled by their natures always to be looking back at what has been, rather than forward into the future, the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks, if not the author of Genesis, knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless, so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.”
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4 people liked it
More quotes…
It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator's inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel's command to Lot's family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful -which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandoned and lost forever, precisely the way in which, say, relatives who are dead are always somehow more beautiful and good than those who still live- then it seems clear that Lot and his family are commanded not to look back at it not as a punishment, but for a practical reason: because regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempts to make a new life, which is what Lot and his family now must do, as Noah and his family once had to do, as indeed all those who survive awful annihilations must somehow do. This explanation, in turn, helps explain the form that the punishment of Lot's wife took- if indeed it was a punishment to begin with, which I personally do not believe it was, since to me it seems far more like a natural process, the inevitable outcome of her character. For those who are compelled by their natures always to be looking back at what has been, rather than forward into the future, the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks, if not the author of Genesis, knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless, so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.”
