The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
by Daniel Mendelsohnpublished
September 19th 2006
by HarperCollins
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binding
Hardcover, 528 pages
literary awards
2006 National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
isbn
0060542977
(isbn13: 9780060542979)
description
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 ...more
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Read in September, 2008
recommends it for:
People who like family history
I am always so impressed with people who can write about research like it was an adventure. (The book "Possession" by A.S. Byatt is an example from fiction.) This book was a crazy adventure about genealogical research, of all things. I bought a hard copy version from the bargain rack at Border's. When I read the inside cover, just quickly while I was in the store, I thought this book was fiction. I thought it was a fictional research mystery like "Possession" or even "Th...more
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Es gibt viele Bücher über den Holocaust. Auch zum Thema der durch den Holocaust geprägten Familiengeschichte gibt es mehr Bücher als ein Mensch lesen will. Das muss man nicht wissen, um Mendelsohns Buch zu lesen. Denn Mendelsohns Buch ist mehr als nur ein weiteres Buch über den Holocaust. Es ist ein Buch über Erinnerungskultur, über die Entstehung und Bewahrung von Erinnerung, über die Rekonstruktion und Konstruktion der eigenen Identität, ebensosehr wie über den Gegenstand der Erinne...more
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Read in October, 2007
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 partic...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 partic...more
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Read in January, 2008
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. Ove...more
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The Lost is a book of memories. Yet for myself, more than following the story, or grasping the immense historical/political ramifications that still exist, or allowing myself the luxury of feeling another’s loss, grief, or horror, or a million other things that we all do as writers/readers. I thought a lot about what Meldelsohn was trying to do. The language that he used, the family background he painstakingly, and at times redundantly, spoon fed us. The internal complexities of family relatio...more
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Read in July, 2008
The Lost is an absolutely stunning work recounting the author's attempts to reconstruct the story of his cousins who perished in the Holocaust.
Realizing that all those who might be able to help him in this endeavor are growing old and dying, Mendelsohn travels around the world to interview every surviving Jew of Bolechiv, Ukraine (nee Bolechow, Poland). In the process, he synthesizes the memories of these incredible people, drafting an evolving narrative of his relatives' li...more
Realizing that all those who might be able to help him in this endeavor are growing old and dying, Mendelsohn travels around the world to interview every surviving Jew of Bolechiv, Ukraine (nee Bolechow, Poland). In the process, he synthesizes the memories of these incredible people, drafting an evolving narrative of his relatives' li...more
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Mendelsohn’s epigraph to this searing memoir/detective story is, fittingly, from Proust, with whom he shares a desire to recover lost time, to capture what can never really be held. In Mendelsohn’s case, it is primarily a search to understand the lives and deaths of people he never met, relatives killed in the Holocaust. Through interviews that span the globe, Mendelsohn pieces together fragments of the lives of these six people, his grandfather’s brother’s family, and acquires a portr...more
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Read in August, 2008
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 ord...more
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Read in April, 2008
I just finished this book at lunch today. Wow! This was like a Homeric odyssey. An adventure, a traveloge, a research project and a mystery. And in the end, he learned what he hoped he would learn - WHAT happened to his family and more amazingly WHERE it happened. It was an emotional ending to the story. How even with knowing, we never truly KNOW someone else's experience of life and death and everything inbetween. And the story that his mother shared with him over the phone towards the e...more
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First, Ihave only dipped into and skimmed around in this book.
I remember when this book was first published. I had read Mendelsohn's earlier Elusive Embrace, so recognized the author's name. I recall generally favorable reviews of The Lost. I thought: this is an important book. (I do not believe that is just a manifestation of the liberal syllogism: The Holocaust is important; this book is about the Holocaust; this book is important.) I think it's important because it connects micro- an...more
I remember when this book was first published. I had read Mendelsohn's earlier Elusive Embrace, so recognized the author's name. I recall generally favorable reviews of The Lost. I thought: this is an important book. (I do not believe that is just a manifestation of the liberal syllogism: The Holocaust is important; this book is about the Holocaust; this book is important.) I think it's important because it connects micro- an...more
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Read in January, 2008
Publishers Description:
"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 subj...more
"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 subj...more
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I get the impression that Mendelsohn spent considerable time thinking about not only the structure of this book – but that which it mirrors – the structure of his thoughts…expands out to the structure of his family…to the structure of his community (religion, ethnicity, education, place, etc), to the structure of how all of that fits into history which is a construction unto itself: what stories get told, by whom, and why, what stories don’t. The silences in history also speak volumes....more
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Read in May, 2008
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, ...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, ...more
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Read in July, 2007
This was a pretty interesting book. The author goes on a mission to discover what happened to six of his family members who were killed in the Holocaust, and is kind of racing against time to find people who knew them or heard about their fate. It makes you think a lot about how, as time passes, we are losing the opportunity to hear about this tragedy from people who actually experienced it first-hand. It is easy to acknowledge how horrific the Holocaust was, but it's become almost generic an...more
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Read in February, 2007
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 inter...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 inter...more
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Read in October, 2007
Daniel Mendelsohn has been fascinated by his family tree since childhood. His grandfather was sparse with answers, and family came and left. Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, and Judaism were intertwined and confused.
The Lost is Daniel's story about a search for answers as to what happened to his great uncle, who was left behind in a small polish village.
The story takes us all over the world and introduces us to many people - all who tell a different story about what happened. Dissecting the...more
The Lost is Daniel's story about a search for answers as to what happened to his great uncle, who was left behind in a small polish village.
The story takes us all over the world and introduces us to many people - all who tell a different story about what happened. Dissecting the...more
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Read in May, 2007
recommends it for:
geneologists; interested in Holocaust; if you like memoirs
Great book. I read it a while ago so my recollection of the details is not great, but I really, really enjoyed it.
I felt very connected with the narrator, I really liked his writing style, and the biblical parallels throughout were interesting.
It is odd, but I never had been able to personally identify or imagine myself in the place of anyone who was tortured, survived, or was somehow victimized by the Holocaust, that is, before this book. I've read, I think, much more fiction written a...more
I felt very connected with the narrator, I really liked his writing style, and the biblical parallels throughout were interesting.
It is odd, but I never had been able to personally identify or imagine myself in the place of anyone who was tortured, survived, or was somehow victimized by the Holocaust, that is, before this book. I've read, I think, much more fiction written a...more
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Read in June, 2007
recommends it for:
memoir lovers/writers, genealogists, holocaust survival stories
Fascinating, detailed, local/global chronicle of one man's search for six relatives missing in the Holocaust - sixty years after the fact. Mendelsohn is both a scholar/researcher and a human being trying to wrap his mind around complex family relationships and how they may have affected the fates of individuals. It's true that this type of precision may not appeal to someone looking for a fast read - this book is DENSE, and could have been edited a little more tightly - but if you are the kind...more
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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
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The Lost is a book that is as frustrating as it is fascinating. Fascinating because the author was able to figure out what happened to his great uncle and aunt and their four daughters, who lived in the tiny Ukrainian town where Daniel Mendelsohn’s grandfather grew up. That was no small undertaking. Mendelsohn’s painstaking research is beyond impressive. And the story is an important one to read. Because of him, six murdered Jews whose story would have been lost has been preserved. Clearly, ...more
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