The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn

book data

595 ratings, 4.15 average rating, 198 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		41%
4		37%
3		15%
2		4%
1		0%

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published

September 19th 2006 by HarperCollins

binding

Hardcover, 512 pages

literary awards

National Book Critics Circle Award (2006)

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 to say ...more

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10/28/07

Ukrainer rated it:

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...more 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 interested that from his childhood, Mendelsohn’s grandfather (Uncle Shmiel’s brother) teaches him that Ukrainians are the worst people alive—much worse than the Nazis themselves. Yet, when he returns to his family’s ancestral village, Mendelsohn discovers the Ukrainians there are kind and gracious.

These sections resonate with me as I, too, struggle with similar feelings (though, of course, not on such a personal level as Mendelsohn). How can I love Ukraine so much knowing many Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis?

I had an epiphany as I read Mendelsohn’s hypothesis that both Ukrainians and Jews, at this time, are at the bottom of the food chain. As such, the two groups struggle to gain ground on each other. For example, when the Russians are in power, the Jewish community is relieved because they alleviate some of its suffering. Yet, the Ukrainians are tortured at the Russian’s hands. Conversely, when the Germans take over, the Ukrainians are happy, while the Jews suffer unimaginably.

I read this section, had my epiphany, on a flight from Slovakia to France and found myself weeping on the plane.

Yet, the book also includes graphic accounts of Ukrainian abuse that is simply irreconcilable. I found myself constantly shaking my head as I read descriptions of torture—of children smashed against rocks and men’s eyes cut out. I instinctively tried to shake these images from my mind.

Although the book is long, over 500 pages, and often meanders and is repetitive, I found myself completely invested in knowing for myself what happened to Uncle Shmiel, his wife, and four daughters.

Yet, I also had a sense that Mendelsohn is disingenuous in some of his writing. For example, he shares a family narrative about his great aunt being sold into marriage. Yet, in an earlier book, Mendelsohn writes about discovering this family story is not true. He never shares this fact with the readers of The Lost. I finished the book, then, wondering if what Mendelsohn left out of the book is just as important as what he includes.(less)

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08/03/08

Marci rated it:

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 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, however, I found the book quite fascinating. I thought it was amazing that at such an early age the author became so obsessed with his family history. He wrote letters to distant aunts and uncles and had a running letter correspondence with his grandfather trying to find out what they remembered about his uncle and his family (who as I mentioned before all he really knew at first was “had been killed by the Nazis”), and interestingly enough he still didn’t find out all he could have before many of them died because he didn’t yet know what questions to ask. The curiosity eventually becomes a quest to know everything he can know about this family (his Uncle Shmiel, Aunt Ester and their 4 daughters) and takes him all around the world searching out the surviving Jews from the small town of Bolechow (he mentions how many had survived the Holocaust and I believe it was only around 30) to interview and try to piece the story of their lives back together again. One of my favorite thoughts coming from the book was toward the end when the author describes what we tend to think of losing as the result of these mass genocides or of any death really...”We tend, naturally to think first of the people themselves, the families that will cease existing, the children that will never be born; and then of the homely things with which most of us are familiar, the houses and mementoes and photographs that, because those people no longer exist, will stop having any meaning at all. But there is this too: the thoughts that will never be thought, the discoveries that will never be made, the art that will never be created. The problems, written in a book somewhere, a book that will outlive the people who wrote down the problems, that will never be solved.” The author did an excellent job at presenting his story in a way that makes you think about the Holocaust from a totally different perspective that we are used to and for that I would recommend it...just don’t give up after the first 50 pages!
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08/01/08

Ruth rated it:

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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03/14/07

Kristen rated it:

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 yea...more

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09/08/07

Lori rated it:

Read in November, 2006

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...more

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09/23/07

Chelsea rated it:

bookshelves: 2008, advance, awardwinners, history, holocaust, memoir, non-fiction, own

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 ...more

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05/28/07

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...more

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11/08/07

Marianna Evenstein rated it:

Read in November, 2007

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

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02/04/08

Robyn rated it:

(review of isbn 0060542993)

bookshelves: 2008

Read in March, 2008

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

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10/03/07

Kristin rated it:

recommends it for: Non-Squeamish History Buffs

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

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07/15/07

Kay McAdams rated it:

Read in August, 2007

recommends it for: everybody

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

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02/05/09

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,

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06/20/09

Marcy rated it:

Read in June, 2009

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...more

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05/15/09

Erin rated it:

bookshelves: favorite-nonfiction

Read in April, 2007

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

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06/07/07

Magpie Ima rated it:

Read in January, 2007

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.

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05/17/09

Kelly rated it:

(review of isbn 0060542993)

bookshelves: memoir, non-fiction

I was amazed by the concept of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. When Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, his elderly relatives would weep over his resemblance to his great-uncle Schmiel. The great-uncle, his wife and their four daughters were all killed by the Nazis. Almost sixty years after the end of the Holocaust, Mendelsohn travels the globe, searching for answers about Schmiel and his family. It’s both a resurrection of the past and a race against time, because many of the people he sp...more

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04/01/08

Sarah rated it:

bookshelves: 5-stars, 500-plus-pages, bio-diary-memoir, read-in-2008

Read in July, 2008

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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03/07/09

Sheila rated it:

I really liked this book. I nearly quit reading after 50 pages due the run on sentences and excessive use of punctuation. Some sentences are more than half a page in length and I found them difficult to read. Commas, dashes and parentheses are liberally used. I kept reading though because the premise had caught my interest.

Mendolsohn wrote the book after searching for his relatives killed during the holocaust. Because all of his family that stayed in Poland during WW2 were killed, h...more

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01/14/09

Becky rated it:

bookshelves: autobiography-biography

Read in January, 2009

This book is interesting (I have great interest in the crimes of the Holocaust) but tedious. Has anyone read it?

Okay, I wrote that while trudging through the first few chapters. After finishing "The Lost" I have to say that this was one of the most moving reads I've had in quite awhile. As I began Mendelsohn's work, I was thrown off by his style - what seemed to be run-on sentences and intricate details that I deemed useless and tedious. However, as I went on I realized...more

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12/12/08

Kay Meredith rated it:

Read in December, 2008

This book describes Daniel Mendelsohn's search for the six members of his family (his great uncle) who were lost during the Holocaust in World War II. The actual story is fascinating but the author's sentence structures are very complex and he uses commentaries from the book of Genesis to add themes to his search. As much as I know and love the book of Genesis, I found this part tedious and wanted to skim it every time.

On a positive note, we all need to remember what happened to Je...more

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"To be alive today is to have a story to tell. To be alive is precisely to be the hero, the center of a life story. When you can be nothing more than a minor character in somebody else's tale, it means that you are truly dead." More quotes...