The Lost - reviewed

A Review of:

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn

Reviewed by Dan McDonald

 

            I have finished reading one of the best books I’ve ever read. Daniel Mendelsohn’s book The Lost captured my attention from the opening page to its final words, which is an accomplishment for a book a little over 650 pages long. The book begins by telling us of a boy listening attentively to his grandfather’s stories of distant places and people in the old country. The grandfather’s stories began and finished where the grandfather intended, but between beginning and end they took in a number of features and remembrances on their way to their finish. There was a story that didn’t fit the tendency of having additions. There was a story almost always cut short and filled with pain. The boy’s grandfather had a brother, Uncle Schmiel. Uncle Schmiel had a wife, and as the story goes “four beautiful daughters” in the old country in Bolechow. They were lost to the holocaust. The actual words that summed up the Grandfather’s story in a single sentence is something I felt had more of an impact on me because I read them the first time from the book. As tempting as it is to simply quote them I hope many of you learn the words in the often enough repeated sentence I am describing around those words rather than with them. A man, his wife, and their four daughters – they were the lost family of six from among a lost population of six million. There was something about the briefness of his grandfather’s stories about this family of six which inspired and haunted the boy who as an adult searched for clues wherever he could find them so he could know more about the story of Uncle Schmiel’s family. This book written by the adult version of Daniel Mendelsohn, the boy who heard the stories, is the story in part of Uncle Schmiel and his family but also a memoir of Daniel Mendelsohn’s search for clues about how this now lost family had lived, what they were like, and what were the details as horrible as they might be of their deaths.

            The book tells us of how the young man in search of the story of his grandfather’s brother’s family set up a method to his seeking the truth about the family. He would interview people who knew something of the family or knew some of the family members personally. There was a race against time for the lost family’s lives had ended more than fifty years earlier. People who actually knew them and could remember them had to be at least seventy years and older. Many had already passed away and some were losing their memories if not their lives, and in a few years all would be gone. So if he heard of someone who might have known them or had information about their lives he went and sought their permission to be interviewed and recorded. He found many who were willing. For some it was horribly painful to remember but they spoke. Maybe they spoke because they wanted to tell the story since it was getting late in life and not much longer would they be able to speak about that time. He wanted the stories to be authentic, so with each person he tried not to let information slip about what others before them had said about incidents, or things they had heard, or of what they had seen so long before that might no longer be remembered with as much clarity as if they had told the stories closer to those original days. It would be difficult to get a full story but in a few years it would be impossible to get anything of the story. With urgency the author began his search.

            In addition to discovering a story of Uncle Schmiel’s family, the village where the author’s maternal grandfather had originated became in the book the context for so many people with memories, the place where it all happened. If the Jager family had attention focused to it, then Bolechow became the unforgettable setting at the center of the story. Bolechow was a small town, along the borders of Eastern European national boundaries. It was a town where someone might be born in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, go to school in Poland, get married in Germany, go to work in the Soviet Union, and retire in Ukraine. A person could do this without ever taking a step outside of the small town of Bolechow. It had been a place where for nearly three centuries, Polish, Ukrainians, and Jews lived in equality under the law. All that ended with the coming of the Second World War.

            We are given the chance through this book of being invited on a virtual global exploration for hints at the story of Bolechow and Uncle Schmiel’s family. There are stories in Bolechow. There are stories in Scandinavia, in Denmark, Australia, Israel, and in an apartment in upper Manhattan. When the story seems to have reached a point where nothing more will be learned then a new lead emerges promising fresh information. Slowly a story of the years of the lost family and the painful era emerges. Can everything be known? No, somethings remain uncertain. If we could know everything, there would still be the emptiness of knowing that what we really crave when we hear of lost lives is that we could meet the persons living in their own human bodies, seeking simply to be themselves in front of us. History is the craving for stories of the lost that reaches a place where we can rejoice in finding something new and find sorrow in that we are not the ones who can breathe life into the dead bones.

            When Daniel Mendelsohn traveled to discover the stories, he took others with him. He credits his accompanying people with helping the search to succeed better than if he had gone alone. Some of his fellow travelers asked questions of people he hadn’t thought to ask. Sometimes his accompanying travelers would press people in ways the author would not. Perhaps something is to be learned. Search for a lost family, for meaning, for any number of things while so obviously personal is almost always better done with other travelers sharing the journey.

            One feature of the way the book’s chapters and stories are presented is an interesting parallel story within the story. The author tells the story with stories he draws from the Book of Genesis. The Genesis stories are presented with brief comments from Raschi, a Medieval Jewish commenter or Friedman, a more modern Jewish commenter. The stories from Genesis are not used to give authoritative credence to the story being developed by Mendelsohn, but are simply tapestries of human testimony and experience that seem to give a parallel décor to the story being told. We have the story of holocaust seen in the background of Noah’s flood, not necessarily a parallel message, but a story describing whole populations swept away except for a few fortunate hidden survivors. There is the story of wandering seen in Abraham, or looking back seen in Lot’s wife. It is like seeing the story with a parallel but separate story that touches on but does not equate the story the book is telling. Perhaps this is how we see times and places in history, whether family, national or global speaking to us. There is the family story, the national story, the specific time history seen in relationship to a history progressing either randomly or with purpose from the ancient lost civilizations to the yet unfolding future.

            The book presents us with a story that is haunting, painful, and yet in a strange way beautiful. The testimony of the few Jewish people who escaped Bolechow tended to be that things were complicated. It was a time when to collaborate with murderers was to seek security and to give aid to the innocent was to endanger one’s own ability to survive. It was a time when people betrayed their own and when strangers risked the very lives of their own family members in order to hide someone at least for a time until someone’s eyes saw someone bringing food to a house at night and the questions began to be asked. When authorities executed whole extended families for one member’s choice to give comfort to the refugee, it was understood why so few wished to help. It was also seen to be so amazing that some did look at their own family members and determined this is what is right I will help. In the end, the holocaust was something that involved the Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians of Bolechow. There were the Jewish police who hoped that for their service they would receive an escape from the evils of the Nazi regime. There were Poles and Ukrainians more energetic than Germans in carrying out the actions against their Jewish neighbors. But also there were Polish and Ukrainians with nothing to lose who decided to be willing to lose everything to help their neighbor in need. This all emerges from the ordinary lives of ordinary people caught up in a time where the forces of war and injustice swallowed up a village before anyone knew how to prepare a stand against what had come. It is simply spoken one of the best books I have ever read.