The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
by Daniel Mendelsohn
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Book Summary Information
Author: Daniel MendelsohnEdition: Perfect Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2006-09-19
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 528
Publisher: HarperCollins
Book Reviews of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Book Review: Mendelsohn and his elderly sources are so sympathetic; the presentation, however, asks the reader for a lot of patience
Summary: 3 Stars
There are some very important lessons in this book about what it was like to survive the Holocaust; what it was like NOT to survive; what it is like to research events relying on survivor's memories; how elusive is a true account of horrible events; what are the many forms of denial; what it is like to inherit this difficult legacy through one's own family members (and how poignant that so many of them who survived long enough for Mendelsohn to interview them died even before this work could be published!); what became of village identity when much of the population was being murdered; and many other important things.
Unfortunately, there are also lessons about the difficulties of demanding too much of your readers. This book is too ambitious when it interweaves Jewish textual interpretation with the stories of WWII survivors. And the use of photography was little more than a tease. Small photographs placed in odd spots throughout the text perhaps did make the reader study them more carefully than if they had been larger, captioned, etc., but it added to the already considerable burden of hard work to read and digest this book. I wanted to like it. I don't regret reading it. But it limits its audience (and has clearly put some readers off) by its length and complexity.
Summary of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
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 subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood.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 they were "killed by the Nazis." Mendelsohn, even as a boy, was always the one interested in his family's history, but when he came upon a set of letters from his great uncle Schmiel, pleading for help from his American relatives as the Nazi grip on the lives of Jews in their Polish town became tighter and tighter, he set out to find what had happened to that lost family. The result is both memoir and history, an ambitious and gorgeously meditative detective story that takes him across the globe in search of the lost threads of these few almost forgotten lives.
A whole culture lies behind the story Mendelsohn tells, and a lifetime of reading as well. For our Grownup School feature, he has given us a tour of some of the books behind his own, in a list he calls 10 Great Novels of Family History, the Holocaust, New York Jewish Life (And Other Things That Helped Me Write My Book). And you can watch his own moving introduction to the book in this short video:
 Watch Daniel Mendelsohn introduce The Lost: high bandwidth or low bandwidth |
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