Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost

Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: a Search for Six of Six Million is as it's subtitle indicates an attempt to discover the histories of six individuals who perished in the Holocaust. It seeks to humanize a history that often gets lost in numbers. Mendelsohn's book is a record of his five year effort to touch and to feel an historical event, to recapture a moment in the past.

As a teenager and young adult, Mendelsohn harbored an interest in his family's history. In particular, he was fascinated his mother's family, the Jagers. Even more particularly, he was fascinated by his great uncle Shmeil Jager, his wife Ester, and their four daughters who died in the Holocaust. As a boy, the information he gathered and overheard on this family was scant and Mendelsohn naturally assumed that owing to their fate nothing further could be gathered. However, as he pushed and researched further, at one point traveling to the Jager's ancestral residence of Bolechow, a town in what is now the Ukraine (given their fate, "home" seems the wrong word for this town, despite the fact that Mendelsohn uncovers documentation establishing that the Jagers lived in Bolechow for some four hundred years), Mendelsohn discovers that his ancestors haven't quite disappeared without a trace. Indeed, his trip and his persistent and dogged research leads him to discover all sorts of documents, and more importantly, people who recall this family of six.

Mendelsohn's book is elegantly structured. He tells of his search for his family in a chronological order: the first chapter (1967-2000) details his burgeoning interest in the family and in particular Shmeil Jagers, the second chapter recounts he and his siblings journey to Bolechow in 2001, the third tells of their subsequent trip to Australia to visit folks who had lived in Bolechow and knew Shmeil and his family, the fourth of a trip to Israel to connect with yet more contemporaries of this family, and so on.

In the process of telling a contemporary story,his search for the Jagers, Mendelsohn recounts and comments on ancient Torah stories, from the Creation to Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. He cleverly weaves the two sets of stories together, so the ancient ones comment and reflect in a timely way on the more contemporary stories of his family and his search for them.

Sometimes, the ancient ones seem almost a template, and the Holocaust stories and the stories surrounding the uncovering of those stories reflections, or iterations of the ancient stories. Thus, throughout his account of the genesis of his interest in his family, Mendelsohn writes and comments upon the Torah's account of the creation of the world. As he comes to find out what he can (and what he can't) about his family, the story of Adam and Eve provides succinct reminder of the pains and pleasure of knowledge. Throughout the second chapter, alternately focused on Mendelsohn's trip to Bolechow and the relations between Shmeil and his siblings, Mendelsohn recalls and comments on the story of Cain and Abel: from whence rises murderous hate, proximity or distance? In the third chapeter, dominated by first-person recollections of the Holocaust as it unfolded in Bolechow, the author puzzles over the story of Noah and the flood: how does it make sense of a senseless tragedy?



This is clearly intended as a history. But, it's a refreshingly and self-consciously modest history governed by values and ways more common associated with story. The book tells a contemporary story but is grounded in the ancient stories of the Torah, as it unfolds according to the traditional weekly readings of the Torah.