The potential of History-more notes on Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost

Ancient stories from the Torah serve Mendelsohn in The Lost,his account of his search for ancestors lost in the Holocaust. Like a Greek chorus, they comment directly and indirectly upon his search story as it unfolds and the family stories he gradually uncovers.

Mendelsohn does this most effectively when he uses the Adam and Eve story to highlight the pain and pleasure that comes in acquiring knowledge. He recounts Adam and Eve's story while he tells of gathering the first fruits of his own family research. In both cases, knowledge proves a curse and blessing. Mendelsohn's knowledge blesses him by connecting him with people he presumed lost. When a near contemporary of Shmeil's daughters "acts out" how he once upon a time greeted Shmeil's ten year old daughter Bronia, hearing this old man's recollection of the moment comes close to bringing the moment back for Mendelsohn. It's as if the recollection transports Mendelsohn back to the streets of Bolechow as they existed in 1939.

However, as he grows in knowledge of his family, along with connection, Mendelsohn experiences pain. There's the pain of the truth; his family met a horrific end. There's also the pain unique to knowledge: as Mendelsohn's reading of the Adam and Eve story points out, knowledge inevitably makes you aware ignorance and the likelihood you'll never bridge it. With knowledge, you come to know what you wish to know and are not likely to ever know. In hearing an old man vividly recall his greeting to a ten year old girl, to hear him say it again with the inflection and tone he used, is to come awful close to bringing a moment back. Conversely, this very proximity also points to the gaping hole in the almost recalled moment.

In searching for his family, in his focus on the past, Mendelsohn like all historians is after something. As with all historians, he's after something definitive: an object, a letter, a location that is linked to people from the past. Yet, this something definitive is meant to serve as a tool, a bridge, to something of a more indefinite nature. The object(s) the historian gathers ideally transport him of her out of their contemporary selves and into the selves of another time and place. Oral testimony of witnesses can perform the same function, as it does when Mendelsohn hears a contemporary of his mother's cousin Frydka recount how the young girl confided her love of a Polish boy to her. Mendelsohn had heard this fact from a few people prior, who had heard it second-hand. Hearing of Frydka's love, from someone Frydka told, brought the truth of the fact home to Mendelsohn. He experienced how, "a single human memory can catapult you to a specific and now irretrievable point in space and time"(357).

Unlike professional historians, Mendlesohn's history is motivated by a family instinct. I didn't grow up in a culture of family like Mendelsohn's and I perhaps presume in commenting upon it. But, from reading his book, one gathers that family is a means of extending ones self and ones time beyond natural boundaries. In family-centered cultures like Mendelsohn's, individuals live on in the memory of their descendants. They are re-membered every time they are remembered.

This notion of extending one's life in the memory of descendants is even hinted at by perhaps casual turns of rhetoric. Thus, on the back of a photograph of himself taken on his 44th birthday, Uncle Shmeil writes that the picture was taken "Im 44 lebensjahr," which Mendelsohn deftly points out literally translates out as 'in the 44th year of life'. Shmeil may have a set number of lebensjahr, or years of life, but in so far as he's remembered afterward he has years beyond that. As a presently living member of such a family, Mendelsohn quest to uncover the lost history of his ancestors is as much an obligation as it is a seeking after knowledge for its own sake. In doing the work by which he remembers Shmeil, Mendelsohn adds years to his life. And, family does this for one another. Someone will do it for Mendelsohn, one presumes. It is an expression of a family's love for one another.

Beyond this, his search seems driven by a real yearning, born of love, a quasi-mystical hope that the process of knowing history will transport him to the past and he can become one with his relatives who died. To an uncertain but palpable extent, he can feel their pain, their anxiety, their suffering.

To stretch a point, it almost seems that in a family-centered culture like Mendelsohn's, Mendelsohn's work at remembering is what's expected, and presuming it yields a kind of comfort. One's descendants as well as one's ancestors will possibly be with you at moments of joy and at moments of suffering. Near the end of the book, when Mendelsohn finally locates with some certainty the location where Frydka and Shmeil were shot, it is as if he believes he will join them there, at that moment. Joining them, he will be able to share it, and their end wont be as lonely as it is horrible. But, alas...this doesn't quite prove to be the case.

Yet, Mendelsohn remembers for History's sake. To the extent that History must be composed of stories, the past he unearths stymies his attempt to write history. According to Mendelsohn, stories have specific features: their narratives proceed according to an orderly, cause and effect flow of time; stories have hero's and villains; essential elements (personality, locations, sequences) of the story must be known/spoken of with a certaintyl; stories must assume certain narrative shapes and patterns for them to appeal. The past he uncovers refuses to conform.