Story versus history- Notes on Daniel Mendelsohn's "The Lost"

Earlier, in writing of Daniel Mendelsohn's history "The Lost," I wrote of Mendelsohn's contention that History is dependent on story, or narrative, despite the fact that the past often lacks elements one might suppose crucial to narrative: a certain level of detail, order, coherence, and shape. It is these elements that make story and History compelling.

His search for facts surrounding the life and death of his great Uncle Shmeil, Shmeil's wife Ester, and their four daughters (Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele, and Bronia), proves frustrating. So much seems lost. Once the Germans moved into Shmeil's hometown of Bolechow, many of the folks who survived fled or went into hiding. In both cases, there was nobody left to witness the fates of those who perished. Testimony is sparse and mostly second hand. Witnesses contradict each other, even when it comes to what would seem simple facts, such as how many daughters Shmeil and Ester had. One group of survivors insists Shmeil died in 1942, with Ester and Bronia, in Belzec concentration camp. Another set seem in a rough agreement that he joined the partisans with Frydka, and they died together at a later date. Then, there is a third story.

Providing a wonderfully concise statement of one of his book's central themes, Mendelsohn prefaces Part Four of Lost with a quote from Jose Saramago:

But the disadvantage with sources, however truthful they try to be, is their lack of precision in matters of detail and their impassioned account of events...The proliferation of secondary and tertiary sources, some copied, others carelessly transmitted, some repeated from hearsay, others who changed details in good or bad faith, some freely interpreted, others rectified, some propagated with total indifference, others proclaimed as the one, eternal and irreplaceable truth, the last of these the most suspect of all.

A proliferation of memory surrounds Frydka's short life. She is the one member of the family that all the Bolechow survivors claim to remember. Everyone's eager to talk about her. However, memories contradict a bit. She is remembered as "'a modern woman...living in the wrong time'"(298), popular with the boys, a hummingbird, as easy, as hard to get, as capable, as conniving. Recalling her stride and the way she carried her bookbag some sixty years after the fact, a contemporary of hers goes so far as to mimick the way she carried herself. Faced with this storm of memory, Mendelsohn begins to conceive of her as "the kind of girl...to whom stories and myths naturally cling"(298).

One story that emerges early on is of Frydka's love for a Polish boy (Cizko Syzmanski) and of how this boy loses his life in the course of trying to save hers. No two survivors have heard the exact same story. In some versions, she and Cizko are partisans. In another, he hides her in his house till a neighbor betrays the two. In another, he hides her at the home of a Polish art teacher. In some, she's with her father and in others she's by herself. In a couple of stories she's pregnant. One witness claims she was pregnant, but not with her lover Cizko's baby.

Speaking with a survivor and his wife about what he's discovered, Mendelsohn recalls how "because there was something about this couple that appealed to me, I wanted to say something that would please her, and would be true"(385) I think this a common impulse and one of the foibles of history.

Trying to create an acount that appeals, Mendelsohn finds himself at times tempted to render an account that has the comforting shape of story. He begins to try to work the facts he manages to glean from the various memories folks have shared with him into a resolving story. He spends a great deal of time trying to pin down and square details and testimony, in the hopes that ultimately, he will be able to tell the truth of Frydka, however partial, and the story of Frydka. That, the two will be nearly synonymous or congruous.

Referencing the temptations faced by another writer writing of her grandmother who was also a Holocaust victim, Mendelsohn writes

To become a story, the details of what happened to the grandmother, what happened in real time, in real history, to a real person, would have to be subordinated to the overall outline that already existed, for whatever idiosyncratic reasons of personality and preference and taste, in the mid of her granddaughter.(437)

He wants to tell a story; he considers the grandfather who he reveres, who "could go to the grocery store to buy a quart of milk and come back with an amazing and dramatic story to tell"(438). He even comes to the point where he thinks that while "he hadn't gotten the whole of the story...hoped for, I considered it all and I thought, It's enough. I thought, Genug is Genug"(438).

Ultimately, he resists this temptation. He comes to reject it at the moment when he comes closest to the subjects of his search, Frydka and Shmeil. In the end, he discovers with a fair degree of certainty where they were shot, and as he stands in that place, he feels the specificity of their lives and the ultimate separation of his own: "their experience was specific [Mendelsohn defines specific as: that which is particular to an individual] to them and not to me"(502). He eloquently concludes: "we do know that they were, once, themselves, specific, the subjects of their own lives and deaths, and not simply puppets to be manipulated for the purposes of a good story for the memoirs and magical-realist novels and movies"(502).