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The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million By Daniel Mendelsohn HarperCollins, 2006 512 pages, $27.95
Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost is the story of his search for six relatives, his grandfather's brother's family, who were killed in the Holocaust. The search is ocean-going and slow to unfold-held back, yet pushed on by its watery domain. The book presents a handful of memories from a handful of survivors and witnesses, many over 80, from one Polish town. Yet even the mealiest of recollections carry a mystery-and it is this mystery about what might have happened to the six that has aggrieved others and consumes Mendelsohn. The book is a testament to, and an enactment of, the trappings of memory's rituals: how we linger, defend, indulge, and exhaust what we hope to believe about the past, and what we must relinquish as speculation. To plumb its depth, Mendelsohn must reawaken the dormant yet simmering ache of the Jews, re-grieve their loss, if the book is to be true. Author and story are so interdependent that the family's vanishing is indistinguishable from Mendelsohn's elegiac memorial to them.
Among the several juxtaposed narratives-essay, reflection, Old Testament history and analysis, scenes from Mendelsohn's childhood and search today-are two stories, one supposed, the other actual. The primary story is what happened to the author's great uncle Shmiel Jäger, his wife, and their four daughters in their hometown of Bolechow, Poland-today part of Ukraine. As a boy in the 1960s, the author heard only that Shmiel, his wife Ester, and Lorka, Ruchele, Bronia, and Frydka were "killed by the Nazis." (Sometimes the core detail is changed: first they raped them, then they killed them.) No one knew the whole truth, and no one would ever know. The suspicion of gas chamber or firing squad was too painful to dwell on.
Early in his quest, Mendelsohn...