Daniel Mendelsohn: "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million."

Daniel Mendelsohn is an American writer of a well-established position thanks to his 2001 autobiographical book The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity, in which he explored his sexuality, frequently referring to the homosexual code of Greek mythology. He is also an awarded regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His 2006 Book-Critics-Circle-awarded novel The Lost is another autobiographical work. In it the author records his round-the-world journey which he undertook to find out the circumstances in which his great-uncle Schmiel, his wife and four daughters were killed by the Nazis.

The decision to search for the lost members of the family was triggered by the desire to fill in the blanks in his grandfather's stories, as the narrator confesses: My grandfather told me all these stories, all these things, but he never talked about his brother and sister-in-law and the four girls, who, to me, seemed not so much dead as lost, vanished not only from the world but — even more terrible to me — from my grandfather’s stories. After his grandfather dies, Mendelsohn receives the mysterious wallet which he always saw in Grandfather's pocket, where he finds a set of letters from his great-uncle Schmiel to the family in America: his pleas and descriptions of the situation of Jews in the then Polish town of Bolechow at the onset of the Nazi terror. And so, reading Grandfather's gift as a sort of command to write the full history of the family, the narrator has produced what he calls a mythic narrative... about closeness and distance, intimacy and violence, love and death. To make sure the story sounds complete, he writes the novel in five sections named after the first five chapters of the Torah (starting with 'Bereishit' or 'Beginnings'), interweaving his narrative with the mythic narratives of the Creation, the Flood and Cain's murder of Abel, which serve here as master narratives universalizing and explaining the significance of the ordeal which Bolechow's Jews suffered from the Nazis. He interprets the story of Lot's wife as a warning that regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempt to make a new life. For those who can't help it and look back the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks ... knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.

Having signaled that the story promises no optimistic ending, he constantly doubts whether it is possible to comprehend and render properly what happened to the victims of the Holocaust. Mendelsohn states: Whatever we see in museums, the artifacts and the evidence, can give us only the dimmest comprehension of what the event itself was like... We must be careful when we try to envision ‘what it was like.’ It is possible today, for instance, to walk inside a vintage cattle car in a museum, but... simply being in that enclosed, boxlike space... is not the same as being in that space after you’ve had to smother your toddler to death and to drink your own urine in desperation, experiences that visitors to such exhibits are unlikely to have recently undergone. In order to overcome this impossibility (probably), he records an eye-witness account of A terrible episode [which] happened with Mrs. Grynberg. The Ukrainians and the Germans who had broken into her house found her giving birth... When the birth pangs started she was dragged onto a dumpster in the yard of the town hall with a crowd... who cracked jokes and jeered and watched the pain of childbirth... The child was immediately torn from her arms along with its umbilical cord and thrown — It was trampled by the crowd and she was stood on her feet as blood poured out of her with her bleeding bits hanging.

Mendelsohn's effort to give the lost six their faces ends in a partial success only, since in the novel, which is a record of his search after all, equal attention is paid to the perished members of the family and to the ramifications on the significance of the biblical stories. Moreover, every step that Mendelsohn undertakes to gain scattered pieces of information about the victims (the Internet searches, the library visits, the airplane flights to meet the survivors from Bolechow) and his own bewilderment and desire to find out the truth are treated with equal solemnity. For me - too many details and names to remember, too many threads picked up that do not contribute to the discovery of the truth, if there is any to be discovered. Hence I gave up and left one fifth of this thick volume unread. I don't know what to blame it on - is it the book's fault confirming the narrator's immobilization or is it my attitude, resembling that of Huck Finn, who initially got interested in the story of Moses but, having learned that Moses had been long dead, refused to concentrate on Miss Watson's lesson.