Soon to be featured in the Ken Burns documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust, premiering on PBS September 18th
A New York Times Notable Book • Winner of the National Jewish Book Award • Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award • A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
"A gripping detective story, a stirring epic, a tale of ghosts and dark marvels, a thrilling display of scholarship, a meditation on the unfathomable mystery of good and evil, a testimony to the enduring power of the ancient archetypes that haunt one Jewish family and the greater human family, The Lost is as complex and rich with meaning and story as the past it seeks to illuminate. A beautiful book, beautifully written."—Michael Chabon
In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic—part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work—that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history.
The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust—an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates. That quest eventually takes him to a dozen countries on four continents and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the small Ukrainian town where his family's story began, and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him.
Deftly moving between past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with childhood memories of a now-lost generation of immigrant Jews and provocative ruminations on biblical texts and Jewish history, The Lost transforms the story of one family into a profound, morally searching meditation on our fragile hold on the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.
Soon to be featured in the Ken Burns documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust, premiering on PBS September 18th
A New York Times Notable Book • Winner of the National Jewish Book Award • Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award • A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
"A gripping detective story, a stirring epic, a tale of ghosts and dark marvels, a thrilling display of scholarship, a meditation on the unfathomable mystery of good and evil, a testimony to the enduring power of the ancient archetypes that haunt one Jewish family and the greater human family, The Lost is as complex and rich with meaning and story as the past it seeks to illuminate. A beautiful book, beautifully written."—Michael Chabon
In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic—part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work—that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history.
The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust—an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates. That quest eventually takes him to a dozen countries on four continents and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the small Ukrainian town where his family's story began, and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him.
Deftly moving between past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with childhood memories of a now-lost generation of immigrant Jews and provocative ruminations on biblical texts and Jewish history, The Lost transforms the story of one family into a profound, morally searching meditation on our fragile hold on the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.
Reviews-
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Starred review from July 24, 2006
As a boy in the 1960s, Mendelsohn could make elderly relatives cry just by entering the room, so much did he resemble his great-uncle Shmiel Jäger, who had been "killed by the Nazis." This short phrase was all Mendelsohn knew of his maternal grandfather Abraham's brother, who had remained with his wife and four daughters in the Ukrainian shtetl of Bolechow after Abraham left for America. Long obsessed with family history, Mendelsohn (The Elusive Embrace
) embarked in 2001 on a series of journeys to learn exactly what had happened to Shmiel and his family. The result is a rich, ruminative "mythic narrative... about closeness and distance, intimacy and violence, love and death." Mendelsohn uses these words to describe the biblical story of Cain and Abel, for one of the book's most striking elements is the author's recounting of the book of Genesis in parallel with his own story, highlighting eternal themes of origins and family, temptation and exile, brotherly betrayal, creation and annihilation. In Ukraine, Australia, Israel and Scandinavia, Mendelsohn locates a handful of extraordinary, aged Bolechow survivors. Especially poignant is his relationship with novelist Louis Begley's 90-year-old mother, from a town near the shtetl, an irascible, scene-stealing woman who eagerly follows Mendelsohn's remarkable effort to retrieve her lost world. B&w photos, maps. -
Los Angeles Times Book Review
"A magnificent and deeply wise book. . . . Mesmerizing. . . . Mendelsohn's accomplishment is enormous." — Los Angeles Times Book Review
"The Lost is the most gripping, the most amazing true story I have read in years. . . . Enthralling. . . . An immensely moving and beautifully written book." — Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books
"A remarkable personal narrative — rigorous in its search for truth, at once tender and exacting. It is deeply moving, often distressing, sometimes funny. . . . Mendelsohn succeeds in assembling an immensely human tableau in which each witness has a face and each face a story and destiny." — Elie Wiesel, Washington Post Book World (front cover)
"Stunning. . . . A singular achievement, a work of major significance and pummeling impact." — Samuel G. Freedman, Chicago Tribune
"Mendelsohn, a classicist, creates a stunning Odyssey here, an epic world-wandering." — Garry Wills
"Daniel Mendelsohn has written a powerfully moving work of memoirist appropriation of a "lost" family past in tones reminiscent of the richly expansive prose works of Proust and the elusive texts of W.G. Sebald—a remarkable achievement." — Joyce Carol Oates
"Epic and personal, meditative and suspenseful, tragic and at times hilarious, The Lost is a wonderful book." — Jonathan Safran Foer
"A stunning memoir. . . . Beautiful and powerfully moving. . . . As suspenseful as a detective thriller, and as difficult to put down. . . . . What makes The Lost so extraordinary is how loving it is." — O, the Oprah Magazine
"The Lost is a sensitively written book that constantly asks itself the most difficult questions about history and memory." — BookForum
"A beautiful book, beautifully written." — Michael Chabon
"The Lost is a sensitively written book that constantly asks itself the most difficult questions about history and memory." — BookForum
"A grand book, an ambitious undertaking fully realized." — Forward
"Daniel Mendelsohn has written a powerfully moving work of a "lost" family past. . . . A remarkable achievement." — Joyce Carol Oates
"A stunning achievement. . . . Extraordinary." — New York Observer
"Hugely ambitious yet intensely engaging. . . . Absorbing, novelistic. . . . Thought-provoking and original." — New York Times Book Review
"A stirring detective work, The Lost is ... deepened by reflections on the inescapable part that chance plays in history." — J. M. Coetzee
"Mendelsohn, a classicist, creates a stunning Odyssey here, an epic world-wandering." — Home & Garden
"Riveting. . . . Recalls the recent work of Jonathan Franzen or early Joan Didion. . . . A brilliant, steely-eyed personal history." — Newsday
"Extraordinary. . . . Mr. Mendelsohn, an evocative, ruminative writer, brings to life the vanished world not just of prewar Poland but also of his childhood and his extended family." — William Grimes, The New York Times
"A masterpiece. . . . Daniel Mendelsohn is an astonishing writer. . . . This book for better or worse makes the Holocaust new again." — The Jerusalem Post
"An excellent memoir. . . . Essentially a detective story, The Lost winds up describing far more than Mendelsohn's...
