I don’t know what other books will eventually make the New York Times list of Ten Books of 2006, but Daniel Mendelsohn’s wondrous book — “The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million” — will be one of them.
There is not much chance of over-praising this book — not after it has already been praised in the highest terms by a pantheon of writers, including Charles Simic (“the most gripping, the most amazing story I have read in years”), Jonathan Safran Foer (“epic and personal . . . a wonderful book”), Michael Chabon (a “beautiful book, beautifully written”), Francine Prose (a “stunning memoir”), Rebecca Goldstein (a “stunning achievement”), Garry Wills (“a stunning Odyssey . . . an epic world-wandering”), Samuel G. Freedman (“stunning . . . a singular achievement, a work of major significance and pummeling impact”), J.M. Coetzee (“a stirring detective work”), Joyce Carol Oates (“a powerfully moving work . . . a remarkable achievement”), Ron Rosenbaum (“hugely ambitious yet intensely engaging”), Jean Strouse (“a gripping, beautifully written tale . . . about memory, history, the nature of truth”), and Elie Wiesel (“a remarkable personal narrative — rigorous in its search for truth, at once tender and exacting . . . deeply moving”).
It is the story of Shmiel Jager, his wife Ester, and his four young daughters, Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele and Bronia, who lived in the Polish town of Bolechow and who perished in the Holocaust — survived by Shmiel’s six younger siblings, who had left Bolechow for
And Daniel Mendelsohn, as a young boy, looked like Shmiel:
Some time ago, when I was six or seven or eight years old, it would occasionally happen that I’d walk into a room and certain people would begin to cry. The rooms in which this happened were located, more often than not, in
Miami Beach, Florida, and the people on whom I had this strange effect were, like nearly everyone in Miami Beach in the mid-nineteen-sixties, old. Like nearly everyone else in Miami Beach at that time (or so it seems to me then), these old people were Jews – Jews of the sort who were likely to lapse, when sharing prized bits of gossip or coming to the long-delayed endings of stories or to the punch lines of jokes, into Yiddish; which of course had the effect of rendering the climaxes, the points, of these stories and jokes incomprehensible to those of us who were young.
The story was lost to Mendelsohn, hidden in a foreign language, behind a veil of years and memories too painful for words. The story begins with a separate section of the
[M]y mother’s mother was not born in Bolechow, and indeed was the only one of my four grandparents who was born in the
United States: a fact that, among a certain group of people that is now extinct, once gave her a certain cachet. But her handsome and domineering husband, my grandfather, Grandpa, had been born and grew to young manhood in Bolechow, he and his six siblings, the three brothers and three sisters; and for this reason he was permitted to own a plot in that particular section of Mount Judah Cemetery. There he, too, lies buried now, along with his mother, two of his three sisters, and one of his three brothers. The other sister, the fiercely possessive mother of an only son, followed her boy to another state, and lies buried there. Of the other two brothers, one (so we were always told) had had the good sense and foresight to emigrate with his wife and small children from Poland to Palestine in the 1930s, and as a result of that sage decision was buried, in due time, in Israel. The oldest brother, who was also the handsomest of the seven siblings, the most adored and adulated, the prince of the family, had come as a young man to New York, in 1913; but after a scant year living with an aunt and uncle there he decided that he preferred Bolechow. And so, after a year in the States, he went back – a choice that, because he ended up happy and prosperous there, he knew to be the right one. He has no grave at all.
Mendelsohn has pieced together the story of Shmiel and his family, in a book that is a mystery, a detective story, an investigation, a tale with twists and turns, a reflection on families and siblings, a contemplation of the role of chance, individuals and God (and rabbis) in history, a telling and re-telling of family stories from differing perspectives and different times, an extraordinary rendering of Torah portions, a simultaneous work of autobiography and world history, a moving piece of literature that reads like a novel, a book that employs unique literary techniques (including pictures, presented with no captions, wordlessly integrated into the text in an amazing way), a record of travels over four continents to pursue the stories, a monumental work reflecting a lifetime of effort.
Ultimately it is a rescue of six people from the oblivion of history into which they (until now) had perished, enabling us to know them almost as family, and almost to comprehend the history that consumed them, as well as to know in an entirely new way those who survived. The book — to use the word used by Francine Prose, Rebecca Goldstein, Samuel G. Freedman and Gary Wills — is “stunning.”
Absolutely essential reading. (A longer excerpt from Chapter One is here).