To be alive is to have a story to tell

books:


	• The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Daniel Mendelsohn HarperCollins, 2006 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 94 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Story of Self Discovery

I gave this book only three stars , because it bills itself as a holocaust story when it is not. If this book were touted as a story of search and self discovery, it would have received five stars. The writing quality was five stars. This author is a gifted essayist. If you want to read a 500 page essay, then you will like this. Like many Jews, Mendelsohn grew up with grandparents from the old country speaking heavily accented Yiddish inflected English. They told colorful tales from their Shtetles. They told stories within stories in the Yiddish tradition. The author was most entranced with his grandfather and loved hearing his tales about growing up in Bolechow. Bolechow was a village at times part of the Ukraine and at others part of Poland not far from Lvov. All of Mendalsohns grandparents' siblings came to the states. However, one brother, Shmiel, returned to Bolechow to make his life there. He prospered, married , and had four daughters. His youngest was 13 when the nazis arrived. All six perished during WWII. With snippets of information, a few photographs, a few documents, the author goes on a mission to discover their exact fate. That is he wanted to know exactly how they lived and how and when they died. He learns that Shmiel had at least one and probably two trucks which the Nazi's coveted. He learns that the prettiest of his daughters, Frydka, was the most charismatic and lively of the girls. He learns that their Ukrainan and Polish neighbors felt a seething anti-semitism towards them. He learns that the Poles and Ukrainians often joined in the nazi brutality. So what else is new? In his search he forges a new and stronger relationship with his photographer brother, Matt, delves into biblical texts, rabbinical interpretations of those texts, and travels the globe seeking survivors from Australia, Scandinavia, Ukraine, and Israel. Along with snippets of information, mere wisps that only flesh out the characters of his search minimaly, we read his thoughts on a myriad of subjects. This author clearly wanted to enlarge the barest of historical data into a book long tome. The information he gleaned in his search could be written in no more than 20 pages. There are numerous repetitive references, descriptions of turns of phrases and meaningful glances. He digresses into comparisons between the story of Noah and Soddom and Gomorrah with the destruction and death of innocents in the Holocaust. I did not find the comparisons convincing justification for the evil perpetrated in the Holocaust. He further compared Rashi's and Friedman's interpretations of these parts of the Talmud as well as the story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Issac. He delves into the Lech lecha portion of the Talmud which was his Bar Mitzvah Torah portion. He throws in the Homerian classics like the Iliad and the Oddysey as a comparison of his journey for the truth. Over and over we get the message that the story is in the journey and not what he discovers about these 6 relatives. He quotes and refers to Proust as an ideal to whom he aspires. I have to say that I really don't care for Proust. I think his writing is entirely too verbose and flowery. Sadly, each of the six family members who perished could have been saved had his grandfather been able to provide $5000 for each of them to guarantee that they would not have become a burden on the U.S. Unfortunately, he could not. Nevertheless, it is merely academic that any of the six would have been allowed to leave Poland and get a U.S. visa at that time even if he had been able to provide the financing. Mostly, the U.S. state department was then and probably still is anti-semetic. They threw up barriers at every turn to keep Jews out of our country. History will not look kindly on them including and especially Joe Kennedy who as the English ambassodor under Roosevelt refused to give the fleeing Jews visas to the states. Roosevelt refused to allow the St. Louis to dock with its fleeing desperate Jews many of whom paid dearly to board the ship. They were the rich and educated. Yet they were returned to the ovens in Germany. Germany planned the incident and used it to prove that no one in the world really cared what he did to the Jews. For the most part he was correct. One can read Constantine's Sword to see that the Catholic church turned a blind eye. Yet instead of being a Holocaust book of great depth and information, we are led on this journey of self discovery recounted in enough detail to fill a 500 page book. Mendelsohn is a talented author. He can turn a phrase. He can make the detailed descriptions of his journey interesting to the reader. I actually think that children of survivors might find this book interesting as a suggestion of what they too might do before all the surviviors are dead. If that is what you want then you will be satisfied. Otherwise, you will be disappointed. This is not a holocaust story.

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A Tour de Force

One of the best and most treasurable books on the subject of memory and the Holocaust, this is a book in particular of and for the second generation, the children and grand-children of Holocaust survivors who bear--like Mendelsohn who, spitting image of his murdered great-uncle Shmiel the subject of this book, could make his older relatives cry just by walking into the room--so much of the burden of memory and loss. I won't repeat the premise of the book which has been amply covered by the other reviewers, except to add that this book in many ways is designed as a kind of Citizen Kane of Holocaust literature, in which the author finds witnesses who tell their stories, each a slightly different refraction as though through a prism of an ultimately unknowable truth, and thereby pursues the many threads of a mystery buried in the recesses of the past in order to discover, reveal and clarify, to bring closure and permit one to live on. In doing so, the author gives a final, and enduring dignity to the lives of his great-uncle and family who would otherwise have disappeared into oblivion with the simple epitaph, "killed by the Nazis." The writing is very personal, but to see it as self-indulgent as some reviewers have suggested, is mistaken. This is a personal quest as much as it is an archeology, and the author's mental landscape is thus very much a part of the unraveling, and in light of his erudition and expert writing, highly enriching. Yes, the reading demands patience, but that is the nature of a quest, whose value lies as much, if not primarily, in the process--in the arduousness of the pilgrimage, as it were--as much as in the attainment of the destination. A survivor remarks, in one of the vignettes, "There were the Egyptians with their pyramids. There were the Incas of Peru. And there was the Jews of Bolechow." Every personal tragedy is all-encompassing for the one who endures it, every loss of an individual the loss of a world. It is a tribute to the powers of the author that he makes us care--very much--about the life, and the death, of the Jews in the town of Bolechow more than half a century ago, sitting astride modern history, leaving but faint traces in the memories and the lives of the survivors, of a great, vanished civilization.

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could have been much better

There were parts of this book I liked a lot, but it had a lot of problems.

The book is repetitive and dwells on many useless details that do not add to any aspect of the various stories being told.

The author does not seem to be able to decide what he's doing. He says that he wants to know what happened to lost relatives but what he really wants to do is reminisce about his grandfather; visit and describe holocaust survivors without ever telling much detail of their stories; and comment upon biblical and classical texts in an effort to draw meaning from the holocaust. Although logically starting his search by visiting the town in which the relatives resided, the author apparently arrived without a plan. He randomly runs into an old woman who tells him a snippet about what she saw happen to some Jewish people. Then he leaves and spends years traveling all over the globe to talk to survivors who would have no way of knowing what happened because they left or were in hiding. In the last pages of the book he returns to the relatives' home town and again, randomly, runs into people on the street. This time he is lucky and finds someone who knows what happened. If he were really trying to find out what happened to his family, he didn't need to travel around the world to do that. He just needed to stay in town a little longer and do some investigative work.

I found the story telling precious. There are a couple of instances in which the author tells you that characters about whom he's written at length told him stories that he can't tell us. I hate being told repetitively, "I know something you don't know." It's insulting to the reader and should just be left out.

Summary: The effort to develop a greater context for the story of the author's relatives is legitimate but executed so heavy-handedly that the story of the lost relatives is diminished. A good editor with a hatchet could have cut a couple hundred pages out of this book and made it much better.

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To be alive is to have a story to tell

I am so thankful to have read this story. I read many reviews here and some seem to have missed the point completely. They definitely saw a tree or two, but the forest is really where it's at! This book, in my opinion, takes patience, just as it took patience for Mendelsohn to travel and interview all of those people along the way.

Early on I figured out that he intended to tell more than the story of those lost six. In telling their story, he was telling the story of the six million. In telling the story of these memories, he told the story of his own journey. In telling about his family he showed me things about my own family. His inclusion of scripture showed how the stories of our time are really the stories of all time. He was no great Jew - but he discovered his faith and heritage along the way. In our fast food society (no longer eating the same foods made by our grandparents and great-grandparents!) we just want the bottom line now. This story was more than just a period at the end of Uncle Schmiel's life.

I do agree the book could have used a bit of editing (so do I so I should know!) and I would have enjoyed captions on Matt's photos, but I definitely liked having them woven throughout the story. I'm not Jewish and I'm not a writer, but after reading this book I would very much like to be the main character of a good story!

"To be alive today is to have a story to tell. To be alive is precisely to be the hero, the center of a life story. When you can be nothing more than a minor character in somebody else's tale, it means that you are truly dead." This is where it's at. Mendelsohn wasn't bragging about what a great story teller he is! He just knew there was a story to tell and wanted to tell it in a different way that would teach us along the way. If you just want morbid Holocaust stories, try the evening news. This book is about life.

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Masterful and Powerful

Emotionally powerful and beautifully written, this account of the author's search for information about six relatives murdered in the Holocaust raises profound questions about the nature of historical and personal memory. The author's reconstruction of his relatives' deaths -- at the hands of SS Einsatzgruppen, gas chambers, and their own Ukrainian and Polish neighbors -- is graphic, horrific and difficult to read. But the author always emphasizes remembering his relatives' lives more than their deaths. At the heart of his story is a tale of heroism, by a Polish Catholic boy, which makes it possible for the author (and the reader) not to hate. On the negative side, the account overuses repetition, and the author frames his account with somewhat pedantic commentaries on Genesis, often having, as far as I can see, only tenuous parallels with the principal narrative. Even with these minor blemishes, this is a masterful work of Holocaust literature. I highly recommend it.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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.

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