The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (review)

At the center of the front cover of Daniel Mendelsohn’s prizewinning memoir, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, a space customarily reserved for the prominent display of a book’s title and author, there is, instead, a blank. The dazzling whiteness of the overexposed image, whose content is impossible to make out, seeps into and blurs the edges of the surrounding sepia photographs. As a result, it is not so much the readable images as the glaring absence of the central photograph that piques our attention by its refusal to reveal that which it so conspicuously obscures.

It was such an intriguing and “irritating lacuna” (42) that led Mendelsohn to undertake and embark on a systematic and extensive search for the unknown truth about the fate of his maternal great-uncle Schmiel’s family who perished in the Holocaust. Culminating in a climactic discovery about his ancestors, Mendelsohn’s highly complex and intensely engaging memoir chronicles the author’s worldwide quest for any information that would cast light on the lives and deaths of Schmiel Yaeger’s family. A gripping and moving account of Mendelsohn’s determined pursuit of his family’s history, The Lost is also an eloquent meditation on storytelling, remembering, and bearing witness to a past that we have not experienced.

Having grown up under the spell of his maternal grandfather’s stories about life in the small town of Bolechow, a home to generations of the Yaeger family, Mendelsohn had spent his youth trying to untangle and order the confounding family history that would clarify his connection to the elderly Yiddish-speaking relatives, some of whom would begin to cry every time he entered a room. Yet even after years of meticulous research, Mendelsohn, now a classicist in his forties, still confronts the tantalizing gap that had first motivated his relentless pursuit of his family’s complicated past: no one knows what had happened to the family of Schmiel, the lost Yaeger brother whom the young Daniel so uncannily resembles. Just when Mendelsohn contemplates abandoning his search, “a small number of strange coincidences, odd reminders of Bolechow, or Schmiel, or [his] family’s specific past” (43) make him consider “the possibility that the dead were not so much lost as waiting” (43).

Wryly observing that “the return to the ancestral shtetl was by now . . . cliché” (109), Mendelsohn self-consciously positions his project within, as Eva Hoffman terms it, “the growing genre of what might be called second-generation quests—attempts by children of immigrants or Holocaust survivors, to track down and apprehend a remote and often traumatic ancestral history” (2007). What distinguishes The Lost from these texts, however, is not only the generational difference—Mendelsohn belongs to the generation of grandchildren of Holocaust survivors—but also his relationship to the people whose story he sets out to reconstruct. Whereas the second-generation memoirists quest for their parents’ life stories, Mendelsohn searches for the unknown truth about Schmiel Yaeger’s family, distant relatives whom he has never personally known.

The extraordinary structural intricacy of The Lost inscribes it into the classical Greek tradition embraced by storytellers who, like Mendelsohn’s beloved grandfather, resisted the obvious narrative strategy that would seamlessly progress from beginning to end. Accordingly, Mendelsohn organizes his narrative into “vast circling loops, so that each incident, each character . . . ha[s] its own ministory, a story within a story, a narrative inside a narrative” (32). Playing on the exceptional narrative dexterity such an approach requires, Mendelsohn adds yet another layer of complexity to his text by framing each section with commentaries of individual parashot from the Book of Genesis that carefully explicate and relate key stories from the Torah to the events Mendelsohn narrates. Providing an evocative interpretative framework, these ruminative sections also map the trajectory of Mendelsohn’s deepening understanding of the Hebrew religious tradition, an understanding that challenges him to readjust what he thinks he can know about his family’s past. Still in other passages Mendelsohn...