The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

by Daniel Mendelsohn Narrated by Bronson Pinchot

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

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Among the grainy photographs of the Mendelsohn family from the old country -- taken in a village called Bolechow, in what was then Poland but is now the Ukraine -- one stood out: that of a dapper father, a proud mother, and four daughters; on the back was the handwritten caption, "Killed by the Nazis." This was Mendelsohn's great-uncle Shmiel and his family, who met the same fate as most of the other Jews in town.

Mendelsohn recalls being told stories as a child by elderly Jews with tattoos on their arms -- stories that Daniel, a typical boy, infused with a sense of adventure and romance, but that, as a man, he felt a responsibility to investigate. The truth of what happened to each person in the photograph is appalling: shot off a plank over a mass grave, dragged from a cellar and executed, forced to watch as others' eyes are gouged out, and compelled to sit on hot stoves. This is testament enough to the incalculable horror of the Nazi occupation. What is truly unparalleled is Mendelsohn's determination to travel the globe, seeking out the few Bolechowers still alive and recording their testimonies. In the process, Mendelsohn has created a living record of a small, vanished world.

The Lost is a deeply emotional work of factual and emotional archaelogy: honest, devastating, humbling, and impossible to put down. (Holiday 2006 Selection)

Elie Wiesel

It's a vast, highly colored tapestry. Indeed, with passion and no little grit, he weaves in snippets of language, fragments of incident, fleeting names—and succeeds in assembling an immensely human tableau in which each witness has a face and each face a story and destiny. There's a survivor's son in Sweden, a relative in Israel, a peasant in Ukraine, a friend of friends in Austria: All are bound together. A reader cannot help but follow the trail breathlessly—first the suspense, doubt, surprise and, finally, the discovery. We share his anger, commend his hopes. And, when tears choke his voice, we, too, long to cry.

Despite overlong passages and a minor gaffe here and there…this is a remarkable personal narrative—rigorous in its search for truth, at once tender and exacting.
—The Washington Post

William Grimes

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, and his growing fascination with the story of Shmiel.
— The New York Times

The New Yorker

Always aware of the danger of misrepresenting his finds…Mendelsohn constructs an artful, looping narrative that includes elaborate digressions on such topics as the Hebrew Bible, Homeric narrative, and tensions within his own immediate family. The technique pays off, showing how the Holocaust continues to affect people who had no direct experience of it.

Kirkus Reviews

An American Jew undertakes a quest to find out what happened to six of his own relatives who died in the Holocaust. When he was a boy, some of Mendelsohn's older relatives would cry when he entered the room. He reminded them of his great-uncle Shmiel, who, along with his wife and four daughters, was a Holocaust victim in Poland. Though Mendelsohn (Humanities/Bard Coll.; The Elusive Embrace, 1999) took on the role of "family historian," the exact fate of the six remained unknown to him. After his grandfather's death, Mendelsohn reads a stash of letters from Shmiel that illuminates his great uncle's desperate efforts to save his family as World War II approached. Mendelsohn then puts extraordinary effort into unearthing their stories. He twice travels to Shmiel's town, now in Ukraine, and makes trips to countries including Israel, Australia and Sweden to interview relatives and other survivors. The author lets the survivors-many of whom have passed away since the interviews recounted here-unfold their own stories. Many Jews from the town were taken into the woods and machine-gunned; others were gassed. Slowly, a picture emerges of Shmiel and his family-his pride in his butcher business, the girls' attractiveness-that reclaims them from the past. His search also brings him back to his own religion-he intersperses the story with Biblical passages as a way to grapple with what happened-as well as his own brother, who travels with him. Only at the very end of his hunt, after he thinks he is finished, does Mendelsohn encounter a man who steers him to the actual house where Shmiel and one of his daughters were dragged from a cellar and shot. A forceful meditation touching on loss, memory,Jewishness and the vagaries of chance in human life.

From the Publisher

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 relatives: It brings to life the struggle of an entire generation.” — People

“Moving. . . . Proves that there are limitless ways of looking at that most inexplicable of human moments.” — Entertainment Weekly

“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

Chicago Tribune

Stunning….A work of major significance and pummeling impact.”

Entertainment Weekly

Moving…Proves that there are limitless ways of looking at that most inexplicable of human moments.”

Lee Child

A work of awful, heartbreaking, tragic suspense. A book of the decade, easily, and likely a book of the century.”

USA Today

A memorable, insightful book about what can be tragically lost—and ultimately, with persistence, found.”

Booklist (starred review)

A classicist and formidable literary critic, Mendelsohn performs extraordinary feats of factual and emotional excavation in this finely wrought, many-faceted narrative, a work best described as Talmudic…Mendelsohn’s tenacious yet artistic, penetrating, and empathic work of remembrance recalibrates our perception of the Holocaust and of human nature.”

New Yorker

[With] a spectacular trail of discoveries, disappointments, and staggering coincidences…Mendelsohn constructs an artful, looping narrative that includes elaborate digressions…The technique pays off, showing how the Holocaust continues to affect people who had no direct experience of it.”

Times (London)

[Mendelsohn] is a brilliant storyteller.”

New York Times bestselling author Elie Wiesel

An immensely human tableau in which each witness has a face and each face a story and destiny…rigorous in its search for truth, at once tender and exacting.”

Los Angeles Times Book Review

A magnificent and deeply wise book…Mesmerizing…Mendelsohn’s accomplishment is enormous.”

People (4 stars)

An excellent memoir…brings to life the struggle of an entire generation.”

The Oprah Magazine O

Beautiful and powerfully moving…As suspenseful as a detective thriller and as difficult to put down.”

Michael Connelly

A beautiful book, beautifully written.

Charles Simic

The Lost is the most gripping, the most amazing true story I have read in years. . . . Enthralling. . . . An immensely moving and beautifully written book.

Samuel G. Freedman

Stunning. . . . A singular achievement, a work of major significance and pummeling impact.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Epic and personal, meditative and suspenseful, tragic and at times hilarious, The Lost is a wonderful book.

BookForum

The Lost is a sensitively written book that constantly asks itself the most difficult questions about history and memory.

The Forward

A grand book, an ambitious undertaking fully realized.

Joyce Carol Oates

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.

Air Safety Week

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.

Michael Chabon

A beautiful book, beautifully written.

Francine Prose

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.

The Los Angeles Times Book Review

A magnificent and deeply wise book. . . . Mesmerizing. . . . Mendelsohn’s accomplishment is enormous.

J. M. Coetzee

A stirring detective work, The Lost is … deepened by reflections on the inescapable part that chance plays in history.

Ron Rosenbaum

Hugely ambitious yet intensely engaging. . . . Absorbing, novelistic. . . . Thought-provoking and original.

The Jerusalem Post

A masterpiece. . . . Daniel Mendelsohn is an astonishing writer. . . . This book for better or worse makes the Holocaust new again.

People (four stars)

An excellent memoir. . . . Essentially a detective story, The Lost winds up describing far more than Mendelsohn’s relatives: It brings to life the struggle of an entire generation.

Newsday

Riveting. . . . Recalls the recent work of Jonathan Franzen or early Joan Didion. . . . A brilliant, steely-eyed personal history.

Rebecca Goldstein

A stunning achievement. . . . Extraordinary.

Garry Wills

Mendelsohn, a classicist, creates a stunning Odyssey here, an epic world-wandering.

(four stars) - People Magazine

"An excellent memoir. . . . The Lost . . . brings to life the struggle of an entire generation."

People

An excellent memoir. . . . The Lost . . . brings to life the struggle of an entire generation.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169634662
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	08/16/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The Lost
A Search for Six of Six Million

Chapter One

The Formless Void

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 seemed 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.

Like many elderly residents of Miami Beach in those days, these people lived in apartments or small houses that seemed, to those who didn't live in them, slightly stale; and which were on the whole quiet, except on those evenings when the sound of the Red Skelton or Milton Berle or Lawrence Welk shows blared from the black-and-white television sets. At certain intervals, however, their stale, quiet apartments would grow noisy with the voices of young children who had flown down for a few weeks in the winter or spring from Long Island or the New Jersey suburbs to see these old Jews, and who would be presented to them, squirming with awkwardness and embarrassment, and forced to kiss their papery, cool cheeks.

Kissing the cheeks of old Jewish relatives! We writhed, wegroaned, we wanted to race down to the kidney-shaped heated swimming pool in back of the apartment complex, but first we had to kiss all those cheeks; which, on the men, smelled like basements and hair tonic and Tiparillos, and were scratchy with whiskers so white you'd often mistake them for lint (as my younger brother once did, who attempted to pluck off the offending fluff only to be smacked, ungently, on the side of the head); and, on the old women, gave off the vague aroma of face powder and cooking oil, and were as soft as the "emergency" tissues crammed into the bottom of their purses, crushed there like petals next to the violet smelling salts, wrinkled cough-drop wrappers, and crumpled bills. . . . The crumpled bills. Take this and hold it for Marlene until I come out, my mother's mother, whom we called Nana, instructed my other grandmother, as she handed her a small red leather purse containing a crinkled twenty-dollar bill one February day in 1965, just before they wheeled her into an operating room for some exploratory surgery. She had just turned fifty-nine, and wasn't feeling well. My grandmother Kay obeyed and took the purse with the crumpled bill, and true to her word she delivered it to my mother, who was still holding it a number of days later when Nana, laid in a plain pine box, as is the custom, was buried in the Mount Judah Cemetery in Queens, in the section owned (as an inscription on a granite gateway informs you) by the First Bolechower Sick Benevolent Association. To be buried here you had to belong to this association, which meant in turn that you had to have come from a small town of a few thousand people, located halfway around the world in a landscape that had once belonged to Austria and then to Poland and then to many others, called Bolechow.

Now it is true that my mother's mother—whose soft earlobes, with their chunky blue or yellow crystal earrings, I would play with as I sat on her lap in the webbed garden chair on my parents' front porch, and whom at one point I loved more than anyone else, which is no doubt why her death was the first event of which I have any distinct memories, although it's true that those memories are, at best, fragments (the undulating fish pattern of the tiles on the walls of the hospital waiting room; my mother saying something to me urgently, something important, although it would be another forty years before I was finally reminded of what it was; a complex emotion of yearning and fear and shame; the sound of water running in a sink)—my 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.

The Lost
A Search for Six of Six Million. Copyright © by Daniel Mendelsohn. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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