THOMAS LARSON

(Fourth Genre Fall 2007)

Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost is the story of his search for six relatives, his grandfather's brother's family, who were killed in the Holocaust. The search is ocean-going and slow to unfold, held back yet pushed on by its watery domain. The book presents a handful of memories from a handful of survivors and witnesses, many over eighty, from one Polish town. Yet even the mealiest of recollections carry a mystery—and it is this mystery about what might have happened to the six that has aggrieved others and consumes Mendelsohn. The book is a testament to, and an enactment of, the trappings of memory's rituals: how we linger, defend, indulge, and exhaust what we hope to believe about the past and what we must relinquish as speculation. To plumb its depth, Mendelsohn must reawaken the dormant yet simmering ache of the Jews, re-grieve their loss, if the book is to be true. Author and story are so interdependent that the family's vanishing is indistinguishable from Mendelsohn's elegiac memorial to them.

Among the several juxtaposed narratives—essay, reflection, Old Testament history and analysis, scenes from Mendelsohn's childhood and search today—are two stories, one supposed, the other actual. The primary story is what happened to the author's great uncle, Shmiel Jäger, his wife, and their four daughters in their hometown of Bolechow, Poland, today part of Ukraine. As a boy in the 1960s, the author heard only that Shmiel, his wife Ester, and Lorka, Ruchele, Bronia, and Frydka were "killed by the Nazis." (Sometimes the core detail is changed: First they raped them, then they killed them.) No one knew the whole truth, and no one would ever know. The suspicion of gas chamber or firing squad was too painful to dwell on.

Early in his quest, Mendelsohn finds out that they were probably murdered, though not together, during separate German, Russian, and Ukrainian onslaughts against the Jews in Bolechow. The facts he learns about the Jägers would take no more than two pages of this 512-page book to summarize. The other 510 pages cover the perishing memories of the witness-survivors, tempered and deepened by Mendelsohn's growth as a griever through the five years and half-dozen trips to Europe, Australia, and Israel it takes him to authenticate those two pages of fact.

Of the 6,000 Jews of Bolechow, only forty-four survived, some of them hiding for months in forests, barns, and the crawl spaces of the homes of Polish sympathizers. Forty-four Bolechowers! That's 99.2% dead, the author reminds us. Added to those few are the Poles and Ukrainians who saw the local Jews' annihilation. Mendelsohn and his brother Matt, a photographer, track these folk down (all were children or adolescents then) and videotape their responses; ponderable but unrevealing photos, from then and now, dot the book. Each is plagued by some fetid horror. Each divulges little without the author's gentle nudges, repeated questions, apology-filled pressing. The intimacy he develops with the aged and their families slows but steadies the book.

Mendelsohn opens by recalling his Orthodox Jewish grandfather, Abraham, whose "devoutness" and "wonderful clothes" he cherishes. Most of Mendelsohn's maternal relatives got out of Poland and came to America before the war. Even Shmiel came, but returned, fatefully, to Poland. (That Shmiel's letters, cries for help, in 1940 were ignored or misjudged is a bitter pill Mendelsohn must swallow.) Abraham is the patriarch. Despite his fur-collared success in America, he is "always mindful of the dead." As a boy, Mendelsohn is nourished by this mindfulness. It infects his brooding and leads him, in part, to a career as a classicist, studying Greek texts and explicating the origins of our storytelling traditions. It also prepares him, like a prose Homer, to sing of the sorrow his family bears.

The Lost is a witness narrative, part of the American tale-telling tradition that includes fiction and nonfiction (Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby; Death Be Not Proud, and The Armies of the Night). But here, immersed in sixty-year-old ruminations, the author is witness to the witnesses. He could have essayed out their stories and made a much shorter book. But, to draw in and prolong our mourning, he stacks and interweaves their memories, which required his pensive absorption as listener and reflector and requires ours as readers as well. This memoirist democratizes all perspectives, and the garment he weaves is grander and heavier as a result.

The family historian must be a chorister, recording detail his interlocutors recall (in this case, smidgens) and giving them context and life. Sometimes, like a Greek chorus intruding, Mendelsohn uses repetition, as with this gem about a Polish woman: "In Ukraine, Olga had told us, They marched them two by two up this street to the cemetery. The sound of the shooting went on so long that my mother took down her old sewing machine."

The family historian must also learn how to "handle" the story he's hearing and telling. Mendelsohn’s narrative, his involvement enveloping the telling, never escapes its mournful tone, its grinding lament. We watch Mendelsohn settle into the past's incompleteness, its pull toward and its repulsion with being imagined. Will he trust the survivors' memories, some of which conflict? Will he believe the testimony of Bolechowers who, surprisingly, carry their own grudges? As he mulls and assesses, he finds few signposts. He pokes at this unreliability. "What is memory? Memory is what you remember. No, you change the story, you 'remember.' a story, not a fact. Where are the facts? There is the memory, there is the truth–you don't know, never."

Much of the emotional tension of the book occurs in Mendelsohn's musing on the limits of historical knowledge. "What we had, in a way, was a story about the problems of proximity and distance." And later, "Another way of saying this is that proximity brings you closer to what happened, is responsible for the facts we glean, the artifacts we possess, the verbatim quotations of what people said; but distance is what makes possible the story of what happened, is precisely what gives someone the freedom to organize and shape those bits into a pleasing and coherent whole."

In the backyard of a home once occupied by a Polish woman who helped keep two Jews alive, Mendelsohn, finally finds what may be the truest and most touching facts he will know about the Jägers. The details cannot be told here: suffice it to say, the betrayers outwit the saviors. There, he fills his pockets with dirt once soaked by the blood of Shmiel and Frydka. His feeling for their betrayal and murder mixed with respect for the woman and young man who hid them for a time is almost unbearable. This is what's so good about this immersed witness narrator, the ebb and flow of his judgment and love. As I read, the tide of these reactions overcomes me with rage and remorse and speaks to the genuineness of this confessional masterpiece.