[Cz-L] Mendelsohn's "The Lost"

This aired on National Public Radio in the U.S. last year. For more
info on the book and Mendlelsohn, go to npr.com and search for Daniel
Mendelsohn Lost. You can read an excerpt from the book, and listen to
an interview with Mendlesohn. Joanna


September 21, 2007· Last year, Daniel Mendelsohn's best-selling
memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million won a National Book
Critics Circle Award. It tells the story of his grandfather's brother,
who stayed behind in his Ukrainian town after his siblings left for
America, and later died in the Holocaust. The book has just come out
in paperback.

When he was a child, Mendelsohn's elderly Jewish relatives told
stories of family members killed in the Holocaust. As an adult, the
award-winning author and critic went on a quest with his photographer
brother Matt Mendelsohn to unearth those family members' stories from
among the millions of individual tragedies of the World War II era.

During his investigation, Mendelsohn discovered letters from the
family begging relatives in the United States to help them get out of
their Ukrainian town. He also learned that his Uncle Shmiel came to
New York in 1912 only to decide that America held no future for him.
Shmiel returned to his Ukrainian home, and it was from there that he
later wrote, increasingly frantically, to his American relatives..

Inevitably, he tells Fresh Air, "much of what happened in my research
was accidental," and the search for the stories of his family and
their town became a lesson in "the limits of memory, the almost
blurred quality that is characteristic of so many of the stories that
become the written, authoritative histories we read."

Mendelsohn says another realization came to him as he researched The
Lost.

"One of the things you get from being immersed in the study of the
Holocaust," he tells Terry Gross, is "a sense of ... the wrongness of
Europe today. You're constantly reminded ... of the bizarre absence of
these many millions of people and now, 60 years later, many more
millions of people who would have been.

"You can't get that out of your head," Mendelsohn says. "Not least
because ... so many of the physical remains, the synagogues, the
storefronts with Yiddish lettering still on the bricks ... the
ritual-bath buildings, still with Stars of David carved above the
lintels, all of these things are still there."

The evidence of a genocide, Mendelsohn says, "is still there and
nobody has bothered to clean up. And to be confronted with that is to
have brought home, in the most devastating way, both the sense of the
recentness of this event" and an overpowering awareness that "Europe
is completely other than it would have been, in a way from which it
will never recover."


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Received on 2008-12-16 14:33:37