An Epic Search for Family

Tonight I’m going to switch gears so that I can tell you that Monday night I finished reading a stunningly realized piece of literary greatness, which that night took its rightful seat atop the list of my all time most thrilling page-turning experiences. It was one of those times when I turned the last page and shut the book and just sat there for a moment without moving or saying a word. A reading experience that affects you in such a way that you must pause and think before you can move on to the next thing. Written by The New York Review of Books contributing writer, Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million is the true story of the author’s multi-year search for the identity of one entire branch of his family tree, lost to the Nazi carnage of World War II.

As a small boy, Mendelsohn recounts at the beginning of his journey, he could make certain members of his family burst into tears simply by entering a room. This uncanny ability to make the elder generation of his relatives weep was due to nothing more than the boy's involuntary, fierce resemblance to his grandfather’s oldest brother, Shmiel. From that point in his life on, a fascination with understanding this reaction to his looks and their likeness to a man who died years before he was even born grows within him until it ultimately leads to the round-the-world voyage of discovery that makes up this mesmerizing tale.

As with any piece of literature or music or film that uses the Holocaust as the episode within which to set its scene, there is always the danger of falling prey to two guaranteed means of failure. Either the story is a too specific and sharp-focused examination of one person or small group of people; the author’s attempt to give his audience a jolting up close look at a character with whom to identify. An approach that inevitably runs the risk of undermining the enormity of the Holocaust. Or the author views the subject through a wide-focus lens in order to paint a truly grand picture of the event that ultimately failed in its participants’ attempts to bring about the total annihilation of an entire race of people. This approach ultimately leaves the reader, while surely filled with the appropriate shock and disgust, a distant and removed observer of the murder of vast amounts of faceless victims.

Mendelsohn beautifully navigates his story between these two techniques. Throughout his book, he makes it clear that his main focus is to put faces on the members of his great uncle’s family. However, in order to find out who this man was, what his wife was like, what his four daughters did for fun around their small Ukrainian town, and, most important to the author, when and how they all eventually succumbed to Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish question, the author must venture far away from his home in New York City and seek out survivors who may have at some point come in contact with his lost family members. As he slowly, many times by absolutely amazing luck, finds these marvelously described people, from Australia and Sweden to Israel and eventually the small town of Bolechow itself, and listens to all of their stories of endurance in the face of unimaginable horror, Mendelsohn begins to realize that in his efforts to uncover the specifics, he has written a book that testifies to the Holocaust as a whole. He never loses sight of the big picture, even as he hones in on the explicit details.

And most perfect of all, this quest to find these lost relatives, to try to know and understand the man who he so closely resembled as a child that he often brought people to tears, ultimately becomes for Mendelsohn a journey of self-discovery. His book is a wonderful testament to the importance of family and the idea that only through a genuine appreciation of where you came from can you ever truly know who you are.

I can’t think of a better way to spend this year’s observances of Easter and Passover than by reading a book that recognizes how special it is to be a part of a family.

Until next week, here is my hope that we all find out Shangri-La. Good night.