What happened to 'The Lost'?

Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes

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As a boy growing up on Long Island, Daniel Mendelsohn loved stories his Orthodox Jewish grandfather told about the ancestral home in the Ukrainian shtetl of Bolechow and relatives who left it for Israel and America.

But, over the years, Mendelsohn's curiosity grew about those who didn't leave Bolechow -- great-uncle Shmiel Jager, a prominent butcher, his wife, Ester, and their "four beautiful daughters." He realized the stories about them never went beyond the whispered epitaph "killed by the Nazis."

As if their fate alone said it all.

It didn't for Mendelsohn, whose new book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, recounts in sometimes numbing but mostly riveting detail his five-year odyssey in search of what happened to these six who perished in the Holocaust.

Trying to recover identities from the anonymous mass graves of Eastern Europe, the author studied old photos, prowled online genealogy sites and badgered elderly kin for anything they might remember.

Mendelsohn's detective-like mission became an obsession. But it didn't come to life -- for him or in the book -- until he visited Bolechow, and then Australia, Israel, Sweden and elsewhere, to talk to survivors of the Nazi "aktions" in Bolechow.

The personalities and age-challenged memories of these remarkable old people, the author narrates masterfully. They become the lifeblood of the book, making it more intimate than just another generic Holocaust tome.

But be forewarned. This isn't an easy read -- and not only because of the horrifying historic events. A classicist and literary critic, Mendelsohn overburdens the reader, especially early on, with extraneous details, digressions, repetition and a self-indulgent style he describes as "Homeric," likening it to his grandfather's storytelling.

To draw parallels to the book's themes of origins, family, betrayal and death, Mendelsohn weaves in italicized medieval Jewish interpretations of the biblical stories of Creation, Cain and Abel and the Flood. That proves more exhausting than enlightening for the reader.

But the powerful ending -- that final visit to Bolechow and the streets where Shmiel and his family lived and died -- is poignant and heart-rending enough to eclipse the excesses and turn The Lost into a memorable, insightful book about what can be tragically lost -- and ultimately, with persistence, found.

The Lost: A Search

for Six of Six Million

By Daniel Mendelsohn

HarperCollins, 528 pp., $27.95

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