The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.

Mendelsohn, Daniel (author).

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As a boy, Mendelsohn was not only entranced by the stories his grandfather told about growing up in the little Galician town of Bolechow but also attuned to the sorrow that shadowed every tale: his grandfather’s oldest brother, Shmiel, his wife, and their four daughters had been killed by the Nazis. So affected was Mendelsohn by his legacy, he eventually embarked on a quest to find out exactly what happened to his six lost relatives. 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. Autobiography is entwined with revelatory commentary on the Torah, while his affecting chronicle of his journeys to Israel, Australia, Stockholm, Vienna, and, most movingly, Bolechow itself set the stage for Mendelsohn’s sometimes perplexing, always intense conversations with his newly discovered cousins. Shmiel, Ester, Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele, and Bronia gradually come into focus, as does a shocking vision of the hell Bolechow became as neighbors tortured and murdered neighbors. Mendelsohn’s tenacious yet artistic, penetrating, and empathic work of remembrance recalibrates our perception of the Holocaust and of human nature.