Volume 53, Number 15 · October 5, 2006
Back to the Beginning
By Charles Simic
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
by Daniel Mendelsohn
HarperCollins, 512 pp., $27.95
The Lost is the most gripping, the most amazing true story I have read in years. It tells about the search for six of the author's relatives and the solution to the mystery of their disappearance in the Holocaust. Daniel Mendelsohn grew up in a family troubled by their unknown fate, close to a grandfather for whom the loss of his brother, sister-in-law, and four nieces was the greatest tragedy of his life. Neither he nor anyone else had any clear idea of what happened to them. After the war, there had been vague and conflicting rumors, but nothing since. When he was a little boy, Mendelsohn writes, elder relatives at family gatherings used to burst into tears because of his resemblance to the missing Uncle Shmiel. That would start them whispering, but since they talked in Yiddish, a language the boy could not understand, when he did learn something, it was long afterward.
Review, 3806 words
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