By JanetheWriter
Six weeks ago, in my first post to this blog, I told you that Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million was at the top of the "to read" pile on my nightstand.  Having now finished it, I can report that I have never been touched by a book in quite the same way as I was by this particular one.

Almost from the get-go, readers know that Mendelsohn's great-uncle Shmiel Jäger and his family, including his wife and four daughters were "killed by the Nazis." Save for some stories from his grandfather, Shmiel's brother, Mendelsohn knows little else. 

He spends the next 500+ incredibly well written and exceedingly engaging pages meticulously and actively searching--in Poland, Chicago, New York, Australia, Sweden, Israel, Denmark and elsewhere--to discover exactly, or at least to the extent possible, what happened to each of them at the hands of the Nazis. 

But more than that, Mendelsohn pursues a most moving search, through personal interviews with those who actually did know them, to reveal them as individuals--as an aunt, an uncle, cousins, each in their ordinariness--in Bolechow, the shtetl home of his family for generations. 

So moved was I by the telling of his tale--and its constant reminder to me of my own family's lost--that when I finished the last page, I promptly sat down and wrote the following email to Mendelsohn, a man of my own generation who is now a classicist at Bard College:

Dear Dr. Mendelsohn,
 
Bravo!  Just today, I finished reading The Lost and as a 40-something raised in the New Jersey suburbs, I was incredibly and repeatedly struck by the parallels between your life and your family's and that of my own life and family.  From the papery-skinned elderly Floridians, including your grandmother, who, like mine, was possessed of a certain cache because she was born in this country to your grandfather who instructed you to "vush your hendts" upon returning from the cemetery, so often I was, I felt, reading about and hearing the voices of my own people.  So moving was your telling of your odyssey that I had to stop reading at several points -- when you stroked Mrs. Begley's casket and again when you descended into the kestl -- to wipe away my tears.
 
Just a little over a year ago, I visited eastern Europe (Prague, Krakow, and Warsaw) for the first time, spending the better part of 10 days in echoing synagogues, in overflowing cemeteries, at Auschwitz and Birkenau, and, perhaps hardest of all, at a mass grave in the woods just outside Tikochin, a village (not unlike Bolechow, I suspect) three hours from Warsaw and two hours from the Lithuanian border. Although I did not actually visit in Lithuania, that is the place in which numerous aunts, uncles and cousins of my father lived before, as he tells it, "the letters just stopped coming."  Indeed, these relatives are lost to me and my family, making your meticulous search and your success in uncovering the fate of the Jaegers especially moving and meaningful for me. 
 
Thank you,

And now I, too, am considering a search for my family's own lost.  Although I am quite sure that such an endeavor will be neither as ambitious nor as successful as Mendelsohn's, like him, I, too, would like to know what happened to my Lithuanian cousins at the hands of the Nazis.  But more than that, I'd like to know them--as he now knows the Jägers--in all their ordinariness.

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