Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

The book has had many reviews (of which I’ve only read a sprinkling) and I don’t intend to write another one, even though there is a sense that truly good books—and this is one—can be, and in effect are, reviewed again and again. Here I merely want briefly to comment on a characteristic of The Lost that I have not seen sufficiently stressed and take up some issues raised in Ruth Franklin’s review in Slate.

The characteristic I have in mind might be called structural complexity. Above all, the book is a memoir: it’s about Daniel Mendelsohn, from childhood through the complexities of that search. But because it is a memoir-with-a-theme and not an autobiography, it is about the author’s family, particularly—or almost exclusively—how it relates to the six lost. (Since that is the family of his mother, we find out practically nothing about his father.) Then it is about his growing need to know what had happened—progressive states of mind. Further and above all, it is about Mendelsohn’s many activities to find out what did happen. This becomes the story of trips and interviews and other encounters, but most important, it has him introduce a whole roster of characters who variously become involved in that search. He is very efficient or focused about that: of his siblings only one, Matt, who accompanies him on various trips and takes photographs, makes it to the status of person. Then, of course, there are the people (whose lived before Mendelsohn was born) whose lives and deaths he seeks to resurrect (an apt word never used) and the more peripheral and shadowy ones who are neighbors or killers or both. Finally, there are Mendelsohn’s reflections about all that, culminating (in the sense of “most abstractly” in accounts of Genesis and commentaries on that book of the Old Testament, including Mendelsohn’s, meant to shed a kind of symbolic light on these 20th century events. I read all those italicized passages, though I wasn’t always sure why I did.

Ruth Franklin says that Mendelsohn uses these passages about the Bible “somewhat pretentiously,” but in spite of that and other quite negative things she says, I read her review to be enthusiastically positive—cryptically so, since that positiveness is in spite of herself. Perhaps one quotation will say it all: “. . . he manages to make this moving and insightful but also self-indulgent book something of a page-turner.” We are talking about 500 pages, big ones, that consist mostly of talk and thoughts, presented in not-always-separated layers as just described; a book the forward-motion of which could not be further removed from what usually makes a page turner, as exemplified by adventure or detective stories. (Mendelsohn carefully refrains from “building up” to the final revelation, one that came about by accident, even if it was variously prodded to happen.) I was occasionally puzzled myself as to why I kept reading on, since Mendelsohn certainly did not transfer to me, in the fashion of Agatha Christie, the utter need to know just what happened to Shmiel and his family; what kept me with the narrative was ultimately his—Mendelsohn’s—story.

Ruth Franklin has essentially two beefs. First, Mendelsohn is “self-indulgent” (see above); Franklin refers, as well, to “the self-absorption that is evident throughout this bloated [but page-turning-inducing!?] memoir.” Well, it is a memoir, which is about the writer of it. I called my monster autobiography Mostly About Me, putting the matter up front. Mendelsohn puts the six killed family members in the title. Would it have been better if he had called the book, My Search for the Fate of Six Lost of Six Million instead of putting that into the subtitle?

That takes me to Franklin’s second, more serious, objection. Mendelsohn makes some comments—I hardly paid attention to them when I read the book—about the need for his kind of specificity for dealing with the Holocaust, as distinguished from the generality or, if one prefers, universality, purveyed by art. I’m with Franklin in that art can encapsulate experiences of every kind, those pertaining to the horrible events of the Shoah included. If Mendelsohn had written a treatise denying the efficacy of art—or its morality—I would enter my objections as well. Instead, he has, on the side, defended his approach, with his mission stated in the alternate title I gave to his book at the end of the previous paragraph.

Why are these exclusive alternatives—the fleshing out of specific fates and the evocation of the fate of many? Aristotle advised to look for the general in the particular. I don’t see why that should not be a very worthwhile task and why, when you do that in the way Mendelsohn does it, it should not be art as well.