What We're Reading: The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn

I've been writing about The Lost for the past several months.

I did finally finish the book, and it turns out that once you're past the first 50 or so pages, it's an emotional drain. The whole way.

I'm glad I wove some fluffy fiction in throughout the book.

I'm also very glad I read it.

In the end, Mendelsohn finds his family. He even stands in the spot where his grandfather's brother and his daughter hid – a three-by-three basement, about eight feet deep.

For the spatially challenged among you, imagine eating, sleeping, going to the toilet, resting and everything else you could do, in your refrigerator.

With your daughter.

Or your father.

Mendelsohn is able to touch the earth where his great-uncle and his mother's cousin were shot after they were discovered.

It's a long, exhausting journey; you should take it yourself to see how he gets there.

The author spent the better part of seven years writing the book. Eight people who were instrumental to the writing died between the time Mendelsohn met them and the time the book was published. Except for one one of them – who died just before Mendelsohn was able to meet her, though he did get to speak with her on the phone.

One thing that strikes me about the book is the way Mendelsohn is able to organize the narrative for his readers. It's a long, convoluted journey. There's some fact, there's some speculation, there are a lot of contradictory stories.

Another thing that strikes me is the amount of help Mendelsohn is able to dig up. Not only from his family (between his parents' stories and his brother's photography) and his teachers (one travels with him more than once), but from total strangers – a younger man who happens to be studying the Jews of the area from which his family came carts him around Poland and Ukraine, translating, for days at a time; a man who has already taken it upon himself to track down all the survivors from the area carts him around Israel, translating.

Serendipity, kindness, coincidence: these are all part of the story, and all in a big way.

The Lost Update: How to tell the story

I have promised myself never to see the film Schindler's List again.

This is not a statement on Steven Speilberg's amazing interpretation of Thomas Keanelly's rather dry – though ultimately interesting – tome.

It is not a statement on the girl in the red sweater – the only piece of color in the film.

I saw the film twice in the theater. Once was with a group of fellow Jewish high school students. We sat, immobile, in the theater after the movie, until theater personnel told us we had to leave so they could begin letting in the crowd for the next showing.

The second time was with my Irish Catholic friend B—. We were very close in high school, I was one of the very few Jewish friends he had, and it was important to him to have me along for the experience, for some cultural reference, history, conversation.

I broke down crying at the same point in both showings: when Oskar Schindler falls against his car, crying, "If I could only have saved one more."

I've read lots of books, seen lots of movies, about the Holocaust. The only two other works I've exposed myself to multiple times are the film Life is Beautiful, which I've seen twice, and Elie Wiesel's book Night, which I've read three times (once for a class).

The point is, by now, more than 60 years after the end of World War II, hundreds upon hundreds of books have been written; dozens upon dozens of films have been made; thousands upon thousands of stories have been told.

All the stories are remarkable. The individual stories of survival, the individual remembrances. All are powerful.

So how do we tell a story about the Holocaust, and make it stand out? Have we reached a saturation point? Is it possible?

Daniel Mendelsohn does address this question, although it is not his question, in The Lost.

And there's no real answer. The answer has to be, you tell your story, and hope people find it interesting.

And so that's what Mendelsohn does.

For more posts about The Lost, click here.

Living it out, The Lost and interviewing

I mentioned in my brief review of The Wanting Seed this week that it's a bleak book.

I live in Central New York, which is about the bleakest of places – not for the economic troubles, which I realize a lot of mid-sized cities are stuck with, but for the weather. We have positively lovely summers. Two months of sunshine spattered with a couple of thunderstorms.

The thing is, this area gets something on the order of 66 days of sunshine a year. And if two months of them come during the summer, well, that leaves six days of sunshine, give or take, during the other 10 months of the year.

We're in one of those stretches now, when everything is the same color. The dirty snow sits gray on the side of the road. The formerly black road pavement is rendered gray by salt. The sky is rendered gray by clouds. And the air is rendered gray by snow blowing around but never really hitting the ground.

Bleak.

It's why the thinking gets serious this time of year.

Because I don't have my copy of The Wanting Seed handy, I'm going to paraphrase from the book. The scene is two soldiers who are to head off to battle in the morning to fight an unknown enemy. "Life," says one to the other, "is about postponing death until you get to die in the manner and at the time of your choosing."

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know I've been reading The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn a little at a time, because for me, it's a very heavy book. Very heavy. I've been sprinkling in light fiction, and reading it much more quickly. Here are some previous posts about the book.

The people Mendelsohn is searching for, well, they tried to postpone death, but it didn't work. Sometime between 1942 and 1944, they were dead, and no one's exactly sure what happened – if they were there, as survivors note, they would have been dead, too.

People who don't interview others routinely think that the hardest part is coming up with questions. Depending on the interview, what's difficult varies, but unless you're talking to someone with a 15-word vocabulary, coming up with questions is pretty much never an issue.

The hardest parts of interviewing tend to be (a) getting your subject to stick to the topic you're interested in, and (b) getting your subject to trust you.

Story Corps works well – now that we have easy-to-use technology – because the interviewer and subject tend to know each other well and have an idea of what they want to talk about. In fact, they've probably practiced.

Actually, (a) tends to be most difficult when the subject has some sort of agenda – if it's a political candidate, say.

But if you walk into a stranger's house, or shake a stranger's hand across a café table, and you know you have a limited amount of time with this person, you go in expecting to have a very intense conversation about something very personal, write something you hope does the story justice, and nine times out of 10, you'll never talk to the subject again.

Mendelsohn isn't doing exactly that. He follows up with his subjects, keeps in touch with them. But here he is, sitting in a living room in Israel, listening (through a translator) to a woman talk about someone she knew 70 years ago. Listening to this woman talk about the moment she told her friend – Mendelsohn's long lost cousin he was born 30 years to late to have ever known – you better kiss me goodbye now, because God knows when we'll see each other again.

Because this woman whose living room he has invaded, this woman never told her good friend that she was going into hiding and where, because the fewer people who knew about your plans, the better chance you had of surviving, of postponing death.

Everybody has secrets, and I'm sure everybody has secrets they keep from them closest to them. But secrets that you keep because maybe those closest to you will die but you won't? If we're ever in that situation, friend, kiss me goodbye, don't tell me where you're going, and I won't tell you where I'm going.

The Lost: Photographs, memories, and conveyance

I don't take very good photos of people when they're posing. The spontaneous photos I take of people, however, tend to be really good.

I have one of my brother I love. It's at his graduation from the University of Hartford. The lighting was bad, and I decided to take without a flash – or a tripod. What resulted what his smiling face in the center of the frame, surrounded on all four sides by the golden blurs of the theater lights bouncing off the mortarboards of those students standing around him.

I have another one I really like of my friend A—. She is photographing a section of the Declaration of Sentiments in Seneca Falls, NY (see a slideshow I put together of the town). It's a black and white photo, taken from behind her and to her left. She didn't know I was taking it, and it's a positively beautiful picture.

The Lost author Daniel Mendelsohn has traveled to Australia to meet a man who dated one of his long-lost cousins, and meets, as well, others from Bolechow, the town his family came from. Among them is a woman who was a friend of another of his cousins.

Mendelsohn has been carrying around photos of the family he wants so desperately to learn about. And he discovers that what he is carrying around are photographs from someone else's memory.

Unconsciously, I think this is the reason posed photos never look right to me. It's because we're faking the memory. We're not recording something that's happening, we're recording something we've caused.

I suppose this is also why when I set about to sell photos, it surprises me which photos people want. I realize now that it's because the photos I connect to most hold some sort of meaning for me outside the photo, and even if the general mood is conveyed in the photo, the extraneous factors – whom I was with, how I felt, how they felt, what drove me to that particular location – they are all things that never make it through.

Every year Syracuse manages to track down a 60-foot Christmas tree. It sits at the edge of Clinton Square, next to the ice rink. The tree is photographed often, but I have a photo from an unusual angle at an unusual time. It's night, it's snowing, and I'm facing the tree from the middle of Erie Blvd., a full block away from the tree. It's a black and white image, and I could probably make 100 copies and be good on holiday and birthday gifts for a long time.

People love the photo; I do, too.

What the photo can't possibly convey, though, is the calm that lets one stand in the middle of a usually busy street on a weekend night. It doesn't convey the feeling that I just sat through a concert, watching my old friend S— perform while sharing a table with my new friend A—, whom S— had introduced me to. It doesn't convey the frustrated feelings of A&mdash's crushed crush that night. It doesn't convey the crush I had at the time on my new friend. There was a lot of release in that photo. A lot of release.

But not all of that needs to be conveyed in the photo, because I know there are thousands of other people who have their memories of the tree, of snow, of downtown. And the photo might mean something entirely different to them.

And that's OK.

For more posts on The Lost, click here.

Update: The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn

A lot happens in 100 pages.

As Mendelsohn progresses with his story, the language becomes first more flowery, then more friendly – he's not forcing the words anymore, he's telling a story (as opposed to setting it up).

The turning point, actually, is Mendelsohn's description of his grandfather's suicide. The story is told with admiration, and when you get done reading it, you go back and re-read it, because you're unclear on what you just read. You think you read it, then suddenly you're not sure. When you get done, it's a "holy crap!" moment.

The thing that's most striking about this is the amount of work Mendelsohn puts into this book. He flies across continents. He spends hours on the phone with strangers. He builds relationships with the parents of friends and co-workers. He learns languages.

This is not, "hey, I've got an interesting idea, I think I'll write a book."

It's not, "I think I'll try doing such-and-such and write about my experience."

This is, "I have to do this, and I will pass along the interesting bits."

Along the way, Mendelsohn is writing his own Midrash – Bible commentary. He names parts of his book after parshot – portions of the Torah (the five Books of Moses) read weekly.

The Lost is not something read, it's something experienced.

There will be an update in the not-too-distant future.

For all entries on Mendelsohn's book, click here.

What we're reading: The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn

This is going to be a long, slow read, but we'll check in with it occasionally, because it's interesting.

The Lost is Daniel Mendelsohn's search for a branch of his family that was killed during the Holocaust. He's heard stories about so many members of his family, has inquired in letters to older relatives about cousins and great-aunts and so many others.

But his Uncle Shmiel, his wife and his four daughters, decided, after emigrating to the U.S. for a time, to return to Eastern Europe, where they were subsequently killed by the Nazis.

People don't really talk about Shmiel and his family.

Due primarily to the layout of the book (small text, tiny margins) and the language (fairly formal – something you might expect from someone who regularly writes for the New York Times Book Review – which is just not something I typically read for leisure), I'm making very slow progress on it, and am reading other books simultaneously.

But like I said, it's an interesting book. I've made a note to go back and read Genesis, to try to see the people as people, rather than upright, uber-holy Biblical characters.

More on the book next week.