Be Specific About Books Conducive To The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Original Title: | The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million |
ISBN: | 0060542977 (ISBN13: 9780060542979) |
Edition Language: | English |
Literary Awards: | Prix Médicis Etranger (2007), National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography (2006), Βραβείο Λογοτεχνικής Μετάφρασης ΕΚΕΜΕΛ for Αγγλόφωνη Λογοτεχνία (2011), LIRE Meilleur Livre de l' Année (2007) |
Daniel Mendelsohn
Hardcover | Pages: 512 pages Rating: 4.08 | 5063 Users | 656 Reviews

Mention About Books The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Title | : | The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million |
Author | : | Daniel Mendelsohn |
Book Format | : | Hardcover |
Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
Pages | : | Pages: 512 pages |
Published | : | September 19th 2006 by Harper (first published 2006) |
Categories | : | Nonfiction. History. World War II. Holocaust. Autobiography. Memoir. War. Biography |
Relation Toward Books The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic—part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work—that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history. The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust—an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates. That quest eventually takes him to a dozen countries on four continents and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the small Ukrainian town where his family's story began, and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him. Deftly moving between past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with childhood memories of a now-lost generation of immigrant Jews and provocative ruminations on biblical texts and Jewish history, The Lost transforms the story of one family into a profound, morally searching meditation on our fragile hold on the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time. *** Depuis qu’il est enfant, Daniel Mendelsohn sait que son grand-oncle Shmiel, sa femme et leurs quatre filles ont été tués, quelque part dans l’est de la Pologne, en 1941. Comment, quand, où exactement ? Nul ne peut lui en dire plus. Et puis il découvre ces lettres désespérées écrites en 1939 par Shmiel à son frère, installé en Amérique, des lettres pressant sa famille de les aider à partir, des lettres demeurées sans réponse... Parce qu’il a voulu savoir ce qui s’est passé, parce qu’il a voulu donner un visage à ces six disparus, Daniel Mendelsohn est parti sur leurs traces, rencontrant, année après année, des témoins épars dans une douzaine de pays. Cette quête, il en a fait un livre, puzzle vertigineux, roman policier haletant, plongée dans l’Histoire et l’oubli – un chef-d’œuvre. « Daniel Mendelsohn a écrit une œuvre puissamment émouvante sur le passé " ; perdu " ; d’une famille, qui rappelle à la fois l’opulence des œuvres en prose de Proust et les textes elliptiques de W.G. Sebald. Une réussite exceptionnelle. » Joyce Carol Oates « Les Disparus est une bouleversante enquête de détective à part entière, doublée d’un questionnement sur les interventions énigmatiques de Dieu dans les affaires humaines, et approfondie par une réflexion sur la part d’inéluctable et d’incompréhensible que le hasard introduit dans l’Histoire. » John Maxwell Cœtzee « Entre épopée et intimité, méditation et suspense, tragédie et hilarité, Les Disparus est un livre merveilleux. » Jonathan Safran Fœr « Mendelsohn réussit à assembler un tableau immensément humain dans lequel chaque témoin a un visage et chaque visage une histoire et un destin. » Elie WieselRating About Books The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Ratings: 4.08 From 5063 Users | 656 ReviewsCrit About Books The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
The two teenage girls at the right in the back row in this picture are my paternal grandmother and her sister. Their parents and grandfather are in the front row. The picture was taken around 1900. A few years later, my grandmother, rebellious and politically inclined, left the small town in Poland and came, alone, to the United States. She was one of the very few members of her family to escape the Holocaust. Like many American Jews, I don't know precisely what happened to my relatives. DanielA friend of mine gave me her copy of this book, telling me I should read it because of the intimacy my own life has had in recent years to the Holocaust. My boyfriend's grandparents were both Holocaust survivors who emigrated to the US after the war. The book focuses on one man's search to find out more about 'the lost,' six members of his family (an aunt, uncle, and four cousins) who perished in the war, but no one knows exactly how. He travels to multiple countries over several years
The idea of the book is deeply touching: to give a posthumous life to a few among the millions who perished in the Holocaust. The book, however, struck me as too long and too drawn out and the Biblical references as unnecessary. The strength of this book is to make us stop considering the death of a butcher and his family in a small village in Poland as irrelevant in the great scheme of things, because it does matter. In fact, it is the very sad and gripping "banality" of the story that makes us

Both intricate and precise, intimate and broad-ranging, with layers underneath layers, a major accomplishment. Early on I was irked by the use of repetition and circularity but was richly rewarded once I had acclimated to the nonlinear loops of thought and exploration--which is not to say the book feels in any way disorderly or disorienting. The writer is a meticulous guide through the rigors and pathos of his search. The meta-textual analysis of Torah passages, which punctuates the chapters,
There may just be a vertical hierarchy in our popular understanding of the Holocaust. At the top, however uneasy, are the Survivors: it is through their testimony that we know to never forget. Their is also a measure of merit in having outwitted or simply survived the minatory machinations of the Nazis. below them are the victims, particularly present when the doltish ask "why they went like sheep, why they didnt fight back, why they didnt heed the signs in the 1930s?" Below that mound of
This was a truly remarkable story of a search undertaken to find out about the lives of six family members killed during the Holocaust. It was an exhaustive search taking the author into Poland, Israel, Denmark, and Sweden trying to piece together what constituted his family and who really were these cousins and aunt and uncle of his. It was reverting on many levels and gave the reader the insight into how the Nazis not only killed these people but took away their identities. It was as if they
This is, quite frankly, my favorite book. Ever. Ever. Ever. It is an absolute work of art, the galvanizing, almost otherworldly drive to find your ancestors, to find answers, to hunt down the truth even if it takes decades, to lay to rest those who die and to make peace with the fate of those whom you do not know. Mendolsohn is a classics professor, and he lays a mortar combining both Biblical Hebrew beginnings from Genesis and Classical Greek myth to hold together the disparate and, at times,
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