Daniel Mendelsohn: Salon Book Award winner Daniel Mendelsohn discusses his search for missing relatives, the "overfamiliarity" of the Holocaust, and why we should listen to our elders.
Over and over again in Daniel Mendelsohn's book "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," the author finds himself in the house of some elderly Jewish couple, or widow, of his mother's generation if not older, in various places in the world: Tel Aviv; Stockholm; Copenhagen; Sydney, Australia. There is a ritual aspect to these visits, and not only because Mendelsohn has been invited into these people's houses, cautiously or eagerly as the case may be, in order to remember the dead.
He always comes officially expecting nothing, or almost nothing -- coffee and a sandwich, at most -- and generally leaves hours later, having eaten a gigantic meal of traditional Eastern European Jewish cooking: potato pancakes, stuffed cabbage, blintzes, other things that to a goyish reader such as myself are totally unfamiliar. Someone at the gathering will observe that soon no one will be left alive who knows how to cook this food, not the way they did it back there.
So when I showed up at Mendelsohn's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on a recent morning, I made some feeble joke about expecting an enormous repast like the ones in his book, chafing dishes full of kasha fried with onions, pierogi, golaki (pronounced "gawumpkee," as you learn in "The Lost"). He smiled politely, but we both knew it wasn't funny. Mendelsohn's book is tightly focused on the stories of six of his relatives who perished in the Holocaust -- he favors that word, "perished" -- but getting to know those six people, as best we can after all these years, forces us to consider the millions of other dead we will never know, and also the astonishing fact that Jewish Eastern European culture, which had endured for centuries across good times and bad, was almost totally wiped out in four terrible years.
Mendelsohn had no pierogi. He had a fresh pot of coffee and doughnuts from the grocery store, which is pretty damn good by interview-subject standards, and we sat down in his elegantly furnished apartment to talk about "The Lost." It is an extraordinary book, entirely unlike anything else ever written about the Holocaust, and although it is the kind of book that will change people's perspectives, and perhaps inspire imitation, I cannot imagine we will see anything like it again. It is a work of avid scholarship -- Mendelsohn is after all a classics professor at Bard College -- and a true-life detective story. It is a study of how history is written and a test case of how much the history of six ordinary people can be rescued from oblivion, long after their deaths. It is a work both personal and literary, combining the passion of the memoirist, the compassion of the novelist and the dispassion of the historian. ...
Read entire article at Andrew O'Hehir at Salon.com
He always comes officially expecting nothing, or almost nothing -- coffee and a sandwich, at most -- and generally leaves hours later, having eaten a gigantic meal of traditional Eastern European Jewish cooking: potato pancakes, stuffed cabbage, blintzes, other things that to a goyish reader such as myself are totally unfamiliar. Someone at the gathering will observe that soon no one will be left alive who knows how to cook this food, not the way they did it back there.
So when I showed up at Mendelsohn's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on a recent morning, I made some feeble joke about expecting an enormous repast like the ones in his book, chafing dishes full of kasha fried with onions, pierogi, golaki (pronounced "gawumpkee," as you learn in "The Lost"). He smiled politely, but we both knew it wasn't funny. Mendelsohn's book is tightly focused on the stories of six of his relatives who perished in the Holocaust -- he favors that word, "perished" -- but getting to know those six people, as best we can after all these years, forces us to consider the millions of other dead we will never know, and also the astonishing fact that Jewish Eastern European culture, which had endured for centuries across good times and bad, was almost totally wiped out in four terrible years.
Mendelsohn had no pierogi. He had a fresh pot of coffee and doughnuts from the grocery store, which is pretty damn good by interview-subject standards, and we sat down in his elegantly furnished apartment to talk about "The Lost." It is an extraordinary book, entirely unlike anything else ever written about the Holocaust, and although it is the kind of book that will change people's perspectives, and perhaps inspire imitation, I cannot imagine we will see anything like it again. It is a work of avid scholarship -- Mendelsohn is after all a classics professor at Bard College -- and a true-life detective story. It is a study of how history is written and a test case of how much the history of six ordinary people can be rescued from oblivion, long after their deaths. It is a work both personal and literary, combining the passion of the memoirist, the compassion of the novelist and the dispassion of the historian. ...