You will get LOST in LOST

Well, I have finally finished reading Daniel Mendelsohn's 528 page detective-adventure-memoir account Lost: The Search for Six of Six Million, written in September 2006. I have been reading this riveting narrative by this American award-winning book critic, contributing editor for Travel magazine, author and classics professor for the better part of two months. It is an incredible, deeply personal narrative of a man who had recalled hearing, lifelong, that six of his relatives were believed to have perished in the Holocaust. He had come upon a stack of old letters from an uncle, begging for help for himself, his wife and their four daughters at the onset of the early years of Nazi grip on their Polish village. Interestingly, as a boy, the author brought relatives to tears just by walking into a room because of his strong resemblance to this particular uncle. Mendelsohn's book is the coverage of his obsessive, extensive search of what really happened to this part of the family, as none of the relatives can say for certain.

He travels worldwide to unearth morsels of truth, to acquaint himself with those very few who may have known the family members and to interview other Holocaust survivors in an attempt to shed light on the mystery. His photographer brother, Matthew, accompanied the author on many of his travels, catching priceless shots of a increments of past world; on one trip, the author's sister and another brother accompanied them.

While the author may digress by including portions of the Bible's Genesis, relating memories of his youth combining this with travelogue and history then offering personal viewpoints about his academic & teaching background, Mendelsohn's unbelievably suspenseful, haunting, amazing trail of discoveries leading back & forth from the U.S. to Australia, Israel, Ukraine, Scandinavia several times, offering the reader a dim light on hope.

His effort to retrieve a forgotten world is ambitious, heroic and sprinkled with the most flabbergasting coincidences ever known. Lost offers a most horrible vision of hell, but Mendelsohn also reveals human nature, tenacious and empathic, in this emotional, provocative and profound journey that I would strongly recommend.