David Cesarani
Return to Bolechow
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Harper Press 528pp £20
Daniel Mendelsohn’s award-winning book is a milestone in the transition from the memory to the history of Hitler’s genocide campaign against Europe’s Jews. Although it ostensibly records the fate of one family at the hands of the Germans and their collaborators, the substance concerns the efforts of a young American sixty years later, two generations and one continent away from the events in question, to reconstruct what happened. To this end Mendelsohn assiduously tracks down survivors and eyewitnesses all over the world and assembles an archive of documents and photographs. But his search for direct recollection of what happened to his relatives ultimately proves disappointing. The closer he gets, the more he senses that the truth will always elude him. However much he wants to repossess ‘the lost’ he realises that ‘they had been specific people with specific deaths, and those lives and deaths belonged to them, not me’.
Mendelsohn begins his odyssey with memories of his own childhood in America during the 1960s, when family gatherings were punctuated by the sighs and tears of heavily accented elders about something that could not be uttered, at least not in front of the Kinder. His grandfather regaled him with stories
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm