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A newsletter for the students, faculty and staff of Collin College. Published monthly. For information or submissions, call 972.599.3142. Cougar News welcomes student and faculty submissions. Next deadline: June 10 All submissions are due by 5 p.m. on the due date. Photos cannot be returned. Text should be emailed to mrobinson@ccccd.edu or sent on disk. Submit copy that is proofed, edited and saved in Word format. Cougar News staff: Lisa Vasquez, director; Mark Robinson, editor; Marcy Cadena-Smith, contributor; Dana Schmitz, contributor; Sydney Portilla-Diggs, campus correspondent; Stephanie Hall, student correspondent; Heather Darrow, contributor; Nick Young, photographer and layout.
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Book Review: "Lost: The Search for Six in Six Million"
By Mark Robinson
Cougar News Editor
Isn’t it kind of funny how we lose the most important objects in our lives? We always seem to misplace car keys, wallets, purses. Things that are generally important. Items we tend to use everyday. And we lose them.
Why don’t we lose shampoo? Or mouse pads? Or hammers?
Most importantly, why do we lose people? The thing about wallets or keys is that once they settle beneath the couch or end table, they can’t return. They must be found. People, in theory, shouldn’t need to be found.
Herein lies the tragedy of Daniel Mendelsohn’s epic piece of non-fiction, “Lost: The Search for Six in Six Million.”
Treated as ghosts most of his life, Mendelsohn’s great-uncle and aunt -- Shmiel and Ester Jager -- and their daughters -- Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele and Bronia -- were lost, unknowable, almost mythical.
Sometime between 1941-44, all six were murdered. All six were part of the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust living in the Polish city of Bolechow, where the Jager family had lived for more than 300 years.
With a scant amount of facts, some sepia-toned photos and a trunkful of scuttlebutt and hearsay, Mendelsohn took upon himself the task of finding out who Shmiel, Ester, Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele and Bronia were -- in death, and more importantly, in life.
This was a grand undertaking. It started with recollecting clues which Mendelsohn remembered from family conversations, telephone calls and information, especially from his beloved grandfather, Abraham, who had left Poland for America in the 1920s and who deceased before Mendelsohn could pick his brain.
Recapturing this unfinished bit of information led to correspondence to family members around the world, who merely offered fractured memories and unreliable rumors, which had gathered dust and worn thin by time. This quest takes Mendelsohn, and his brother Matt, around the world, literally. From New York to Australia. From Stockholm to Israel. From Israel to Copenhagen. To Bolechow, where everything begins and ends.
Mendelsohn is taxed with trying to refine the facts from the bunk and trying to fill in the holes with reasonable assumptions. Most of the survivors he interviews were in hiding, or had fled beforehand. So their memories are wrought with potential misconceptions and false tales. The other witnesses are all dead -- whether they were shot and dumped into mass graves or herded into cattle cars where they perished in the Belz gas chambers.
Mendelsohn searched for everything from birthdates, death dates and occupations to seemingly innocuous details that interviewees could offer -- the way Frydka carried her book bag, who their boyfriends were, Ester’s “nice legs” or Shmiel having fresh strawberries shipped in for his family.
“Lost” is a series of ups and downs, setbacks and revelations. It’s written, relatively, in chronological order of his interviews and trips, so information is reveled the same way to the reader as it was to Mendelsohn. Layers are placed on top of each other -- or more appropriately -- layers are peeled off, revealing more and more, whetting the reader’s appetite for more.
This, however, cannot be described as a book about the Holocaust. Well, it is because it was the fate of Shmiel and his family. But Mendelsohn creates a grand mosaic of the war, genealogy, history, religion, languages, Jewish culture and family.
A huge familial theme is that of brotherhood. Throughout “Lost” Mendelsohn comments on the first four Parashoth of the Torah along with the ideas of modern and ancient Jewish scholars. Mendelsohn also refers to a number of correspondences sent from Shmiel to his brother Abraham, written with a low-key anxiety asking his brother for assistance in leaving Poland as the Nazi shadow loomed large.
It is unclear if Abraham couldn’t help or if he tried and it didn’t work. The brother theme continues with Daniel and his brother, Matt, who had never been close until they started doing the book. Both stories are intertwined with the Biblical tale of Cain and Abel, and Mendelsohn is quick to dissect the brother dynamic from the beginning of time.
And there are about two dozen other facets of this book that are just as interesting and complex, and it would take a billion words to appropriately describe each one. However, to describe this book is to call it a search for truth. Whether that entails fact, knowledge, a photograph, a secret compartment in a non-descript Polish house or anything beyond nothing or falsities is up for debate. The one absolute is Mendelsohn’s quarry, and everything else -- the means to the end -- is just gravy.
[PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION]
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