Cette quête, il en a fait un livre, puzzle vertigineux, roman policier haletant, plongée dans l’Histoire et l’oubli – un chef-d’œuvre.

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. 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. Comment, quand, où exactement ? Nul ne peut lui en dire plus. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.ĭepuis 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. 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.ĭeftly 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 man book summary