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In The Lost, Daniel Mendelsohn
recounts his search for the circumstances of the deaths of his great
uncle Shmiel and five other members of his Jewish Ukrainian family. The
book is many things: a family history, a meditation on Jewishness (with
frustratingly academic looks at biblical texts), and a detective story,
as Mendelsohn travels from Ukraine to Australia to Israel to Denmark in
search of elderly Jews who might be able to fill him in on the details
of his kin's final living months. The Lost is at times moving, though
the emotion is frequently undercut by the author's meandering
digressions and winding sentences (one particularly egregious example is
179 words long), on the whole similar to the way Mendelsohn's
grandfather would tell stories, ''all that background, all those Chinese
boxes; and then, suddenly, the swift and expert slide into the finale.''
Posted Nov 10, 2006
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