I spent a good part of the day yesterday finishing my reading of The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn. The last time I wrote to you about it, Bush, was on 11/21, if you care to look back in the archives, and I was thrilled to find a comment posted on that entry from the author's brother Matt, a photographer, who accompanied Daniel on many of his travels and figures prominently in the story, and whose photographs appear on many of the pages of the book. The pictures, many of them also from family archives, are small, faded and grainy, and their details are hard to make out--an entirely appropriate visual analogy to the author's struggle to make sense of the past. It was odd, Bush, to find myself sitting out on the sunny balcony of our cottage on the Southern California coast, embarked on a journey through times and places so dark and distant that they might have seemed unreal, had they not been evoked with such poetic truth.
Because this truly is an epic, Bush--a modern Odyssey which takes us on a journey into the past which is part historical narrative, part detective mystery, part Biblical exegesis, part scholarly research, part family saga, part personal confession, part cultural history and in the end, all in all, a poem of epic proportions. It will make you--as they say of certain movies--laugh and cry, though I'm sure you'll do more crying than laughter, given the atrocities that are all too often described, and the heartache of those who were forced to experience them or, if spared, to watch their loved ones victimized before their eyes. It takes five years of study and travel, interviews, recordings, and photography for Mendelsohn to approach his destination and then, finally, to understand that what he was really looking for is unreachable.
But not quite, because we have Mendelsohn's text, the journey, which turns out to be in itself the goal. We have the writing. We have the phtotographs. His search for the factual truth concerning those six lost family members becomes, in his words, "narrower and narrower" as he travels the globe to turn up more and more telling details from the fading, never fully reliable memories of rapidly aging survivors--an extraordinarily rich and engaging cast of characters.
To Mendelsohn's "narrower and narrower"--speaking of the focus of his attention as the narrative proceeds--I would only add "deeper and deeper." Traveling ever further into the depths of the human psyche, the agony of not knowing, of knowing too much, of confronting the ultimate truths, for all of us, of the battle for survival and inescapable death, we end up, as you'll see--I refuse to disclose the "mystery" of this story--in the bowels of the earth, the darkest place of the human soul where moral truths become murkier and more agonizingly ambiguous even as the factual details become clear.
I myself have "known" about the Holocaust. I have seen those terrible films, the photographs from the death camps. I have read some of the books. I was myself alive already, while these events were taking place, not more than a couple of hours by air from where I lived. Other than the (for me) fortunate accident of birth, I could have been that child speared by a pitchfork or thrown from a third story window to the street. But this was not England, where I was born and where, certainly, those German bombs dropped, but Eastern Europe where Daniel's six family members were "lost" to history, swallowed up in the enormity of the Nazi crime--a crime not limited, as Mendelsohn recalls, to Nazis. Nor to the Poles or the Ukrainians who all too readily joined in the slaughter; or even only to those Jews who acted as enablers, betrayers of their own friends, neighbors and family in the misguided and usually futile attempt to ensure their own survival. It was all of us, who failed to prevent its happening, or who failed--as did certain of Mendelsohn's family, to their lasting regret--to respond to desperate appeals for help from America, for transportation out of that hell while it was still possible to leave...
But then I realized as I read this book that I have never "known". That it is, in fact, in the phrase to which the author constantly returns, "impossible to know." But thanks to Mendelsohn I know a lot more than I did. His story, in all its rich complexity and refusal to accept the first or the easy answers, in all the limitation of its scope to a single family, though millions died, in its insistence on the personal and on personal responsibility, opened up the door for a deeper knowing of the Holocaust and its meaning for mankind than I had ever had before, and I thank him for it.
If only all the world were to read this book, I thought, as I sat there in the improbable Sunday sunshine on my peaceful balcony with his book in my lap, there might, there just might be a lesser chance that we would find ourselves repeating that dreadful history.
But then I look to Darfur, and now to Chad, and to the world standing by and, at most, wringing its impotent, unwilling hands, and I'm forced to wonder, Bush. I'm forced to wonder if it will ever end.
Technorati tags:
bush, holocaust, mendelsohn, president, The Lost
3 comments:
Gringo: Pretty loving picture of a military man. Peters description is however, deep.
But you talk like a man who believes in fighting with violence.
We should never forget, that because of the stupid ignorance of young men who think of nothing but picking up a gun, leaders like Bin Laden and Bush proliferate. Otherwise they could never be.
Waxman Has Bush Administration in Sights
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112706Z.shtml
Congressman Henry Waxman has spent the last six years waging a guerrilla campaign against the White House and its corporate allies, launching searing investigations into everything from military contracts to Medicare prices from his perch on the Government Reform Committee. In January, Waxman becomes committee chairman - and thus the lead Congressional hound of an administration many Democrats feel has blundered badly as it expanded the power of the executive branch.
I will get the book Peter, thank you for your post, and review.
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