Non-FictionDaniel Mendelsohn, son of liberal New York Jews, spent his childhood listening to his maternal grandfather, Abraham Jäger, telling extraordinary stories about Bolechow, the town of Ukrainians, Poles and Jews in Galicia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire where the family, before emigrating to the US, had lived for centuries.
Of course, by the time Jäger was telling his tales it was the 1970s, Bolechow, now Bolekhiv, was in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, and all its Jews were gone.
By the age of 15, Mendelsohn was the official family historian. There was only one gap in his knowledge bank - the fate of his grandfather's oldest brother, great-uncle Schmiel, who left New York and returned to Bolechow in 1913 and, along with his wife, Ester, and four daughters, vanished in German-occupied Ukraine in the early 1940s. Of Schmiel and his family's fate, Abraham would only tell his grandson they were killed by Nazis.
NATURE ABHORS A vacuum and Daniel thirsted to know. After his grandfather committed suicide, he got hold of letters of which he was previously ignorant, written by Schmiel to his New York relatives in 1939 and 1940, describing the situation in Bolechow and begging for help. Reading these was like hearing Schmiel talk and, quickened by the encounter, he decided to find out everything he could about his lost family. It took him five years and he had to visit three continents, but he found the dozen or so Bolechow Jews - all that remained of the town's pre-war 6,000-plus Jews - and he talked to them at length.
These conversations - they are the bulk of the book - he reproduces in all their confusing and illuminating glory. They were, of course, formidably difficult for him; for a start, many were in Polish, Yiddish or Ukrainian, none of which Mendelsohn spoke. There was also the problem, unrecognised initially, that the testimony of at least two of the witnesses (which is quite a lot out of 12) were skewed by the fact that the speaker had close family members (whom Mendelsohn didn't know) who had been Jewish policemen who had helped with the liquidation of Bolechow's Jews. Finally, there was the realisation, as he advanced his work, that he had to write quite a different book to the one he had set out to write.
At the start, Mendelsohn simply wanted to rescue from oblivion whatever traces of his lost family he could find by talking to the remaining witnesses. Then he saw his witnesses had more to give than just a few shards about Schmiel: they had their memories of Bolechow as well as their own extraordinary personal stories.
Mendelsohn decided that he had to include these elements, even if this multiplied his narrative problems. Then, as he got even further into the project, he saw that just as important as the stories he told was the way he told these stories, and that an account of his evolving ideas and how they were influenced by both the research process and his reading needed to be included too. This way, the reader could understand why he had made the decisions he made.
Mendelsohn is a classicist: Homer, the Greek dramatists and Virgil are his literary gods, and he takes them as his model. Like them he doesn't tell his story chronologically but instead loops backwards and forwards in time. He also knows from them that the nuance or context or history or back story behind something said needs to be available to the reader at the moment it is said: in order to make this happen, much like Homer, he ingeniously threads his explanatory and explicatory material into the body of the interviews. Other writers have tried to do this (James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men springs to mind) but I have never come across, in the modern canon (the classics are different, of course), a work that manages this so well that as a reader you are always fully briefed on everything you need to know at every given moment.
THE OTHER VIRTUE the author takes from the classics is balance. There is a great deal of violence in the book violence that is visceral and epic, as well as deeply troubling because so much of it was visited by Ukrainians and Poles (rather than Germans) on their Jewish neighbours. For instance, as he describes, on October 28th, 1941, Gestapo and Ukrainian police rounded up Bolechow's leading Jews; Shmiel was on the list but not at home; unfortunately, his sixteen-year-old daughter, Ruchele, was. With 900 others she was held in the Dom Katolicki - the Parochial Hall, a place she knew well as it doubled as Bolechow's cinema. Here, she saw about 100 fellow Jews, including the town's Rabbis, beaten to death. After 36 hours without food or water, she and the 800 odd survivors were driven to Taniawa wood, stripped, shot and buried in a ditch.
After this Aktion, Bolechow's remaining Jews, (who included Ruchele's parents), were obliged, via the Judenrat, to reimburse the Gestapo for the ammunition expended and to pay 3kg of granular coffee to cover labour expenses.
However, Mendelsohn is careful to offset this darkness with light, and he includes (but without sanitising, trivialising or diluting the whole) some extraordinary stories of selflessness and heroism, gentile as well as Jewish. This is never an easy read but you don¹t end feeling completely hopeless or that the world was only bad.
Although this is non-fiction, it isn't simply a documentary about a little sliver of the Holocaust that represents the whole. It is also, because the author knows he has to shape raw experience into an artefact, a beautifully wrought and artfully executed work of narrative art with - as proper stories must but documentary works often don't - a beginning, middle and end.
Mendelsohn does fulfil his contract; he does tell us in the book's closing chapters what happened to Schmiel and his family (which he discovered from Ukrainian rather than Jewish survivors), thus delivering a fully rounded, deeply satisfying and complete narrative. I don't think, really, a reader could ask for anything more, except possibly an index.
Carlo Gébler is a writer. His play Henry & Harriet has just premiered at the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in Belfast
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million By Daniel Mendelsohn Harper Collins, 512pp. £25