"The Lost" Post 3b

The quote "I too, like to think that my grandfather, had he not made his long journey to Timess skvar in 1920, would have somehow used his talent to get what he wanted, to survive..." (166-167) made me think of the tendency of people to have wishful thinking. Everytime I tell a story, I know that I have an impluse to embellish it, make it more exciting, make it more important. This seems to be an unconcious desire of ours, that somehow something more exciting is better. Mendelsohn is talking here about his grandfather and his wily ways, and it appears that his own memory is trying to embellish the talents of his grandfather, that even though he was a Jew and that his relatives who remained in Europe were all killed, he would have survived. It seems really unlikely, especially because of the position that Mendelsohn viewed his grandfather from (a young child looking up to his favorite grandparent). Perhaps this relates to the outrageous stories that Mendelsohn hears from his grandfather about the voyaget hat he took as a young man- the author may be relating his grandfather's imagination to his own, both which attempted to reflect the past in more "story-like" positive manner. Perhaps Mendelsohn is trying to make a universal point here: we are all constantly trying the shift the past in a way that will please us more. It's almost as if the past is something hazy, only there because of the views unconciously taken by our memories.