"The Lost" Post 5b

During its entirety, "The Lost" made me question the value of what Mendelsohn had embarked on. Why did he care to know the specifics of the lives of his relatives that he did not have any contact with, could never know? He definitely wasn’t looking to find them alive or have survived; he states that he wants to know exactly how they died. As he continues his quest, he finds the details of their lives fascinating as well. Although they are his ancestors and a part of his family’s history, I don’t think that their lives could affect his in any way. Isn’t he his own person? However, family history is something that many of us value, and remembrance of the past is shown through the many Internet genealogy websites that Mendelsohn sites. Perhaps these searches are a form of narcissism: placing value on the families that placed us here today. As well, I think that Mendelsohn finds great significance in the characters and conflicts from his family past; he shows in "The Lost" how they mirror those of his current family and even those represented in the Bible. In the same way that we strive to learn from mistakes made in history, I believe Mendelsohn is trying to extract a lesson from the lives of Shmiel’s family. Also, considering their tragic story and the movement which they were part of (the Holocaust), he provides an intimate view for the reader on a tragedy that “is so big, the scale of it is so gigantic, so enormous, that it becomes easy to think of it as something mechanical. Anonymous” (479).
The other thing that struck me about the final section of his novel is the attention Mendelsohn pays to the Ukrainians involved in the killings of the Jews. He talks often of how without the help of their former neighbors, the Germans could not have completed such a thorough slaughter of Bolechow’s Jews. However, in contrast to this harsh reality, Mendelsohn provides a background on the conflict inside this “family” of Bolechow: “I am, however, willing to believe in other generalizations, for instance that seething resentment by a class of people who both have been and perceive themselves to be an underclass, particularly when those people have recently suffered unspeakable oppression- one example of which would be, say, Stalin’s international starvation of between five an seven million Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933, which for Ukrainians is the galvanizing national tragedy just as the Holocaust is the galvanizing national tragedy for Jews” (455). Although unimaginable acts were committed during the Holocaust, as Mendelsohn describes, I agree with him that as hard as it is, it is very important to look at even these acts with an open mind, a balanced perspective.