Speaker: Daniel Mendelsohn, Author, Journalist and Critic

The Lost is much more than a book about the Holocaust. It is about rescuing the stories of the Holocaust and re-imagining the lives of those who perished so they are no longer lost to history. Spurred by a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 by his great-uncle, Shmiel Jäger, Daniel Mendelsohn’s “strange and arduous” journey to solve the mystery of this family began in 2001 when he returned to his ancestral shtetl of Bolechow. For 300 years the Jägers lived in this Galician village, which was first part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then Poland, Germany, Russia and today Ukraine.

Although his siblings made it out before the war, Shmiel stayed behind and was killed along with his wife, Ester, and their four daughters. Haunted from an early age by the mute European faces staring out at him from pictures in his family’s “ancient leather photo albums,” Mendelsohn embarked, in middle age, on a search for the remaining eyewitnesses to the events of that awful time.

This pilgrimage, lasting more than three years, took him to a dozen countries on three continents where he interviewed the last remaining Bolechower survivors--most in their 90s--who shared what they remembered about the Jägers—not only how they died, but how they lived. Part memoir, part reportage, part mystery and part scholarly detective work, The Lost brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history as it awakens individual-scale anguish about the Holocaust by illuminating the smallest of stories—the private life and tragic fate of one single family.

Expressing how the Holocaust continues to affect people who had no direct experience of it, Mendelsohn, the classicist, expands on Vergil’s text: “There are tears in things; but we all cry for different reasons.” Join us as Mendelsohn recounts this astonishing journey to rescue from “generalities, symbols, and abbreviations,” the family, who, like many of our own vanished ancestors, were calling out “to be known.”

DANIEL MENDELSOHN is an award-winning author, journalist, and critic, educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton. After completing his Ph.D. in Classics in 1994, he began a career in journalism in New York City, and since then his articles, essays, reviews and translations have appeared frequently in numerous national publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York, The New York Review of Books, Esquire, and Travel & Leisure, where he is a contributing editor. From 2000 to 2002, he was the weekly book critic for New York Magazine, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Criticism. He is the faculty chair of humanities at Bard College.

BOOK SIGNING: Books will be available to purchase at the meeting and Mr. Mendelsohn will sign them following the program. To pre-order copies, please mail a check for $20, payable to JGSLA, before November 30th to JGSLA, P.O. Box 55443, Sherman Oaks, CA 91413-0443. Your book(s) will be held for you at the meeting. If you are unable to attend, but wish to order a signed copy, indicate that information, along with your mailing address and signing information with your check and add $4 for postage and handling for a total of $23. Books will be available that evening.

For more info on Mendelsohn and “The Lost” go to: http://danielmendelsohn.com/
Video Interview (five minutes): http://webcontent.harpercollins.com/images/om/jy/thelost.wmv

ELECTIONS for the JGSLA BOARD OF DIRECTORS will take place at the beginning of our meeting. Nominations from the floor will be held at our November 16th meeting, and the list of nominees will be sent to members via email prior to the election on December 11th.

LOCATION: Skirball Cultural Center, Magnin Auditorium 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd. Exit the San Diego Fwy. at Skirball Center Dr. Turn right onto Sepulveda Blvd. and right again into Skirball parking, opposite the Center entrance, or turn left on Herscher Drive, north of the Center, to the underground parking lot. For more information go to our website: http://www.jgsla.org or contact Pamela Weisberger, JGSLA Program Chair at: Pamela@jgsla.org

Free for JGSLA members, $5 for guests. Non-members are invited to join ($25 annual dues). Parking is free.