For our final book of the term, we'll look at yet another text that rewrites and reimagines history, Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. Not just another Holocaust memoir, Mendelsohn's book searches for the history of his lost family members at the same time that it suggests the difficulties attendant to representing rupture and violence. Like both Maus and Lose Your Mother, The Lost is situated at the crossroads of memoir, historiography, and literary fiction. How does Mendelsohn's circuitous narrative strategies affect our reading of the text? What do these strategies say about the possibility of getting at the heart of meaning and narrative after the Holocaust?
Born in 1960, Mendelsohn has long been a prominent literary and cultural critic. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton, and has written for the New York Review of Books for a number of years. He has also published a wide array of books, from a memoir about family and sexual identity, entitled The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity, a scholarly study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays, a collection of his essays on literature and the arts, How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken, and a two-volume translation of the complete works of C. P. Cavafy.
Although the subject matter of The Lost overlaps with that of Maus, I couldn’t help but continually compare it with Lose Your Mother, since they are both works of nonfiction that are concerned with the search for origins. In the end, Mendelsohn has more success in finding out what he set out to look for than Hartman for many reasons (the fact that there were living witnesses of the events that took place, the various paper trails that he could follow that Hartman could not, the role of technology, etc.), but their journeys are similar in some ways. They both find themselves being unmoved by the commercialized sites of mourning like Auschwitz and the dungeons of Elmina castle, and much more emotionally impacted by smaller, interpersonal moments (the boys presenting Hartman with their letters, the moments of recognition in the eyes of people who knew the Jagers).
ReplyDeleteMendelsohn’s narrative is more linear than Hartman’s (but given her freewheeling shuffling of genres, that isn’t saying much) in that it follows the trail of specific people, but by weaving in the italicized sections on the Five Books of Moses he pauses from his genealogical project to show how commentaries on true meaning of the Torah and his search for his family overlap. Mendelsohn has the biblical and personal narratives ventilate one another throughout the book. I have to admit that as the book went further along, I became impatient with the biblical passages because I was so invested in the search for the fate of the Jagers, but overall I thought that the use of the biblical commentary as intertext to his search not only gave the narrative more gravity, but it also showed that even something as seemingly unimpeachable as a foundational religious text like the Torah is very much up for interpretation and that rigorous consideration of the roots of stories is necessary in both faith and personal history.
Like Andy, I’d like to make a comparison between Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother and Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost. Hartman’s quest to locate her familial roots in slavery is frustrated in ways similar to those of Mendelsohn’s quest to tell the hushed family story of Shmiel, Ester, and their four daughters. In each, we only end up with incomplete fragments, and from this, the writer still needs to tell a captivating story. In this respect, I feel Hartman succeeds more so than Mendelsohn, even though she comes away with less material about the specific people. It is not essential that one detective quest have more roadblocks than another, but Hartman more adeptly addresses them and moves around them without cataloguing the depths of dead-ends of research that Mendelsohn seems to. Indeed, Hartman deals with just as many blanks in her ancestory: “Four generations were born with a blank space where a father’s name should be. In its place was the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen, which had left a line less dramatic than an X and which suggested nothing as harsh as erasure but simply ‘not applicable’” (81). Yet in response, Hartman focuses more on her matrilineal heritage, and where the detective work of her personal lineage trails off, she adeptly incorporates her research and the story of many others and the general overview of the slave trade through Ghana.
ReplyDeleteThey both dream of extracting the story from the earth. Hartman goes to the dungeons hoping to reach through time and touch slaves, in a sense, just by walking on the same ground (116), and she finds only a waypoint of origin, like Mendelsohn in contemporary Bolechow, that has eerily moved on with things, with life, bearing few traces of the past. Here, Mendelsohn explains his original impluse to go to Bolechow: “this had been my obsession from the beginning, simply to go there, as if the air and soil of the place could somehow tell us something concrete and true” (81). The wish resembles Hartman’s.
Elsewhere, I am frustrated with an apparent misdirection or lack of a clear goal in his detective work. He succumbs to many diversions from his original goal: “out of all this history, all these people, the ones I knew the least about were the six who were murdered, who had, it seemed to me then, the most stunning story of all, the one most worthy to be told” (15). He first attaches the goal to Bolechow, “a place that I thought (then) would be the only place I could go to find out what happened to them all. . . . I feel ashamed at how casual we were, how ill-prepared and naive” (80). And while in Bolechow, talking with Olga and Pyotr, his original desires waver as he is confronted by the particularities of torture: “for the first time I was glad not to have specific information about my relatives, because now that I was there I wasn’t sure I wanted to know which of these things they had endured” (128). But he still wants a story of his grandfathers confirmed or disproved regarding a possible period of hiding in a castle. He states, “I realized that we’d get no closer to knowing anything specific about Shmiel and his family . . . in person” (128). He seems then to give up on the goal, just before its attainability goes away, at least for the moment. And what details would be enough to conclude the mystery without feeling like an anticlimax?
The fate of the Jagers eventually works toward clarification of the ongoing detective narrative, and the survivors in Australia provide details the first and second Aktions and the time in between that are in dissonance with the limited accounts heard in Bolechow (and disproving “facts” in the Yad Vashem database (224)), but even as this information accumulates, Mendelsohn is driven to imagine more details of their particular deaths, several “maybe” statements about how their last days might have been lived (217-21). I wish he’d be more often like his brother Matt because, he states, “I had started to notice that whereas I was preoccupied with learning what had happened, the events themselves, and in what order, it was Matt who always asked how it had all felt” (217). These imaginings seem to move in that direction of “how it had all felt,” and as Mendelsohn continues combining these possible moments for Smiel, Ester, and Bronia, (from about page 230 onward) the book seems to replace the emphasis on the detective work with an emphasis on the Jager family. It becomes more compelling.
ReplyDeleteI think all this discussion of mine is just another way of writing around the contrast between the telling of these two books. Because Mendelsohn agonizes over how every research detail was obtained, he ends up with a book over twice the length of Hartman’s, one that gives the impression that all the research was put into the book, that it is comfortable with endless digressions and getting lost in the details. In his discussion of the Genesis exegesis/midrash near the start of the book, Mendelsohn states, “Rashi is attentive to minute details of meaning and diction that Rabbi Friedman is content to let pass without comment, whereas Friedman . . . is eager to elucidate broader points” (17). Mendelsohn as a storyteller, one conscious of every detail and dialectic inflection, resembles Rashi, even though he “naturally came to prefer Friedman’s general explanation of why the Torah begins the way it does. . . . [It is] in essence, a writer’s issue: How do you begin a story?” (18). To answer this, I might say, “like Hartman rather than Mendelsohn.” I think on some level, Mendelsohn is aware of the storytelling difficulties he’s set up in this book’s goals; they just might be more difficult because they seem less focused on self-definition than Hartman’s. When Mendelsohn interviews Schlomo as they drive away from Tel Aviv, he makes his challenge explicit:
It’s different to write the story of people who survived, because there’s someone to interview, and they can tell you these amazing stories. As I said these words I thought of Mrs. Begley, who had once looked coldly at me and said, If you didn’t have an amazing story, you didn’t survive.
My problem, I wend on to Shlomo, is that I want to write the story of people who didn’t survive. People who had no story, anymore. (315)
He revisits the issue in a similar way later on, reflecting on how Bumo Kulberg and other characters peripheral to the ones he has chosen tend to claim narrative centrality:
To be alive is to have a story to tell. To be alive is precisely to be the hero, the center of a life story. When you can be nothing more than a minor character in somebody else’s tale, it means that you are truly dead. (434)
Mendelsohn seems caught in limbo between telling a story and explaining the story like Rashi as he tells it. He realizes it will be difficult to force the story into the one he “had hoped to be able to tell: A story that had a beginning, a middle, and an end” (436). However, how compelling is literature when presented as a story in conjunction with its own critical analysis? Examine, for instance, one of the occasional “Later on,” parenthetical paragraphs that could be condensed to half a sentence (330). We would lose some cultural/linguistic depth with less commentary, but would the book also gain more readers? Well, anyway, this is mostly a matter of prior expectations when coming to this book, and I think I was expecting greater concession toward the urgency of narrative progression/tension. The less urgently we feel the narrator is moving toward the climax or resolution of the dramatic question, the less inclined we are to believe that dramatic question is important. While I believe the Jagers’ story is compelling, I do not want Mendelsohn’s low-stakes detective narrative—however wide-ranging it may be—to trump it and diminish it in the dramatic structure of the book.
ReplyDeleteWhen the narrator’s telling and character’s plot finally coincide, can it pay off and satisfy the initial expectations, or does that duality diminish both individual narratives? Mrs. Janina Latyk really owns this story, in a sense, because her telling becomes the final confirmation of Smiel and Frydka’s killing spot and the reiteration of the story that Mendelsohn has been piecing together. Only she has been able to tell it as a “coherent narrative, a story with a beginning and a middle and an end” (499), but Mendelsohn’s intense personal interest has arguably reclaimed the story by retelling it. Or maybe is this sense of ownership and closure a false creation of retrospection, an act of looking back, he states, “which is to make an impossible wish, a wish that nothing will be left behind, that we will carry the imprint of what is over and done with into the present and future” (503)?
I’m just trying to rock the boat here. See you all in class.
Dietrik,
ReplyDeleteI think I agree with your point that ownership and closure in memoir is a false creation of retrospection.
The act of looking back that you mention seems to be the type of act Foucault or Nietzsche write about in their work on genealogy. Both authors agree that the sense of ownership is an "impossible wish, a wish that nothing will be left behind" because there is always something beyond the grip or sight of the genealogist. That is, he can never fully reclaim the past because the past is not reclaimable, through narrative or historical introspection. This is why Foucault, expanding on Nietzsche, argues that the point of genealogy is to figure out how meaning was made in the past, and not necessarily to fully reclaim that meaning.
In this latter sense, I think Mendelsohn might be partially successful, though this success might not be the success he intended or desired. By juxtaposing multiple and competing narratives, Mendelsohn doesn't arrive at an exact sense of "what happened" (which isn't the same as knowing the historical facts), but he (and the reader as well) do begin to understand how these narratives were created and what purpose they might serve within the lives of the narrators. In this sense, the genealogy of this memoir is very postmodern.
Really, as I think is typical of memoir or historical genealogy, the text becomes not about "what happened" but about "what happened after." Memoir itself is a tracing of the effects of the past on the present writer. Therefore, genealogy and memoir could almost be used interchangeably here.
I'm not sure if I have an answer for this question yet, but how might the non-fiction aspect of the work, as mentioned by Dietrik and Andy relate to the fictional memoirs we have read so far this quarter - I am thinking specifically of _The Book of Daniel_?
I’m always more interested in the way a story is told than in the information itself. This is true whether I’m reading fiction or nonfiction, literary or otherwise. OK, it actually goes deeper than that. The way a story is told is the story as far as I’m concerned, and the way Mendelsohn tells his story in The Lost attempts to incorporate his narrative biases in a way that I’ve not seen before.
ReplyDeleteThings begin with his grandfather and, more specifically, with his grandfather’s stories. Mendelsohn says he was intrigued by his grandfather’s stories because they were somehow alien to the world he knew, they were discursive, and they were riveting. Despite Mendelsohn’s having learned so little about Shmiel directly from his grandfather, he learned at least how to how to tell the story in the manner that it’s told in The Lost.
Interestingly, Mendelsohn often nods toward his narrative biases. The most disruptive of these is his inclusion of the exegetical meanderings that undergird his narrative as much as his grandfather’s stories do. As Dietrik mentions above, these intertexts are very much in the tradition of midrash, a tradition that was quite comfortable not only explicating complicated material but also with filling in certain gaps in the text. This approach to information (whether this is the text of Bereishit or a spotty family history) makes Mendelsohn’s narrative possible. As he struggles to decide how he can tell this story, he turns to a narrative that proves central for a number of cultures even though Mendelsohn’s own relationship to the Torah is decidedly secular. And he admits it. He admits he’s using the metanarrative of creation to create his own story. I find this to be a risky and fascinating way of showing (and hopefully short-circuiting to some degree) narrative biases.
Of course, Mendelsohn also admits the influence of his formal education in Classics (he specializes in Euripedes by the way) and often refers to elements of tragedy in the stories he uncovers in The Lost. He also backs away from this comparison, but it’s clear that in the end he’s the one looking for catharsis. He finds it when he thinks he’s found the house where Shmiel and Frydka hid. After he experiences the cathartic moment, he’s disturbed to find out that there’s some dispute as to whether or not that house is the actual one, and I think there are a few big gaps in the discussion with Janina Latyk (more on this in class). Mendelsohn ignores these, though. Perhaps after getting the catharsis he’s been after for so long, he only wants someone to verify that it is, in fact, authentic.