
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.