Rescuing history.

The Lost

* Daniel Mendelsohn * HarperCollins * $27.95

Daniel Mendelsohn--best known for The Elusive Embrace, his erudite 1999 meditation on being gay--is a third-generation Jewish American. He was the family historian even as a child, and this side of his personality comes forward in his new book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.

His grandfather Abraham Jager arrived in the United States from Bolechow, Poland, in 1920. Most of the rest of his family emigrated as well, but one brother, Shmiel, decided to return to the ancestral village and live as a "big fish in a small pond," rather than as a small fish in the ocean of America. Shmiel become the foremost kosher butcher in the town, lived in a house on the square just beside the synagogue, and by the 1930s owned one of only two cars in Bolechow. When World War II arrived, he suffered alongside his neighbors as Soviets assumed control of that part of Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. But when the Germans came in 1941, it was the end for the town's Jews; the vast majority were killed in a series of operations in which some of the townspeople participated. After the first such operation, called an Aktion, the surviving Jews were forced to reimburse the Gestapo for the ammunition used to kill their friends and families.

As a boy, Mendelsohn sometimes brought tears to the eyes of his elderly relatives because he resembled the lost Shmiel, who vanished with his wife and four daughters. Not even the names of his daughters were known by Mendelsohn's older family members, let alone when or how they perished.

Then, after his grandfather's death, Mendelsohn discovered that the special wallet the old man had always carried contained desperate letters from Shmiel written to him in 1939 begging for help replacing a truck (he had the only truck permit issued to a Jew in Bolechow and would lose it if he couldn't replace the truck). A few months later Shmiel pleaded for help in emigrating, even if only one of his daughters could escape.

From the letters, his conversations with survivors, and extensive research, Mendelsohn pieced together what happened in Bolechow during the war and the fates of his "six of six million." The Lost is a delicate and almost painfully intimate memoir of his search, which took him as far as Australia, Israel, and Bolechow, now in the Ukraine. Showing his family pictures to a Jewish survivor from Bolechow--a woman who had been the close friend of a Jager girI--Mendelsohn was struck by the significance of photographs, of which, of course, the survivor had almost none: "The picture I showed her that Sunday, a picture I'd seen countless times since I was a boy, brought home to me for the first time the strangeness of my relationship to the people I was interviewing, people who were rich in memories but poor in keepsakes, whereas I was so rich in keepsakes but had no memories to go with them."

After his grandfather died, Daniel Mendelsohn found in the old man's wallet desperate letters from his brother Shmiel in Poland, written in 1939, pleading for help ... Shmiel and his family vanished in the Holocaust.