First Book Club Reading Selected
The votes are in and the first book in our newly-launched JRI-Poland Book Group will be Daniel Mendelsohn’s “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million“. We are hoping our first JRI-Poland Book Group zoom session will take place in late February or early March.
“The Lost” was originally published in 2006. A new edition, reflecting the PBS special on the US and the Holocaust, was published in 2022. . For family historians, reading the book leaves one with envy that Mendelsohn did what many of us have only dreamed of, and admiration for his dogged persistence in his effort to uncover the lives of family members previously presumed “lost”.
As a young boy, Mendelsohn frequently had the disquieting experience of walking into a room and hearing his elderly relatives exclaim, “He looks so much like Shmiel!” Then they would start crying. Shmiel was Daniel’s grandfather’s oldest brother, who, with his wife and four daughters, perished in the Holocaust.
Spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939, Mendelsohn set off for Bolechow, in Poland between the World Wars and now in Ukraine, to try to unearth what information he could while witnesses were still alive to give it. “The Lost” is a stirring examination of memory, family history, and chance.
More details will be available soon! We hope you wil join us!
Please note that participants in the Book Group must be dues-paying members of JRI-Poland. You can check your membership status by logging into the JRI-Poland.org website and checking the status bubble just under the “HELLO” message at the top of your screen. Hovering over the “HELLO” message will invoke a drop-down menu with the option called “MY PROFILE” where you can join if you have not yet by paying $54 annual dues.