by Jordana Horn
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (Harper Collins, $27.95) is an attempt by Daniel Mendelsohn to recover the history of his great-uncle Shmiel’s family of six, killed in the Holocaust in Ukraine. Mendelsohn’s account of his research takes the reader from New York to Australia to Sweden to Israel. Along the way, he grapples with the ephemerality and arbitrariness of remembrance — what is remembered, and when, and by whom.