Du manque douloureux à l’abondance insatisfaisante dans The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million de Daniel Mendelsohn

Abstract

In The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, Daniel Mendelsohn reconstitutes the results and the process of his investigation about his great-uncle, his wife and their four daughters, murdered during the Second World War in unknown circumstances. It is thus an absence that provokes D. Mendelsohn’s writing gesture: that of his ancestors, that of family stories about them, and that of historical recognition about these anonymous, sacrificed lives, which never appear in the official history. From an initial gap that provokes them, the investigation creates a narrative swarming with competing and contradictory versions of the same story. Confronted with a baffling abundance of information, the investigator wonders, as a member of the third generation and marked by traumas he never experienced firsthand, which is the most painful path? In order to restore this incessant dialectic between abundance and lack, D. Mendelsohn conceives his book as a space intended to provide his ancestors with a life story, but also as a vast network in which all of the stories heard during his investigation are intertwined.