Jewish Literary Review

Posted on November 14, 2007 by Steve Pollak

Holocaust book wins French literary prize

Daniel Mendelsohn received one of France's top literary awards for "The Lost," a book about Mendelsohn's search for relatives who died in the Holocaust. 

Mendelsohn won the Prix Medicis in the foreign work category. "La Strategie des antilopes" (The Strategy of Antelopes) by journalist Jean Hatzfeld won the overall Prix Medicis. That book recounts the aftermath of the 1994 Rwanda genocide.

Mendelsohn is a very accomplished writer and literary critic whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Esquire, and The Paris Review. In addition to "The Lost," he has written two other books: "The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity" and "Gender and the City in Euripides Political Plays."

As for "The Lost," it has been hailed by everyone from People Magazine to the New York Review of Books. Here's what author Mark Oppenheimer wrote in the Forward: 

“The Lost” is the story of this gay, blue-eyed classicist, journalist, critic and amateur genealogist, the second of five children, a man now in his 40s and attempting to learn what he can about his grandfather’s brother Shmiel Jäger and Shmiel’s wife and four daughters, who all perished in the small Ukrainian shtetl of Bolechow during World War II. It is a grand book, an ambitious undertaking fully realized. I don’t mean that it’s perfect — no truly good book is — but only that its flaws add to its grandeur, make it a more fascinating read and ensure that it will live in my mind for a long time.

One last thing I'd note: Mendelsohn has begun an online project to help preserve the pre-war heritage of Bolechow. You can find more information about that project at Bolechow.com. 

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