The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn

I vividly remember reading this book. I was home sick and read it from cover to cover in about 3 days, even though the book is over 600 pages. I absolutely could not put it down, despite not feeling well at all. The book begins with Mendelsohn describing how his elderly relatives would cry when he entered a room. They would tell him how much he looked like his Great Uncle, Schmiel. No one would ever say anything more about Schmiel, his wife, or his four daughters, other than they were “killed by the Nazis”. Later, as an adult, he found a set of letters from Schmiel, asking for help to leave Poland. Mendelsohn decided to search for more information, and to see if it would be possible to find out exactly what had happened to them.

Mendelsohn’s research uncovers as much information about the small town of Bolechow as it does about his family. He travels to meet the survivors of the town who are now living in Israel, Australia, and many other places. His goal is to get as many descriptions as possible of the life they lived and what happened during the war. The stories he hears are like many stories from other towns of Eastern Europe: how the local population were often worse in their persecution of the Jewish population, but also how brave people helped or hid some of the Jewish people. In addition, he learns the complicated history of this town which had belonged to several different countries over time, including Poland and Ukraine.

The book is a combination of a personal journal, a mystery story, and a historical quest. Mendelsohn succeeds because he learns not just about his family’s deaths, but also about their lives. They become real people to him with personalities, likes and dislikes, and complicated lives before they died. They are no longer just six names listed among the six million who died.

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The Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Eating Animals, once said that what he loves the most about Isaac Bashevis Singer, is the vulnerability and bravery of his writing. Moreover, Singer can be described as an honest author, and he is also a deeply humane and compassionate writer.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s writing career began in his native Poland, but in his early 30s, he left his home country and emigrated to America. Singer arrived in New York in 1935, and the shock of the move and life in exile were changes he never got over. He had lost his country, and if his audience had been small in Poland (Singer wrote in Yiddish), it was even smaller in New York. However, the old country proved to be a rich source of inspiration. For decades, Singer returned to the pre-World War II life of the Eastern European Jews. In this world, imps, dybbuks, and demons are as real as the baker next door is, and the devil himself is frequently the teller of the tale. In “Zeidlus the Pope,” the Evil One manages to lure a brilliant Jewish scholar away from his faith, claiming that if Zeidlus embraces Christianity, he may one day become the pope. The story ends in hell.

When Singer eventually, especially in the 1960s, began writing about life in America, the irrational element remained intact. However, in the new land, the imps, dybbuks, and demons were often replaced by neurotic behavior, delusional, love-driven deeds, and existential confusion. The supernatural aspect and the closeness to Singer’s spiritual roots never went away though. In “The Cafeteria,” corpses walk on Broadway, and in “Alone,” a nameless visitor to Miami Beach, mysteriously evicted from his hotel, drifts aimlessly and imagines that he’s in the midst of a Biblical disaster, “I was like Noah – but in an empty ark.”

Singer is a master storyteller. He never hides behind false originality (which, according to the author, “often reveal nothing but a writer’s boring and selfish personality”), and his writing is precise, transparent, and straightforward. At the same time, Singer combines the everyday experience with philosophical and theological depths, and even if his stories may be filled with human confusion and conflicts, the eternal mysteries are always present – Singer writes about them with grace and understated awe. As here, in “The Letter Writer:” “The night had ended like a dream and was followed by an obscure reality, self-absorbed, sunk in the perpetual mystery of being.”

Taken together, the components of Singer’s short stories give them the weight of great novels.

WCPL can offer the following short story collections by Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories, and Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories; find and reserve these in our catalog.

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

Are you a fan of Polish science fiction? Do you fantasize about visiting the old stomping grounds of Stanislaw Lem – Lviv? Krakow? Do you venerate his name? If none of this applies to you, it is hereby suggested that you give Stanislaw Lem’s strange and hypnotic novel Solaris a chance.

When Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, after an extended and exhausting journey through space arrives to the planet Solaris, he is expecting a warm welcome. He has been sent to the planet to investigate the situation there, but instead of being received by fellow human beings his vessel is automatically transported to an empty hangar for spaceships, and the space station seems empty. When he begins to familiarize himself with the space station, what he sees bear witness of destruction and disintegration. Something unusual is going on here, and the process is not yet over.

But to describe the plot will not do Solaris justice. The inner and outer events are equally important and there is not necessarily a clear distinction between the two, and Solaris is a deeply psychological and philosophical tale about – well, read and find out for yourself, for this novel is on the most fundamental level a collaboration between the author and the reader and the reader’s will and ability to create meaning.

Stanislaw Lem once said that Solaris was an adventure in his career. He never planned the book, and he never thought that he could write a book like Solaris. The novel, he explained, came into existence through a process of self-organization.

Solaris was published in 1961 and Lem’s reputation as an author eventually began to grow, initially in the Federal Republic of Germany (or West Germany). Ultimately his fiction spread over the world and Solaris was filmed three times (twice in the Soviet Union – the second time around by Andrey Tarkovsky – and once in the U.S. by Steven Soderbergh). His books were translated to more than 40 languages and sold more than 30 million copies. Poland has a proud literary tradition, so it is not surprising that Polish authors every now and then reach international recognition. Lem’s themes tend to center on alienation, the problems of communication, and the relationship between mankind and technology. All this makes him an author that has endured the test of time, but Solaris especially reflects a speech by John F. Kennedy in 1960. “We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier [...] the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled threats.”

Welcome to 2012. And Solaris.

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