The Internet is for sharing.  It’s where we go to reveal our innermost thoughts.  The new Joni Mitchell is not a musician, but a blogger, detailing his or her own truth in the hope that someone, somewhere, will read the words and the writer will not feel so alone.

I had a rough night.  One wherein you wake up every hour or two.  And then stay awake, for far too long, eyes shut, feigning sleep, until you’re swept away again.  And when I finally decided I would not try to drift off one more time, I turned on the light and reached over for my book, Daniel Mendelsohn’s "The Lost".

Actually, it was an electronic book.  Downloaded to my Kindle.  Frustrated that too much of my recent reading was substandard, ultimately ungratifying, I decided to do research.  I looked for award-winning books.  That’s how I found "The Lost".

Oftentimes, awards are given for work that is good in concept, but bad in execution.  Just look at the Grammys.  How many of those records do you want to hear in the years thereafter?  And I can tell you that "The Lost" is not the easiest read.  The author, Mr. Mendelsohn, is a classicist, with a Ph.D. from Princeton.  He sprinkles his narrative with Bible interpretations, delineated in italics, page after page.  You understand the point he’s making (after coming to know his style, reading to the end of the paragraph before trying to divine the point), but it detracts from the story.  His search for his relatives.

They’ve been lost.

But they can’t exactly be found.

You see they died in the Holocaust.

That’s more than half a century ago now.  Some people deny it ever happened.  But reading this book, all you can say is NEVER AGAIN!

I was hooked because of the informal style.  Wherein Mr. Mendelsohn speaks about his grandfather, about gatherings of old Jews, who pinched your cheeks and spoke in heavily-accented English and creeped you out more than excited you.  Actually, now I’m injecting my own world.  Mr. Mendelsohn loved most of his old relatives.  But not Joe the Barber, not all of them.  But if only he’d known who they were in the family tree before they died!  He had so much to ask them, but now it’s too late!

We grew up living to play baseball.  Believing the anti-semitism our parents spoke of had been eradicated.  We were assimilated.  But we knew six million had been killed.  There were those at the JCC with tattoos on their arms, it hadn’t even been twenty years, we could not forget, we were constantly reminded.

I come from Russian and Polish stock.  My grandfather’s family is from Russia.  A big clan. A bunch went to Palestine.  Some went to Boston.  Others stayed behind and became Communists.  Uncle Saul fought in the Russian army and ended up in the Bay Area after the war.  He fell in love with a widow.  But the group broke it up, it was too soon.  Saul ultimately married Lily.  He was always smiling.  Was he happy?

Families.  We know little of my dad’s background.  Only that his dad lost a hand in a railroad accident and left all his money to his first family in Pittsburgh when he passed away.  My father had to support his mother, he had to go to night school, the anger stayed in him almost until the day he died.  Rarely verbalized in terms of what had happened previously, but constantly evidenced in eruptions over seemingly tiny infractions.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s father’s family history is one of darkness.  I understand how this can happen.  How the bad stories can be buried.  But I can’t understand how the brothers don’t speak.  My father insisted we all get along.  No matter how much we sometimes hated each other, the lines of communication had to remain open.  I follow that principle to this day.  Life is too short.  Some people cannot give up the grudge, cannot put forth the olive branch, you must swallow your pride and reach out.

Daniel’s grandfather, a raconteur, like everyone in my mother’s family, including my mother herself, couldn’t get over the death of his brother’s family back in Poland.  Actually, it kept changing, from Austria/Hungary to Russia to Poland to Germany.  And upon his grandfather’s death, Daniel discovers letters from this deceased brother, Shmiel, begging his relatives in America to GET HIM OUT!

If not the whole family, then just one daughter.  Maybe he’ll write to Roosevelt, the President will understand.  All his brothers and sisters are in America, shouldn’t he be there too?

But we turn a blind eye.  We’re too wrapped up in our own lives.  We have little compassion.

But we’re not absent of human feeling, like the Germans and Ukrainians who eradicate Daniel Mendelsohn’s family.

The depictions of the Holocaust will both horrify and rivet you.  Man’s inhumanity to man seems to know no limit.  If I repeated what happened, you wouldn’t believe it.  Or would say it’s too gross.  But it happened.  To regular people.  Just like you and me.  To Shmiel, who’d actually immigrated to America, but had returned to Bolechower, because he preferred to be a big fish in a small pond instead of starting over.

Like I said, "The Lost" is not always an easy read.  So I’m not going to tell you to read it. I’m just going to say we’re insignificant.  If you’re working to be remembered, forget it.  At best, your relatives will carry on your memory.  It’s about living.  In the here and now.  If you have the privilege.