I've been reading Daniel Mendelsohn's book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. Mendelsohn grew up in an assimilated family in New York. In the background of his visits to his older relatives in Florida lay a story about a great-uncle who remained in the family's ancestral town of Bolechow, Ukraine, only to be murdered during the Holocaust along with his wife and four daughters. The writer's grandfather and the other siblings had already emigrated to Israel and the US. The author intersperses his story with an analysis of Rashi's commentary on the Torah and that of the modern commentator Rabbi Richard Elliot Friedman. Mendelsohn continuously revisits the theme of sibling … [Read more...]