Notes from October and November's Not Fiction Book Discussion

Although different in genre, style, and tone, Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, a memoir of his search for information about six family members who perished during the Holocaust, and Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story, a biography of Antonina Zabinski and her family, keepers of the Warsaw Zoo during World War II who helped to shelter over 300 refugees from the Warsaw Ghetto, share an abiding interest in the particulars of the lives they discuss. Mendelsohn notes that at one point during the many interviews he and his family conducted with survivors, his brother Matt exclaimed, "A lot of people want to know how they died, but not how they lived!" In our discussions of these two works, we continually returned to the amazing fact of how the people described managed not only to live, but also to do so with hope, dignity, ingenuity, and courage.

Most members of our discussion groups seemed to enjoy the experience of reading The Zookeeper's Wife more than that of reading The Lost, perhaps because Ackerman shapes a more coherent and uplifting "story of what happened," as Mendelsohn would say. Mendelsohn had hoped to be able to tell a coherent story of what happened to his grandfather's brother, wife, and daughters, "[a] story that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story that, like my grandfather's stories, began with all the time in the world, and then speeded up as the lineaments became clear, the characters and personalities and plot, and ended with something memorable, a punch line or a tragedy that you'd always remember," but in the end, he was unable to do so. He did, however, meet many survivors who were willing, in spite of the pain of their personal memories, to share how they had lived and how those they knew and loved had died. He suggests that "How to be the storyteller . . . [is] the unique problem that faces my generation, the generation of those who had been, say, seven or eight years old during the mid-1960s, the generation of the grandchildren of those who'd been adults when it all happened; a problem that will face no other generation in history. We are just close enough to those who were there that we feel an obligation to the facts as we know them; but we are also just far enough away, at this point, to worry about our own role in the transmission of those facts, now that the people to whom those facts happened have mostly slipped away." Reading these books together perhaps gives us a more complete sense of the enormity of the Holocaust than reading either book alone, the reality that there were, of course, so many heroic and uplifting or tragic and sad stories, but that most of them are lost forever along with the original tellers, making each story that we do have that much more precious.