Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost was a worldwide bestseller, an immediate Classic. This book – the story, told by a child of survivors, of some members of his family who disappeared in the Holocaust (the complete title of the book is “The Lost. A Search for Six of Six Million”) – became the matrix of a genre in itself, repeated a hundred times since but never equaled. The book creates a narrative of exceptional scope: simultaneously the odyssey of an American who returns to the scene of European crime; an investigation that ventures into the labyrinth of a family biography; a vertiginous self-commentary on the reasons for such a work of writing; a reflection on a chapter of history that draws from the sources of universal history and in particular from the great Hebrew texts and ancient Greece. Because, let’s remember, Daniel Mendelsohn is first of all a Hellenist, the author of a thesis on Euripides, an academic who has just re-translated Homer into English. A writer for whom, immediately, history and myths consonate. Déborah Bucchi and Adrien Zirah, themselves Hellenists, spoke with him at length. They talk about The Lost but not only, about his other books where autofiction is always translated into reflective literary essays.
Published this summer as a series of installments, this interview was worthy of being published in a single issue. The first episode is devoted to the singularity of a style with multiple influences: Jewish, Gay, American, and linked to Europe. Identity, exile, but also philology: it is through these themes that the reflection on Daniel Mendelsohn’s work continues in a second episode where the most contemporary political questions are also addressed. In the last part of the interview, he surveys the politics of our period: the rise of populism in the United States and Europe, the resurgence of antisemitism in the West, and Israel’s status as bastion. He also discusses the current war in Ukraine, a country that he knows intimately — he often traveled there in the course of writing The Lost.
