I can't say whether it was a widespread cultural trend of the 1980s and early '90s, but it was during those years that the dimensions and the particulars of the Holocaust captured my imagination. Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's mesmerizing documentary on the subject, led me to the literature of the Holocaust, Primo Levi's Periodic Table, Elie Wiesel's Night and many other books.

When my wife and I traveled to Europe to visit her family, we worked in trips to Breendonk, the collection point for the Jews of her native Belgium, and to Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. We took our children to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. While visiting picturesque villages in France and Germany, we sometimes sought out or happened upon Jew Street, on which there often stood a decaying synagogue.

These places were eerie in their stillness and their emptiness, monuments to the human life that was absent from them, reminders of the campaign to obliterate Europe's Jews.

In time I thought I had read enough about this subject. I am not a Jew, and the Holocaust was personal to me only in that many of my colleagues and friends are Jews. Learning about the Holocaust gave me insight into the nature of anti-Semitism, which, on some level, each of them must abide. But until last month it had probably been 10 years since I had read a book on the subject.

Then I picked up The New York Review of Books and saw Charles Simic's review of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. Simic is the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and UNH professor who is also a

prolific and provocative contributor to the top book reviews. Simic's review began: "The Lost is the most gripping, the most amazing true story I have read in years."

I bought the book and savored its swirling, winding, surprising story for more than a month. I am a slow reader but not that slow; the reason it took so long was that I wanted it to. I wanted to think about Daniel Mendelsohn's story and his telling of it, to absorb what he was learning on his odyssey and what I was learning from him about history and the making of history. In his story itself I found myself cliff-hung, just as I used to be when I watched movie-house serials on Saturday afternoons 50 years ago.

The premise of Mendelsohn's book is simple: His great aunt and great uncle and their four daughters, a butcher and his family in the small eastern Polish city of Bolechow, were "killed by the Nazis," as it was always expressed in family lore while he was growing up. As a man, Mendelsohn decided to find out who they were and what happened to them.

His search for those who knew them took him to Poland, Ukraine, Australia, Israel and Scandinavia. As he told Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air the other night, it was like one of those old movies in which a map comes on the screen to signal travel, and a moving arrow directs the characters, and the audience, to the new setting.

Mendelsohn spells out the why of his journey early in the book. As a boy, he was in the thrall of a grandfather, a legendary storyteller who kept the family alive in his grandson's imagination. In appearance, young Daniel so clearly reminded his relatives of Uncle Shmiel Jaeger, the man killed by the Nazis, that when he walked into the room, they would cry.

Clean slate

As Mendelsohn grew up, he became even more deeply fascinated with his family's story and with its missing link. He realized that, as a member of the second generation since the Holocaust, he was being lulled over time into complacency about these ancestors he had never known. Here is how he put it:

"The only gap . . . was Shmiel and his family, the lost ones about whom there were no facts to pencil in on the index cards, no dates to enter in the genealogy software, no anecdotes or stories to tell. But as time went on it hurt less and less to think that we'd never know anything more about them, since with each passing decade the entire event receded, and with it they, too, grew dimmer, blunter, not only those six but all of them; and as decade followed on decade they seemed more and more to belong not to us but to History. This, paradoxically, made it easier not to think about them, since after all so many people were thinking about them - if not them specifically, then about a kind of generic them, those who had been killed by the Nazis, and for this reason it was as though they were being looked after."

I am not going to tell you much detail about The Lost because I don't want to spoil anything about the remarkable trail that Mendelsohn cuts through time and space. Every reader should come to this book with a clean slate. On Fresh Air, I was upset when Gross questioned Mendelsohn about one of his last and most profound discoveries.

One distressing aspect of his story, a phenomenon familiar to us because of the splintering of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the ethnic chaos in Iraq today, is the behavior of the Ukrainians during the Holocaust. For all appearances, Bolechow was a settled and prosperous mix of cultures before the war. But, with justification, the Ukrainian residents soon came to be seen as willing and brutal Jew killers. (Paradoxically, as readers will see, some Ukrainians were also brave protectors of some Jews.)

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