Mendelsohn on history, family, Judaism

Award-winning writer and critic Daniel Mendelsohn, Ph.D., will give this year’s annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 12, in Graham Chapel.

His talk, “Finding ‘The Lost’: A Journey into the History, Family and Judaism,” will focus on his quest to unearth the stories of his family members who perished during World War II. In his 2006 best-selling memoir, “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million,” Mendelsohn tells the story of his grandfather’s brother, who stayed behind in Ukraine and was killed in the Holocaust after his siblings had immigrated to America.

Mendelsohn’s other works include “The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity,” “Gender and the City in Euripide’s Political Plays” and a collection of essays on literature and the arts, “How Beautiful It Is and How Easily it Can Be Broken.”

Mendelsohn, the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, earned a bachelor’s degree in classics at the University of Virginia and a master’s degree and doctorate from Princeton University, where he was a Mellon Fellow in Humanities and lecturer.

He began a career in journalism in 1994 and has written articles, essays and reviews that have appeared in many publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.

He served from 2000-02 as the weekly book critic for New York magazine and won the 2001 National Book Critics Award for Excellence in Reviewing.

The lecture is being co-sponsored by the Assembly Series. It is free and open to the public and requires no advance reservation.

For more information on any Assembly Series lecture, visit assemblyseries.wustl.edu.