No friends, however, have been as vital to the writing of this book as have Louis and Anka Begley. It would be an understatement to say that they shared with me much that was so important; only a small part of it was a crucial week of hospitality during which I brought my work to an end.
That work has, from the start, been a terrifically pleasurable collaboration with my editor, Tim Duggan, and what merits it has are owed largely to him. His initial enthusiasm for the project, his patience as it grew in scope and size (and duration), his immaculate professionalism, the skill with which he balanced an acute editorial sensibility with a deep sensitivity to my aims, have made the writing of this book a joy to me and, in the end, an experience from which I’ve learned a great deal. For that I am thankful. I should add that not the least part of the pleasure of working with him has been the excellent help, unflaggingly cheerful and unfailingly efficient, given me by his assistant, Allison Lorentzen, to whom I’m also very grateful.
I will once again end where I began. I was just out of graduate school when Lydia Wills more or less scooped me up and pointed me in the right direction, and our professional collaboration has, ever since, brought me great pride and many satisfactions—as indeed has our friendship. It was she who knew all along that this book was the one I had to write, and she who made it happen in just the right way; for that reason it, like so much that I’ve accomplished, is as much hers as mine.
THOSE READERS WHO have gotten this far in the book will have become familiar with one of the dedicatees, Mrs. Frances Begley, née Franciszka Hauser, my feelings for whom will have been made clear in these pages. The other deserves to be commemorated by more than a mere name. Sarah Pettit was, at first, my editor, in the days when I first began writing; but she soon developed into a cherished friend, while continuing for a long time to be a supportive colleague. Her many extraordinary qualities—her intellectual brilliance, her editorial gusto and professional acumen, the superb taste, the wry humor that barely masked a sentimental, even poetic heart, her beauty and her passions—have been duly eulogized elsewhere, as befitting a person who achieved so much in the public world in so little time. Her death from lymphoma in January 2003, when she was thirty-six, was and continues to be a tragedy for a world much larger than that constituted by the circle of her intimate friends. I will say here only that she was the earliest and most enthusiastic champion of this book, and for me it is indeed an unhappy proof that there are tears in things that she cannot see the end result of a project whose birth she greeted with such selfless enthusiasm, at a time when a lack of interest in anything but her own condition would have been more than forgivable. She was, and will always be, my darling girl.
About the Author
Daniel Mendelsohn was born on Long Island and educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books as well as the New York Times Magazine and the New York Times Book Review, and is a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. His first book, The Elusive Embrace, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. He teaches at Bard College.
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Credits
Jacket design by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
Copyright
THE LOST. Copyright © 2006 by Daniel Mendelsohn. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition September 2006 ISBN 9780061448721
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The lost: a search for six of six million/Daniel Mendelsohn.
p. cm.
ISBN-10: 0-06-054297-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-054297-9
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following institutions and individuals for permission to reproduce photographs and to quote from documents in their possession:
Beth Hatefutsoth, The Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, Tel Aviv, Permanent Exhibition; the Jewish Museum in Prague; Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem; Lane Montgomery; and Henryk Jaronowski.
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