Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost is an exercise in negative space. The six members of his family who perished during World War II in Bolechow, a small Galician town, are at once the gravitational center of his story and a black hole. Mendelsohn's seeks to rescue these six — great uncle Shmiel; his wife, Esther; and their four daughters, Bronia, Ruchele, Frydka, and Lorka — from the anonymity of being a murdered Jew, an outline shared by six million others. But Mendelsohn needs details to do so. He needs to know not only how they died but how they lived. What he needs are stories.

A classicist, Mendelsohn has a long-standing passion for odysseys, and his journey to find the specifics of his family lacks neither the pathos nor the distance covered by his ancient predecessors. He and his brother Matt, a photographer, travel the world — from Bolechow to New York, Sydney, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Lviv — in search of the 48 Jews in Bolechow, of the 6,000 who once lived in the village, who survived the Nazis. Many are dead when the middle-aged Mendelsohn starts his search, but from the survivors, he learns that his uncle Shmiel was deaf and nicknamed "the King"; Shmiel's daughter Frydka was a progressive, spirited girl with "pretty legs" and in love with a Pole; and that Lorka was quieter and darkly beautiful. An old man in Sydney demonstrates the way Frydka carried her books in a straight and proud gait. Each act of individualization is an act of creation, too — a parallel underscored with cogent and masterful Talmudic exegesis that Mendelsohn intersperses throughout.

Of course, resurrection comes at a cost. Scandals are raised and dormant grudges are reawakened. Some things are simply unknowable; other things simply unimaginable. Despite the by-now well-known images of piles of shoes and suitcases, the deaths of six million Jews are unimaginable. The death of six specific Jews — pretty Frydka, proud Shmiel, quiet Lorka, among them — is both a much easier and much harder story to bear.

-Joshua David Stein