Book of Daniel

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, July 28, 2008

A young boy walks into a room, and his elderly relatives burst into tears. The reason—usually offered in Yiddish—is that he resembles his great-uncle Shmiel, who, along with his wife and four beautiful daughters, was killed by the Nazis.

This piece of family lore was repeated, with great displays of emotion and precious few details, throughout Daniel Mendelsohn’s childhood. After recounting it in his 1999 memoir The Elusive Embrace, the author set out to discover exactly what happened to Shmiel and his family, tracking down relatives and surviving witnesses on several continents. The resulting book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, was a runaway bestseller, garnering literary respect while selling like hot cakes in 12 different countries.

So what do you do for an encore? When Mendelsohn isn’t writing about himself or his family, he reviews books, plays, and films for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and other A-list periodicals. “Being a critic is what I am,” he declares on a sunny afternoon in his Bard College apartment. After spending “a solid five years” on The Lost, he decided to collect his critical writings, “to have that part of my personality between covers.” How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, forthcoming from HarperCollins, has already won praise from Publishers Weekly and Booklist.

Mendelsohn’s clearly enjoying his life. He just turned in a manuscript he’s been polishing for 10 years—a translation of C. P. Cavafy’s complete poems, to be released by Knopf in April 2009—and he’s about to fly to Capri; a packed red suitcase sits on the rug. It’s enough to swell anyone’s head, but Mendelsohn hasn’t forgotten his roots. When he finished his PhD and moved to New York in 1994, he wrote freelance magazine fluff like “Food Courts of Las Vegas.” “I lived on ramen noodles for three years. I knew every CVS that sold them for five for a dollar instead of four for a dollar.” He grins. “I am not one of those people who pretends to be blasé about having an international bestseller.”

That grin flashes often; a slightly skewed tooth lends it a Mephistophelean air. Mendelsohn’s head is neatly shaved, his light-blue eyes rendered even more striking by high, arching brows. In repose, his gaze is intense, even challenging; one senses that nothing gets past him without being noticed. He wears his erudition lightly, with a vocabulary that swoops from “meretricious” to “nutty,” sometimes in the same sentence. His coffee table displays books in several languages; his sink displays Believe in God breath spray and Oy Vey body detergent. There seem to be a lot of Daniel Mendelsohns.