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Sophie Vallas, Daniel Mendelsohn’s Memoir Writing: Rings of Memory

Brigitte Félix
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Sophie Vallas, ed., Daniel Mendelsohn’s Memoir Writing: Rings of Memory. Lanham (Maryland): Lexington Books, 2021, 161 p. ISBN: 9781793626769. $100.

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1There are few scholarly publications on book-length essays such as those written by Daniel Mendelsohn, a major contemporary author whose work brilliantly perpetuates the rich tradition of essay-writing in North American literature. Daniel Mendelsohn’s Memoir Writing: Rings of Memory, a collection of eight articles by French scholars edited and introduced by Sophie Vallas, is a welcome addition to the rather limited amount of academic work on both Mendelsohn’s texts and on “memoir writing” as a specific subgenre of essay writing. As novelist Jerome Charyn states in his praise for the book on the back cover, it is “the first collection ever of Daniel Mendelsohn’s first three memoirs and a ground-breaking volume of essays that favors a close reading of Mendelsohn’s powerful texts.” A regular contributor of reviews and essays to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books where he holds the position of editor-at-large, Daniel Mendelsohn now has a long career as a memoirist, critic, essayist and translator. He is a renowned Classicist and teaches as a Professor of Humanities at Bard College. He recently completed a new translation of Homer’s Odyssey published to high acclaim by the University of Chicago Press in April 2025. He is the author of ten books, among which the three memoirs that the essays gathered by Sophie Vallas examine: The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (1999), The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006)—an international bestseller that was awarded numerous prizes, including the Prix Médicis in France—and An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic (2017).

2Some of the contributions in the 160-page volume were originally papers presented on the occasion of the symposium on Mendelsohn’s work organized in March 2019 by the research group LERMA at Aix-Marseille Université. After a substantial introduction by Sophie Vallas, the readers will find an interview with Daniel Mendelsohn conducted by Sophie Vallas and Laurence Benarroche on the day following the symposium, which Mendelsohn also attended. Following the interview, the first essay is dedicated to The Elusive Embrace; the next three focus on The Lost and the last four are devoted to An Odyssey. The eight critics describe and analyze Mendelsohn’s memoir writing as it is embodied in the three books which, as the writer says, constitute a kind of “intellectual autobiography” (2). The blurring of the “potential frontiers between criticism, teaching, and self-writing” (3) is central to Mendelsohn’s conception of his work. For him, self-writing is the exploration of what connects the self to a vast network “interweaving stories of intimacy and personal reflections with abstract ideas revelatory of a background in Classicist studies, erudition and debate,” to use Nicolas Pierre Boileau’s description in his article on The Elusive Embrace (33). Sophie Vallas argues that this is precisely what makes Mendelsohn’s writing truly original among the contemporary production of literary nonfiction works.

  • 1 Originally published in German in 1946, Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Wester (...)

3Daniel Mendelsohn’s Memoir Writing: Rings of Memory presents the articles in the chronological order of the publication of Mendelsohn’s three works, but such an arrangement actually helps the readers see the progressive building of a complex network of the themes and motifs—including linguistic motifs—that circulate within and between the three memoirs. The first essay, by Nicolas Pierre Boileau, highlights the value of The Elusive Embrace as a seminal text. It establishes the pattern for Mendelsohn’s memoir writing technique which consists in delving into the family past through meticulous investigations into textual and photographic archives. This is combined with Mendelsohn’s extreme familiarity with the classics, Homer in particular, which provides the essayist with a model for his hermeneutic way of reading and writing. The next three articles focus on different aspects of the monumental inquiry Mendelsohn conducts in The Lost. Yves-Charles Grandjeat shows how the quest for a partly irrecoverable past through various languages raises issues of narrative ethics in the face of the past’s resistance to any translation that would ease its way into the present. Next, Laurence Benarroche centers her reading of The Lost on the role played by the photographs Mendelsohn incorporates into his text, in an effort to re-member his “lost family,” the great-uncle and aunt and their four daughters who were assassinated in Poland by the Nazis in 1943. Marc Amfreville’s essay then shows how The Lost and An Odyssey can be read as the conjoined darker and brighter sides of Mendelsohn’s continuous search through all kinds of photographic, written archives and human memories (in The Lost). Both books display the writer’s belief in literary exegesis as the way to ensure the transmission and persistence of memory. As Daniel Mendelsohn himself recalls in The Lost: “When I was growing up […] I would wonder what kind of present you could possibly have without knowing the stories of your past” (162). M. Amfreville’s contribution on The Lost also serves as a transition to the second half of the book which contains four essays on An Odyssey. The first one, by Jean Viviès, re-examines Erich Auerbach’s famous reading of the scar episode from Homer’s Odyssey in Mimesis1 and Mendelsohn’s revision in turn of Auerbach’s interpretation, which leads him to ponder the ambiguities of his relationship with his own father, Jay Mendelsohn. Sara Watson’s article concentrates on the legacy of the American tradition of self-writing, while Arnaud Schmitt examines the intertextual resonances and dissonances of Mendelsohn’s memoir with Philip Roth’s autobiographical narrative in Patrimony. The last essay, by Sophie Vallas, probes the significance of a symbolically charged object, a bed, that plays a key role in recognition scenes in both Homer’s and Mendelsohn’s texts.

4The long interview (21 pages) with Daniel Mendelsohn can be read as a “prelude” (9) to some of the discussions in the ensuing essays on memory and the use of photography, among other key topics. The text of the interview is divided into eight thematic sub-sections, five of which deal with The Lost. Mendelsohn gives useful insights into how he worked on the book and the choices he made, starting with his decision to include photographs from the very beginning, and to associate his brother Matt, a professional photographer. The whole project was inspired by the family archive but also by a literary model, namely W. G. Sebald—his interest in WWII and the Holocaust as well as his use of the Homeric technique of ring composition which also informs Mendelsohn’s self-narratives. The whole interview is extremely informative and enjoyable, with the exception of the last, rather conversational, section on sports and literature, which might have been edited and shortened. Mendelsohn’s detailed answers to the interviewers supply valuable background for approaching the scholarly analyses in the ensuing essays.

5The opening essay, “The Elusive Embrace: A Gay Man’s Bi-passing the Fantasy of Oneness,” by Nicolas Pierre Boileau, is an in-depth exegesis of Mendelsohn’s reflections on his “own personal journey into his adult self” (33), including his gay self. For N. P. Boileau, the gayness of, and in, the text itself is one of the manifestations of the elusiveness of identity caught between sameness and difference. Thus, The Elusive Embrace “queer[s] the queer narrative” (45), criticizing certain visions of identity and intersectionality with a counterdiscourse sitting “uncomfortably on the margins of […] queer theory’s all-encompassing definition of sameness” (40). N. P. Boileau’s thorough reading helps the reader both navigate the paradoxes of Mendelsohn’s position—whose “coming-out” is about his leading a straight-like life in the suburbs—and note the signs of the text’s resistance to its inclusion into queer identity or even queer literature. N. P. Boileau challenges the idea that The Elusive Embrace is a memoir because Mendelsohn’s stance is “that of the critic who observes from a distance, and not that of the memoirist” (35), so that the book is a rather “queer” memoir thwarting the expectations of the genre, oscillating between two modes: the memoirist and the critical. Such a deliberately constructed elusiveness participates in the book’s seductive deconstruction of binary structures, opening the possibility of enjoying in life and in writing the “multiple choices between other and sameness” (44).

6N. P. Boileau’s essay is an essential introduction to the main features of Mendelsohn’s oeuvre: his literary explorations of ancient texts—like the Old Testament in The Lost, The Odyssey in An Odyssey—, his inquiries into his family history, his questioning of the space of difference that separates one from oneself, and oneself from the Other that the self contains. In “Translation, Heteroglossia, and Othering in Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost,” Yves-Charles Grandjeat’s argument partly branches out from Boileau’s by showing that the writer’s encounter with otherness is a “journey through translation” (49), between image and text, secular and sacred, and between languages. The issue of translation becomes a powerful hermeneutic tool which Y.-C. Grandjeat uses to analyze the significance of the complex entanglement of voices and narratives in The Lost. Mendelsohn’s “quest for the missing fragments of his identity” (49) confronts him to the various languages spoken by the survivors of the Jewish community and the people in the town of Bolechow, now in Ukraine, who might have known his grandfather’s brother, Schmiel, as well as his wife and their daughters. The multi-layered linguistic space in which the narrative unfolds, leads “Daniel,” the narrating agency in The Lost—and the readers—to experience the extent to which “the self is shaped through a weaving together of multilingual stories” (50). At the beginning of his essay, Y.-C. Grandjeat insists upon calling the book a “novel” as if “Daniel” had the status of a fictional first-person narrator, which is debatable. Actually, the article does not expatiate on this point and drops the claim after a few paragraphs. Indeed, there is not much to be gained in designating the book as a “novel” rather than a “memoir”—especially as both genres are open to the dialectical hybridization of the fictional and the factual, History and personal histories or social discourses. Besides, the connection made with translation issues using the allusion to the potential of heteroglossia associated with the genre of the novel since Bakhtin is a much more stimulating suggestion. The point is that through translation, which creates an insterstitial space for otherness, difference and absence to meet, Daniel makes a “constantly renewed experience of estrangement” (55). Ultimately, The Lost can be read as an encounter with Otherness defined as that which precisely resists translation. In the end, the untranslatable or the untranslated create a “textual distance” that protects the Other, the Lost, “mak[ing] space for the dead and let[ting] them rest in peace” (59).

7While Y.-C. Grandjeat’s essay mainly referred to the figure of the father, Mendelsohn’s great-uncle Schmiel, Laurence Benarroche’s contribution sheds light on the most elusive character in The Lost, the youngest daughter named Bronia, probably killed at age 13 on September 2, 1942. In “Rescued from Oblivion—The Search for One of Six in Mendelsohn’s The Lost, Bronia as a Tragic Character,” L. Benarroche notes that the passages about Bronia are both “scarce and noticeable” (73), which grants her a special position. The Lost concludes with the evocation of Bronia and her mother and the confirmation—brought by the information gathered in the 2007 postscript—of the exact date of Bronia’s execution as well as the heart-rending realization that the little girl and her mother died awful deaths separately. Commenting on the scant details that Mendelsohn managed to collect, among which one single photograph of Bronia, L. Benarroche sees in the girl not only a double emblem of the irretrievable, but a tragic figure in the classical sense, a victim of her father’s rivalry with his brother, which led Schmiel to the tragic decision not to flee to America to join the rest of the family before it was too late to do so. Relying on trauma studies, L. Benarroche claims that Mendelsohn’s researching the details of Bronia’s life not only betrays the writer’s experience of post-memory, i.e. the passing down of trauma from one generation to the next, but also allows him to share that experience with the readers: the acute sense of lostness stems from how little information he can find and convey on the girl. However, L. Benarroche’s conclusion, conversely to Y.-C. Grandjeat’s, suggests the possibility of some form of replenishment through the “imaginative reading” encouraged by Mendelsohn’s way of treating the figure of Bronia. The readers are invited to prolong the writer’s own imaginings of the little girl’s effaced presence, thus accompanying the writer in his performance—through memoir-writing—of a “repairing” gesture that L. Benarroche associates with the Jewish prayer of Tikkun Olam.

8Marc Amfreville’s essay, “An Odyssey: The Lost Redux,” is strategically placed in a pivotal position before the rest of the volume, which is then dedicated solely to An Odyssey. Relying on the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit, M. Amfreville shows that The Lost resurfaces in An Odyssey in more ways than one might think at first reading. The juxtaposed reading of The Lost and An Odyssey generates an enlightening interpretive journey back to The Lost. M. Amfreville draws our attention to the play of signifiers by tracing the way Mendelsohn’s text unfolds the writer’s intellectual quest for wholeness in a paradoxical acknowledgment of the conflictedness inherent in every being. For instance, M. Amfreville develops the symbolic and narrative function of the pun between “whole” and “hole,” which leads him to an in-depth analysis of the significance of the pit—or, more suggestively, the black hole—where Schmiel hid with one of his daughters before they were shot. The image of the dark hole (figuring the unknowable or the unpresentable) is reversed into a metaphor for the disclosure finally taking place, while illustrating the danger of self-destruction inherent in the “plunge” into the black hole of the past (86). M. Amfreville’s critical reading of An Odyssey relies on a skillful digression returning to the text of The Lost. It once again highlights the thematic and textual affinities between An Odyssey and The Lost and also reflects Mendelsohn’s own digressive mode of ring composition. Quoting from Archive Fever, M. Amfreville reminds us that Derrida considers the will to conserve the past and memory as “organically informed” (92) by the death drive. How can literary creation counter such a force? How could Mendelsohn write after The Lost? He could, and did, M. Amfreville argues, because he believes that writing as a form of transmission is on the side of life. In The Lost Mendelsohn wanted not so much to find out how six members of his family died, but how they had lived, in order to rescue those lives from oblivion. It is essential that The Lost should be seen not just as the monumental book it is, a funereal and insurmountable end in itself. M. Amfreville renames An Odyssey The Lost redux” to underline the continuity of Mendelsohn’s memoir writing from one work to the next and to emphasize the idea that An Odyssey should be read as “a tale of bonding [between father and son] and hence, ultimately, of survival” (92), a narrative showing that “darkness can be, at least fugitively, punctured by life” (92).

9Arnaud Schmitt’s essay on An Odyssey does not immediately follow M. Amfreville’s, but since it broaches the father-son theme, it is interesting to read it next. A. Schmitt sees in patrimony, i.e. the dynamic relation between the father and his son, or “how the son experiences fatherhood” (122) the main source of the “narrative tension” (to borrow the title of Raphaël Baroni’s book, which A. Schmitt uses as a theoretical framework) that sets the storytelling of An Odyssey into motion. For that reason, Mendelsohn’s book might be part of the tradition of Jewish American literature, along with such canonical writers as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth. The readers who are familiar with Patrimony, Roth’s memoir about his own father, will find that An Odyssey similarly deals with how the presence of the father is a source of conflicts and existential angst (124) that can be narratively exploited. In both Roth and Mendelsohn’s books, the father figure always reminds the son of his position as “the little boy,” no matter what the circumstances might be. Even when Jay Mendelsohn, in An Odyssey, sits among the seminar students in Professor Daniel Mendelsohn’s classroom, he is the one who teaches his son a lesson in the end—about how Homer’s epic is as much about life as about writing and literature. By analyzing the narrative mode and its sophisticated machinery—including the “ring composition,” those “elaborate circlings in space and time” (28) that characterize Homer’s Odyssey—A. Schmitt concentrates on the singularity of Mendelsohn’s plot which is based on the intricacy and relative indeterminacy of the father-son relationship. As a matter of fact, the first sentence of the book sets the plot in motion with a “complication” from the start: the fact that the aging father should attend his son’s seminar inevitably announces future disruptions. The originality of An Odyssey as an autobiographical narrative lies in the “face-off between father and son” within the university classroom. This situation triggers the more or less direct reflection on the complexity of the father-son relationship through a series of embedded points of view—the son watching his students watch his father during the seminar sessions. In Mendelsohn’s memoir, the seminar functions like a stage where the intimate nature of the father-son relationship is mediated by the situation and kept at a safe distance. The disagreements remain within the intellectual sphere and are transferred onto—or translated into—the father and the son’s diverging interpretations of Homer’s Odyssey: “This is definitely not a Roth novel” (132). Mendelsohn manages to keep the original tension in his treatment of the antagonistic father-son relationship theme thanks to an efficient narrative strategy based on carefully managed analepses and belated disclosures, i.e. a strategy inspired by the ring structure to be found in the Homeric epic the son and the father contend over and read together.

10Like Arnaud Schmitt, Jean Viviès reads An Odyssey as a tribute to a father figure by his writer-son. Leaving aside the narratological perspective of A. Schmitt’s analysis, J. Viviès’ essay unravels the intertextual tapestry of Mendelsohn’s storytelling by confronting the text of the “scar episode” from Book 19 in Homer’s Odyssey with Eric Auerbach’s analysis of this passage in Mimesis. J. Viviès chose to quote extensively from both Homer and Auerbach instead of referring the readers to the two sources, which appears slightly unconventional. Yet we can see this as an indication that detailed acquaintance with the textual matter is a prerequisite. Moreover, it is aptly reminiscent of Mendelsohn’s own use of sometimes long verbatim quotations from many passages in The Odyssey before developing his interpretations (not only in An Odyssey but also in The Elusive Embrace, not to mention the quotations from the Book of Genesis and the rabbinic exegeses in The Lost). For J. Viviès, Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey offers a critical re-reading of Auerbach’s interpretation of the scar/wound scene in Homer’s epic. Using his father’s objections in his seminar, Mendelsohn underlines the irony and ambiguities of this episode, contrary to Auerbach’s contention that there is no mystery in Odysseus’s return. Relying on recent scholarship and revisions of the translation of Odysseus’s attribute, polytropos, as meaning “complicated” rather than “cunning,” J. Viviès argues that An Odyssey as “a modern, post-Auerbachian Telemachy, filled with doubts and complications” (103), contrary to Auerbach’s vision of The Odyssey.

11As Sophie Vallas notes in her introduction to the volume, J. Viviès’s analysis strikingly anticipates the publication of Mendelsohn’s Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative and Fate (2020), which delves into Auerbach’s Mimesis and the critic’s reading of book 19 of The Odyssey. The rather surprising subtitle —“A Tale”— for a book of essays about literary writing, literary history and criticism (Homer, Fénelon and Sebald are successively studied in the three chapters), points at the genre-defying type of writing that characterizes Mendelsohn, for which “memoir” proves an adequately loose term, according to Sara Watson. In “Conversion in Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: Reworking the American Memoir,” Watson focuses on this matter of the generic identity and definition of Mendelsohn idiosyncratic “memoir writing.” She goes back to the historical foundations of the American practice of autobiography in Puritan times and sees in Mendelsohn’s work the heritage of Transcendentalist essays with their emphasis on education. Likening Mendelsohn’s memoir writing in An Odyssey to a conversion narrative may seem slightly overstretched, except when S. Watson somehow suggests that the conversion is that of the genre of the memoir itself, which has educational virtues. As a matter of fact, the principle of ring composition creates mystery and encourages the readers, like the students in Mendelsohn’s Homer seminar, to look for clues and go back and forth in the text and in the story. The memoir thus educates its readers into the subtleties and uncertainties of critical reading and also makes it possible to reject overarching interpretations because of its protean, elusive form.

12The last essay in the volume is Sophie Vallas’s, which elegantly shows that An Odyssey can and should be read as the odyssey of (its own) interpretation. “Rosebed: the Stuff Beds Are Made Of in Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey” is based on a close reading of An Odyssey which, like Mendelsohn’s narrative style, draws on an initial mystery triggering a quest for clues through textual analyses where interpretations originate. Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and the paronomastic pun substituting “bed” for “bud” in the article’s title suggest a striking parallel with what happens at the end of An Odyssey, thus allowing S. Vallas to develop a sophisticated reading of Mendelsohn’s essay, starting with the final words of Mendelsohn’s dying father, “a door.” The bed used by Daniel Mendelsohn, which was made by his father from an old door years before, expresses in condensed metaphorical fashion the poetic and hermeneutic powers of storytelling at the core of Mendelsohn’s memoir writing. S. Vallas shows how the word “bed,” like “rosebud” in Citizen Kane, is a potent “biographeme,” a word that encapsulates the story of a man’s life, Daniel’s father. It is Mendelsohn’s close reading of the Odyssey that teaches him how to uncover the “sêmata,” or the signs—words that may designate objects working as signals he then incorporates into his narrative. Those signs and words tell tales as much as the tale itself. Using the polysemy of the word sêma (meaning a sign or a grave), S. Vallas goes further than the obvious definition of An Odyssey as Mendelsohn’s literary “tomb” (tombeau) for his father. Pick up the sêma of the bed the father made from a humble door and you can start unraveling the whole tapestry of literal and figurative meanings. S. Vallas’s close reading enhances the richness of the book’s design in its finest textual details, as when she detects a shift from family memory to a “very subjective retrospective analysis” approaching in a Proustian manner “the essence of the moment” (146) in a sudden loosening of the syntax. Speaking of Jay Mendelsohn’s exceptional presence in his son’s seminar, one of the students writes to Daniel Mendelsohn: “I’ll always read The Odyssey with him in mind” (377), and that is also what S. Vallas’s essay conveys, through the brilliant critical exegesis of two sêmata, a bed and a door, bringing together “a father, a son and an epic,” as the subtitle of Mendelsohn’s essay indicates.

13Daniel Mendelsohn’s extremely graceful style, his erudite analyses of classical texts, his artful storytelling and the utmost attention he pays to words and language in his work have undeniably inspired the eight contributions gathered by Sophie Vallas. The essays adopt eight different critical perspectives, all extremely enlightening, which bring out the specificities and the unique character of Mendelsohn’s writing. Each contributor reveals the tightly-knit literary texture of An Elusive Embrace, The Lost and An Odyssey. The volume will certainly be a source of great interest and reading pleasure for the researchers in literature who turn to close textual analysis as a hermeneutic tool. Daniel Mendelsohn’s Memoir Writing: Rings of Memory is undoubtedly a landmark publication on three major works of nonfiction. It must be recommended to all those scholars wishing to explore the poetics of Mendelsohn’s original memoir writing, to find food for thought on the genre of “memoir writing,” and to join the discussion about the place of Daniel Mendelsohn’s oeuvre within both the American tradition of the literary essay and the field of contemporary American literature.

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Bibliographie

Mendelsohn, Daniel. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. 2006. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative and Fate. London: William Collins, 2020.

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Notes

1 Originally published in German in 1946, Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, was translated into English in 1953 and became a major reference in the fields of literary studies, stylistics and comparative literature. The first part of Daniel Mendelsohn’s Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative and Fate (2020) intertwines the description of the way he designed the narrative of An Odyssey with the story of the extraordinary circumstances in which Auerbach wrote Mimesis when he was in exile in Istanbul, after he was fired from his position as a Professor of Romance philology at the University of Marburg and forced to flee Germany in 1936.

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Brigitte Félix, « Sophie Vallas, Daniel Mendelsohn’s Memoir Writing: Rings of Memory »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/27008 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15i2x

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Brigitte Félix

Université Paris 8

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