In 2003 philosopher Peter Singer wrote Pushing Time Away, a biography of his grandfather David Oppenheim, a Viennese Jew killed in the Holocaust. In a devastating critique published later that year in The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn argued that Singer had managed to write a book about the Holocaust devoid of emotional content. Oppenheim's story in and of itself was obviously tragic, but, according to Mendelsohn, Singer had done his best to insure that neither he nor his readers would feel very deeply about it. Keen on fending off the sentimentalism that attaches to so much Holocaust literature, Singer evinced "a tendency to miss emotional clues and rich details of lived life that, in another's hands, would have made this biography searing rather than merely affecting."

Shortly before that review appeared, Mendelsohn, a professor of the humanities at Bard and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, had traveled to Sydney to interview a group of Holocaust survivors (whom he, after his grandfather's Yiddish inflection, thinks of as "surwivors") for his own rather similar book, The Lost. Now that it has appeared, it's clear why Mendelsohn's disappointment with Singer's book seemed so personal. Mendelsohn and Singer share a set of premises. The Holocaust, both men believe, has become caked in cheap sentiment, pressed into the service of an easy sadness that makes the tragedy feel stripmined to Mendelsohn's generation--those whose grandparents saw the insides of the camps--and even more so to the next. Holocaust writing can veer close, they think, to the tawdry and exploitative. The Swiss impostor Binjamin Wilkomirski, for one, played the trump card of Holocaust authenticity with his 1995 memoir Fragments, about life in a concentration camp he had never been in; the enormous success (and adaptation into film) of Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, owed not a little to its schmaltzy treatment of the Holocaust.

There was thus the whiff of a secret boast ("in another's hands") to Mendelsohn's point about Singer. That boast has now been amply justified. Mendelsohn's engagement with these concerns--his honest critical appraisal of his own motivations for and misgivings about writing a charming, elegant, suspenseful book about such grave matters--has made for a work that is not "merely affecting," indeed not only "searing," but extraordinary.

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