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For five years, Daniel Mendelsohn traveled the globe searching for an answer to the question he had first asked as a boy decades earlier: What really happened to his great-uncle's family during the Holocaust? Here, Mendelsohn weaves together his discoveries about the past, family secrets and Judaism itself. He visits nearly a dozen countries on four continents in pursuit of the truth, eventually interviewing the town's twelve living survivors. Along the way, he detects things that challenge family myths and inspire new questions about long-held beliefs. Interwoven throughout the present-day developments are flashbacks to Mendelsohn's youth spent with his immigrant relatives, and more generally to Jewish life, philosophy and tradition over the years. Not only does he come to know his six deceased relatives on this unforgettable journey, but he discovers so much more about himself, his religion, his immediate family and their shared history as well.--From publisher description.

Jews --- Jews --- Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) --- Mendelsohn, Daniel Adam, --- Jaeger family. --- Family.

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Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, France's best foreign book of the year In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own-works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul. Francois Fenelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey,The Adventures of Telemachus - a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years - resulted in his banishment. And the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write two of his own books-a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father-that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

Literature, Modern --- European literature --- Critics --- Classical influences --- Classical influences --- Mendelsohn, Daniel Adam, --- Auerbach, Erich, --- Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe-, --- Sebald, W. G. --- Homer. --- Homer --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Influence.