Victor Ripp is a descendant of two worlds: the first, a family of well-to-do Jewish entrepreneurs who emigrated from Europe before it was too late to do so during the Nazi occupation; the second, a family of not-so-well-to-do Jewish laborers who stayed behind in France and Poland. Everyone down to the last person in the first family survived the Holocaust/Shoah; the second family was not so fortunate, and Ripp lost several members of his family. The main "character" in this book is Alexandre Ripp, Victor's cousin, who was part of that second family and who was gassed in Auschwitz at the age of three. Victor sets out to retrace what happened to Alexandre and the rest of his relatives, all the while visiting different Shoah memorials and reflecting on their meanings.

I think one of the most interesting things about this book to me is that Alexandre was deported from France. There seems to be a misconception out there that the Jews of France were mostly safe, which simply wasn't true. Foreign-born Jews, especially, were in danger of being rounded up by the Nazis, and were on multiple on occasions. My own great-grandmother and great-uncle David were deported from France and were murdered in Auschwitz (I always get surprised looks when I tell people this, as if Germany and Poland were the only dangerous places to be a Jew during the Shoah), so I felt an instant connection to the author and Alexandre. I can't even begin to imagine how frightened Alexandre must have been, especially since was separated from his family and held in an internment center for months before being murdered in Auschwitz.

The author isn't afraid to explore what the privilege of Kahans (the first family, his mother's side) helped them to do (namely, escape), and what the lack of said privilege spelled out for the Ripps.

I also enjoyed the author's reflection on the thirty-five Shoah memorials he visited - how he felt, how politics and feelings shaped them, how people see them now. I do wish that photographs of the memorials had been included with the book, because I found myself googling each new one to see exactly what he was talking about. Some of the memorials do little to memorialize Jews; those in countries that were part of the former Soviet bloc, especially, tend to lump all those who were killed as victims of an ideological war between communist Russia and fascist Germany.

The author tends to come across as somewhat dry and unemotional. This isn't a critique of his feelings (he also discusses how different people and different generations react to the Shoah), but it made for some uninspired reading at times, which is a shame, because the material was interesting. I'm one of those 3G survivors who get quite emotional about it, more emotional than my grandmother most of the time, even though she lost everyone in her family (and, consequently, I have never known the relatives I lost except through a few scattered pictures and letters - I mourn, I suppose, the emptiness that I feel on that side of the family, the great gaping hole that cannot be filled because my grandmother was a little girl when she was sent away to England and remembers so little about them).

This book, in a way, reminds me of Daniel Mendelsohn's "The Lost: A Search for Six in Six Million," although Mendelsohn's writing style is much more emotional, and there is a bit of a mystery that is "solved" in that book. But they are two books about Jews whose ancestors made it to America and who lost relatives in the Shoah who had stayed behind in Europe. Both are quite interesting, but I'd recommend Mendelsohn's more highly. ( )