The Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles will be honored to
present Daniel Mendelsohn, acclaimed author of the groundbreaking
genealogical memoir, "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," as
the keynote speaker for the 30th IAJGS International Conference on
Jewish Genealogy in July 2010.

"The Lost" is the international best seller about his worldwide
search for information about the fates of six relatives who perished
in the Holocaust. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
and the National Jewish Book Award, it was praised by Nobel Laureate,
Elie Wiesel as "a vast, highly colored tapestry...a remarkable personal
narrative, rigorous in its search for truth, at once tender and
exacting." In September 2007, the French translation ("Les disparus")
became a runaway bestseller, unanimously hailed by critics as "the
masterpiece of the season," and it has been translated into a dozen
other languages.

Mendelsohn's book, film and theatre reviews and essays on literary
topics appear in The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review and
he is also a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. In addition to
his other honors, Mr. Mendelsohn is the recipient of a 2005 Guggenheim
Foundation Fellowship. In April 2008 he was the Richard Holbrooke
Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin; in February
2010 he will be a Critic in Residence at the American Academy in Rome.
He is also the founder of the Bolechow Jewish Heritage Society.

A genealogist >from a tender young age, Mendelsohn described "The Lost"
as a story about people "crying out to be known." In it, he reminds us
of the virtue -- and the urgency -- of researching and interviewing
living relatives: "Once a person has died it doesn't matter if the
space that separates us >from knowing them is 12 years of 12 minutes, a
second or a century. The closest we can get is to know those who were
close to them. Then those who were close to them start to die and we
get that much further."

The JGSLA is thrilled to be hosting him in his first IAJGS appearance
at the conference's opening evening on Sunday, July 11 at 7:30PM.

Registration for the conference is now open, and more information can be found
at: http://www.jgsla2010.com.

Pamela Weisberger
Program Chair, IAJGS 2010 Los Angeles
info@jgsla2010.com

For more information on Daniel Mendelsohn go to his website:
http://www.danielmendelsohn.com