Daniel and Matt in Sept. Travel & Leisure

It's a brother act in the September issue of Travel & Leisure magazine, featuring Daniel's story and my photographs of L'viv, Ukraine. The travel piece is a nice lead-in to the highly anticipated (at least in the Mendelsohn household) pub date of Daniel's amazing memoir, "The Lost: A Search For Six of Six Million," at the end of the month.

Since we're starting this blog from scratch, and since our regular website will be temporarily out of commission, perhaps a little background is needed. A couple of years ago I traveled to Ukraine with three of my siblings in an effort to uncover any information about the deaths--somewhere around 1941--of my great-uncle, his wife, and their four daughters. We knew from letters sent to my grandfather in 1939 that things were getting increasingly desperate for Uncle Shmiel and family. But that's pretty much all we knew. Certainly the six of them had perished in the Holocaust, but how??

We thought that by returning to the tiny town of Bolechow--Polish when the Jagers lived there but now part of Ukraine--we could find a simple answer to this question. If only. Our trip turned out to be just the beginning. Over the next few years Daniel and I would travel to all over the world, from Sydney to Stockholm, from Tel Aviv back to New York City, (and back to Denmark!) interviewing Bolechow residents who knew our family. This journey forms the core of "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," (HarperCollins), Daniel's riveting memoir.

The book is getting amazing advance press and you'll be reading a lot more about it in the next few weeks. Don't laugh, but I'm learning this blog stuff on the fly, so as soon as I figure out how to link things (!) I'll connect you to the Amazon site. That way you can buy the book.

p.s. On a completely selfish front, it's great to be in Travel & Leisure this particular month simply to be a mere ten pages away from my absolute idol, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, who, in a way only she can, documents her trip to the Galapagos Islands. I've been a Roz groupie for decades now, so being in the same issue as her was an extra special honor.

Now, back to the weddings...

Matt