Elizabeth Rosner. (2017). Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory. Catapult.

Elizabeth Rosner. 2017. Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory. Catapult.

Elizabeth Rosner, Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory. Catapult, 2017.

Elizabeth Rosner. Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory. Catapult, 2017.

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1. • value: World War II
2. • value: racism
3. • value: War
4. • value: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
5. • value: PTSD
6. • value: Rwanda
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18. • value: 9/11
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22. • value: concentration camps
23. • value: Sociology
24. • value: Jewish books
25. • value: mass murder
26. • value: trauma recovery
27. • value: historical books
28. • value: world war 2 books
29. • value: history books for adults
30. • value: Holocaust books
31. • value: military history books
32. • value: psychology books
33. • value: sociology books
34. • value: trauma therapy
35. • value: intergenerational trauma
36. • value: generational trauma

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Rosner, Elizabeth
   • bioText: Elizabeth Rosner is the author of three novels and a poetry collection. The Speed of Light was translated into nine languages and won several awards in the US and in Europe, including being shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Femina. Blue Nude was named among the best books of 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Electric City was named among the best books of 2014 by NPR. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, the San Francisco Chronicle and others. She lives in Berkeley, CA.
   • name: Elizabeth Rosner

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2017-09-01T00:00:00-04:00

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Survivor Café

fullDescription

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

An “impressive, highly readable” exploration of “atrocity, trauma, and memory” that examines the legacies of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and other mass trauma events—“a powerful book” (Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer).
As firsthand survivors of many of the 20th century’s most monumental events—the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Killing Fields—begin to pass away, Survivor Café addresses urgent questions: How do we carry those stories forward? How do we collectively ensure that the horrors of the past are not forgotten?
Elizabeth Rosner organizes her book around three trips with her father to Buchenwald concentration camp—in 1983, in 1995, and in 2015—each journey an experience in which personal history confronts both commemoration and memorialization. She explores the echoes of similar legacies among descendants of African American slaves, descendants of Cambodian survivors of the Killing Fields, descendants of survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the effects of 9/11 on the general population. Examining current brain research, Rosner depicts the efforts to understand the intergenerational inheritance of trauma, as well as the intricacies of remembrance in the aftermath of atrocity. Survivor Café becomes a lens for numerous constructs of memory—from museums and commemorative sites to national reconciliation projects to small–group cross–cultural encounters.
Beyond preserving the firsthand testimonies of participants and witnesses, individuals and societies must continually take responsibility for learning the painful lessons of the past in order to offer hope for the future. Survivor Café offers a clear–eyed sense of the enormity of our 21st-century-human inheritance—not only among direct descendants of the Holocaust but also in the shape of our collective responsibility to learn from tragedy, and to keep the ever–changing conversations alive between the past and the present.
 
“Each page is imbued with urgency, with sincerity, with heartache, with heart . . . [Rosner’s] words, alongside the words of other survivors of atrocity and their descendants across the globe, can help us build a more humane world.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: San Francisco Chronicle, 1 of 100 Best Books of 2017
   • content: "Rosner's memoir, which combines moving personal narrative with illuminating research into the impact of mass trauma on a personal and cultural scale, is imbued with urgency, sincerity, heartache, and heart."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer
   • content: "Mixing the personal with the historical and the literary with the scholarly, Rosner achieves a breathtaking overview of events as varied as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the Rwandan genocide, and Japanese American internment. Her impressive, highly readable Survivor Café takes on important issues of atrocity, trauma, and memory, rendering them all with such great clarity and intimacy that the reader will not soon forget them, or this powerful book."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Booklist (starred review)
   • content: "Rosner demonstrates a rare blend of scholarly assessment and personal revelation, tempering her singular passion with an encompassing mercy. In this important and vital contribution to the conversation about legacy and responsibility, Rosner distills the magnitude of such burdens and defines the scope of memorialization with an elegance and eloquence that reverberates with both depth and nuance."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: "A thoughtful, probing meditation on the fragility of memory and the indelible inheritance of pain."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: "Novelist Rosner (Electric City) shines an unblinking light on the most horrific of 20th-century crimes and asks: What is the intergenerational legacy of trauma? . . . She considers art, anniversaries, memorials, and psychotherapy, but the most powerful technique she finds for dealing with trauma is simply telling the story behind it . . . Themes of memory, language, and the bodily imprint of trauma are powerful, as are Rosner's accounts of revisiting Buchenwald with her father . . . Rosner's conclusions--that powerful suffering must be communicated before healing can occur and that the most profound of human atrocities must be acknowledged so that their like does not happen again--open the door to understanding and, optimistically, show a path to peace."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Read it Forward
   • content: "This is a personal exploration for Rosner, but also an exploration of the commonalities found in the children of survivors."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Lilith Magazine
   • content: "Survivor Café is an exercise in mapmaking, in identifying convergent paths in apparently disparate legacies left by the world's humanitarian disasters . . . [Rosner] asks us to look inside ourselves, to learn from the past, to forgive, and to understand the deep connections binding us to our past, our future, and to all other things."
8. • premium: False
   • source: The Daily Gazette
   • content: "Survivor Café is a beautifully expressed personal examination of how trauma is passed down through generations...An exquisite read."
9. • premium: False
   • source: The Mercury News
   • content: "In deep fissures and dark alleys having to do with multigenerational trauma, anti-Semitism, racism, terrorism, torture, death and loss, Berkeley writer Elizabeth Rosner uncovers, improbably, hope and connection."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Orange County Register
    • content: "There's been a slew of research examining the genetic effects of psychological trauma, but author Elizabeth Rosner is among the first to take a deep dive into the personal implications of such inheritance with her stunning new book, Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Berkeleyside
    • content: "Deeply moving."
12. • premium: False
    • source: ACEs Connection
    • content: "Rosner's writing is crafted like the poet she is, and her ability to meld and transcend her own story with those of survivors of wars, slavery, and genocide is nothing less than brilliant and more importantly, healing."
13. • premium: False
    • source: Emily Rapp Black, author of The Still Point of the Turning World
    • content: "Elizabeth Rosner's Survivor Café is about how we inherit, not just our histories, but the complexities of how we survive them. With the heart of a poet, Rosner unpeels the layers of trauma in a way that will stay with you long after you read the last page."
14. • premium: False
    • source: Andrew Carroll, editor of the New York Times bestsellers War Letters and Behind the Lines
    • content: "In Survivor Café, Elizabeth Rosner brilliantly captures both the enormity of war and its enduring aftershocks--the devastating legacies for victims, perpetrators, and societies who suffer through and beyond it. A mixture of history, personal narrative, and research, the book expertly documents how atrocities are passed down through generations and how we may find ways to contain this pernicious...
15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      June 26, 2017
      Novelist Rosner (Electric City) shines an unblinking light on the most horrific of 20th-century crimes and asks, what is the intergenerational legacy of trauma? How do we respect the survivors and honor the dead? How do we deal with the “limits of language” and the “ephemeral nature... of memory?” She considers art, anniversaries, memorials, and psychotherapy, but the most powerful technique she finds for dealing with trauma is simply telling the story behind it, “the paradoxical quest for preserving the intangible residue of loss.” In several of the collagelike chapters Rosner rummages through the words and works of others, attempting to find connection and meaning, but the emotional center of the book is her parents’ experience of the Holocaust and her “personal inheritance” of that memory. The book’s larger shape can be hard to see given its fragmented structure, but the themes of memory, language, and the bodily imprint of trauma are powerful, as are Rosner’s accounts of revisiting Buchenwald with her father. Despite the difficulties of capturing the unspeakable, Rosner’s conclusions—that powerful suffering must be communicated before healing can occur and that the most profound of human atrocities must be acknowledged so that their like does not happen again—open the door to understanding and, optimistically, show a path to peace.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      June 15, 2017
      Trauma informs a memoir palpable with anger, sorrow, and frustration.Poet, essayist, and novelist Rosner (Electric City, 2014, etc.) feels an intimate connection to the Holocaust: her father was imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp when he was 15, and her mother, at the age of 12, fled from her home in the Vilna ghetto and lived in hiding for two years, until the Russians drove the Nazis out of Poland. The two met later, married, and immigrated to the United States, where Rosner and her siblings were born. German culture and language were forbidden in her family, yet the author's life was shadowed by her parents' history. "Shards of their past lodged themselves inside me at birth, if not before," she writes, which infused her life with "grief, anxiety, rage, and so much more." Those emotions are shared, Rosner knows, with many others whose lives were blighted by atrocities: Vietnamese boat people, victims of the Cambodian Killing Fields, Japanese descendants of atom-bomb survivors or families interned in American camps, and survivors of Armenian, Rwandan, or Native American genocides. Although she empathetically considers others' experiences, her focus is on how her own identity has been shaped. The author looks to epigenetics for evidence of intergenerational trauma, passed to offspring in "mother's milk drenched in sadness" and other visceral ways: "we are inheriting more than the overt repeating of survival stories." Rosner acknowledges the need "to interrupt the cycle of trauma" through therapy and, at the same time, believes that the culture urgently needs those stories to ensure that the past will not be forgotten. She repeatedly expresses frustration with the inadequacy of words to convey horrific reality as well as by memorials and museums that fall short of offering "a personal shape for such collective and monumental mourning." Central to the narrative are three visits to Buchenwald with her father, for a commemoration, where inmates, liberators, and German residents gathered at a Survivor's Cafe, an emotional reunion. A thoughtful, probing meditation on the fragility of memory and the indelible inheritance of pain.

      COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from September 1, 2017
      This is a subject internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Rosner (Electric City, 2014) has been contemplating her whole life. The daughter of two Holocaust survivors, Rosner was often the unwitting recipient of her parents' experiences, though many questions went unasked, and many stories were left untold. Rosner's three trips to Germany with her father left her wondering how memories of the Holocaust will be preserved and honored as the ranks of survivors continue to dwindle. Who will be entrusted to bear witness? No matter the atrocitythe Killing Fields, Hiroshima, Rwandathe wounds humanity inflicts upon itself are writ large as survivors and their descendants cope with trauma, and genocides reshape history. Whether suffering is a result of an epic tragedy or individual grief, the act of keeping memory alive is a tricky balance of immediate comfort and continual pain. Rosner demonstrates a rare blend of scholarly assessment and personal revelation, tempering her singular passion with an encompassing mercy. In this important and vital contribution to the conversation about legacy and responsibility, Rosner distills the magnitude of such burdens and defines the scope of memorialization with an elegance and eloquence that reverberates with both depth and nuance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

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A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

An “impressive, highly readable” exploration of “atrocity, trauma, and memory” that examines the legacies of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and other mass trauma events—“a powerful book” (Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer).
As firsthand survivors of many of the 20th century’s most monumental events—the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Killing Fields—begin to pass away, Survivor Café addresses urgent questions: How do we carry those stories forward? How do we collectively ensure that the horrors of the past are not forgotten?
Elizabeth Rosner organizes her book around three trips with her father to Buchenwald concentration camp—in 1983, in 1995, and in 2015—each journey an experience in which personal history confronts both commemoration and memorialization. She explores the...

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Survivor Café The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory

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