Survivor Caf: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory [Paperback]

As featured on NPR and inThe New York Times,Survivor Cafeis a bold work of nonfiction that examines the ways that survivors, witnesses, and post-war generations talk about and shape traumatic experiences.

As firsthand survivors of many of the twentieth century's most monumental eventsthe Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Killing Fieldsbegin to pass away,Survivor Caf?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 campin 1983, in 1995, and in 2015each 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 Caf?becomes a lens for numerous constructs of memoryfrom museums and commemorative sites to national reconciliation projects to small-group cross-cultural encounters.

Survivor Caf?offers a clear-eyed sense of the enormity of our twenty-first-century human inheritancenot 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.

Survivor Caf?which combines moving personal narrative with illuminating research into the impact of mass trauma on a personal and cultural scale  feels like the book Rosner was born to write. Each page is imbued with urgencyl³.