Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory Paperback – September 4, 2018

Describing Survivor Café is a bit like trying to explain why a gourmet multi-course banquet was so satisfying. On so many levels, Survivor Café challenges the reader, provides intriguing insights into author Elizabeth Rosner’s life and philosophy and offers a perspective I’ve seen in few other books.Among the many things for readers to feast on: the concept of multi-generational trauma, with both anecdotal and scientific examples; snippets of quotes from a wide range of sources; little vignettes from trauma victims and much more. The subtitle "The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory." aptly describes the framework of the non-fiction work.Besides using the Nazi Holocaust and the extermination of Jews, Rosner also talks about Rwanda, Viet Nam, South Africa, Syria and Cambodia in a way that is almost seamless, asking us to think about how to remember atrocities long past the time the victims and their immediate descendants are gone.In the introduction of the book, Rosner says, “This book is my offering in the name of peace. Within the act of excavating the past and braiding its stands together, I hope it is possible to rewrite and, perhaps to rewire the future. I know that although words are almost never enough, they may be all we have.”Her rich, melodic prose goes a long way to starting that process. I’ll be reading the book again soon to absorb it all.

To write of darkness is to risk being overcome by it. A daughter of Holocaust survivors, Elizabeth Rosner takes that risk as she searches to understand her parents’ grief. In her insightful and far-reaching book, Rosner discovers that she has inherited their trauma, as did many others in the second generation. She travels to the death camps in Europe that her relatives were in because she wants to physically be where they suffered and where hope was reduced to a flicker. She wants to hear what remains in the air where so many lives went silent.Sharing her family’s journey would have been enough, because this holds more horror and strength than most of us can comprehend. But she looks beyond the Holocaust and talks about the genocides of other ethnic groups in places like Cambodia, Rwanda, and Syria. She writes of the fire bombing of civilians in Dresden and the atom bombing of the cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These survivors and their descendants are also dealing with the legacy of trauma.Rosner says it’s crucial that we remember these stories because humanity tends to forget its atrocities and then create new ones. Americans forget that, during World War II, we didn’t believe the reports of the death camps and turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees, sending them back to their deaths. We forget that we pulled 120,000 Japanese Americans out of their homes because of their ancestry and forced them into internment camps because we feared what they might do.This is a hard book to read, not because of Rosner’s writing. Her writing is exquisite. It is hard because it’s nearly impossible to believe that humans could inflict such pain upon others. In the 1930s and 40s, Germany was the most Christian country in the world, but when their Jewish neighbors were being taken away because they were Jewish, Christians turned their backs and said nothing. This is hard to understand, too. To their credit, Germans are owning up to their complicity.In the absence of compassion, fear leads to hatred leads to murder. Rosner says, do not forget this.

This is an excellent book with one serious flaw: its extolling of epigenetic inheritance. Although scientists can be wrong, the present consensus view is that even in the case of parental trauma, epigenetic inheritance is unlikely in humans. Two distinguished biologists had this to say in 2014 "environmentally induced epigenetic changes are rarely transgenerationally inherited, let alone adaptive, even in plants. Thus, although much attention has been drawn to the potential implications of transgenerational inheritance for human health, so far there is little support. On the other hand, the human transmission of culture and improved habits is clearly Lamarckian. To quote S.J. Gould (Gould, 1980), “human cultural evolution, in strong opposition to our biological history, is Lamarckian in character. What we learn in one generation, we transmit directly by teaching and writing.” In this and other respects, perhaps it is premature to compare humans to plants (as Burbank did) in terms of their capacity to recall past environments, in this generation and the next.

This remarkable book about intergenerational trauma and what we might do to transform it to create a kinder more peaceful world should be required reading in American high schools. Over and over again, Rosner and the others to whom she refers speak about the crucial importance of facing the past, however imperfectly, in order to move into a better future. Now in America, the America where books are banned, guns are promoted by too many as the solution to social strife, and oppressed populations continue to fight for their stories to be heard and not covered up by fairy tales about American history, this book could be an antidote, or at least a sane and questioning Voice. It might make the younger generations think about what has happened and what their responsibility is to not allow it to happen again.

I've finished Survivor Cafe. It is brilliant. BRILLIANT. Thank you for writing this. This book and this story - these stories! - is incredibly moving and also wildly beautiful. That is no easy feat, and you've done that in a way that is humble and accessible.There are so many aspects to this that are profound - perhaps, most of all, the open-hearted way you've woven together subtle threads that develop in the reader, a way to hold the impossibility along with compassion for the particular, the tangible, the personal. Just beautiful.The structure of it is impeccable, Liz. By the time I got to Beechwood II, I was both ready for it, and startled by the visceral impact it had on me. So well done.

Thank you. This is a valuable and wide-ranging contribution to the literature around the Holocaust and other events around the world. I appreciate the wide-ranging exploration, both in terms of the wide range of events explored, even if only briefly, and in terms of the range of exploration. I hope it will make a contribution to our thinking around trauma and how it lives in us, including in the descendants of people who have experienced traumatic events, sometimes over lengthy periods of time.

A powerful book which fallows the legacy of trauma . A book which stays with you long after you have finished reading

Great book. Very moving story

With the skill of the novelist and poet that she is, Elizabeth Rosner blends her personal history into an examination of the ways in which trauma is passed on to succeeding generations and the ways in which survivors of genocide and other traumas remember in order to forget and forget in order to remember--that's part of the labyrinth of memory. With humility, grace, and the brilliance that readers of her poetry and fiction will find familiar, Rosner invites us to sit at her own carefully researched survivor café, sweeping in its scope and profound in its impact. Everyone who cares about the survival of humanity should read this deeply moving, carefully researched book.