A review by tanyarobinson
Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory by Elizabeth Rosner
4.0
I feel completely inadequate as I try to review Survivor Cafe. The title comes from the informal sit-downs organized at the Buchenwald survivor reunions, but for me the subtitle more fully encapsulates what this book is about: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory.
Rosner is the child of a concentration camp survivor, and also a historian who feels a responsibility to keep the Holocaust alive in communal memory. In the process of writing this book she has interviewed many survivors and children and grandchildren of survivors. One unique aspect of her approach is the recognition that the trauma of the Shoah has been transmitted forward through generations, whether that is through sharing of memories, epigenetics, or some subconscious secondary experience of a parent's ordeal.
Though her focus is on the Holocaust, she discusses other traumatic group experiences - the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Killing Fields of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the Armenian genocide, and more. She acknowledges that each of these tragedies created (often undiagnosed) PTSD that is experienced both by the actual actors and by their descendants.
This sounds absolutely depressing, but Rosner's writing has such a beauty about it that the darkness is transcended. I came away wishing I could sit down with her and her father and hear their stories, hear more from so many of the fascinating people she has connected with. 4 stars.
Rosner is the child of a concentration camp survivor, and also a historian who feels a responsibility to keep the Holocaust alive in communal memory. In the process of writing this book she has interviewed many survivors and children and grandchildren of survivors. One unique aspect of her approach is the recognition that the trauma of the Shoah has been transmitted forward through generations, whether that is through sharing of memories, epigenetics, or some subconscious secondary experience of a parent's ordeal.
Though her focus is on the Holocaust, she discusses other traumatic group experiences - the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Killing Fields of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the Armenian genocide, and more. She acknowledges that each of these tragedies created (often undiagnosed) PTSD that is experienced both by the actual actors and by their descendants.
This sounds absolutely depressing, but Rosner's writing has such a beauty about it that the darkness is transcended. I came away wishing I could sit down with her and her father and hear their stories, hear more from so many of the fascinating people she has connected with. 4 stars.