The Survivors: A Story of War Inheritance, and Healing

In this clear-eyed memoir, former Obama speech writer Frankel portrays family members shattered by the Holocaust, including his own. As a child in the 1980s, Frankel frequently talked with his mother’s parents, Holocaust survivors Rivkah (Bubbie) and Abraham (Zayde), about how they assumed new identities after the war, among other open secrets: “Secrets are something of a family tradition,” he notes. When Frankel was a young adult, his mother became increasing unstable, and, he observes, “I couldn’t shake the feeling that Mom’s life, and my own, had been shaped by the Holocaust.” He decided to study Holocaust trauma theories, in part to understand what he believed to be the “soul wounds” she’d inherited. Frankel’s digging into his mother’s past eventually revealed the “toxic secret” that his biological father was a family friend, and that he was the product of an affair. As Frankel hurls head-first into an identity crisis, he feels as if his “whole life had been a lie”; traumatized, he “suddenly felt a strange new kinship with Bubbie and Zayde.” He’s overtaken by rage and debilitating anxiety attacks; the healing commenced only as he began to understand his paternal relationships and his mother’s fragile mental state. Frankel’s candid, evenhanded memoir affectingly depicts a son’s struggle to understand himself and his family history. (Oct.)