Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory

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. [em](Sept.) [/em]