Elizabeth Rosner - Survivor Café

Praise for Survivor Caf

A Best Book of 2017 ( San Francisco Chronicle )

A Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award

A Most Notable Nonfiction by Bay Area Authors Selection
( East Bay Times )

Rosners memoir, which combines moving personal narrative with illuminating research into the impact of mass trauma on a personal and cultural scale, is imbued with urgency, sincerity, heartache, and heart.

San Francisco Chronicle ,
1 of 100 Best Books of 2017

This is a personal exploration for Rosner, but also an exploration of the commonalities found in the children of survivors.

Read It Forward

Survivor Caf is an exercise in mapmaking, in identifying convergent paths in apparently disparate legacies left by the worlds humanitarian disasters... [Rosner] asks us to look inside ourselves, to learn from the past, to forgive, and to understand the deep connections binding us to our past, our future, and to all other things.

Lilith

Survivor Caf is a beautifully expressed personal examination of how trauma is passed down through generations... An exquisite read. The Daily Gazette

In deep fissures and dark alleys having to do with multigenerational trauma, anti-Semitism, racism, terrorism, torture, death and loss, Berkeley writer Elizabeth Rosner uncovers, improbably, hope and connection.

The Mercury News

Mixing the personal with the historical and the literary with the scholarly, Rosner achieves a breathtaking overview of events as varied as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the Rwandan genocide, and Japanese American internment. Her impressive, highly readable Survivor Caf takes on important issues of atrocity, trauma, and memory, rendering them all with such great clarity and intimacy that the reader will not soon forget them, or this powerful book.

VIET THANH NGUYEN , Pulitzer Prizewinning

author of The Sympathizer

This is the book that clinicians and patients alike have been waiting for. Rosner seamlessly integrates the latest research on intergenerational trauma with her own deeply moving personal account. The result is a true advancement in the field, a must-read that is rich, accessible, compelling, and informative.

JOSHUA SIMMONS , Psy.D., Clinical Psychologist

and Candidate in Analytic Training at

the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

Theres been a slew of research examining the genetic effects of psychological trauma, but author Elizabeth Rosner is among the first to take a deep dive into the personal implications of such inheritance with her stunning new book, Survivor Caf: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory .

The Orange County Register

Using her experiences as a child of Holocaust survivors, [Rosner] navigates the audience through the realms of epigenetics, psychotherapy, history, and philosophical struggles to bring something unique to the study of trauma... These personal recollections provide a dimension that softens some of the most indigestible theories and concepts that we have come to associate with memory, psychology, psychoanalysis, trauma, and history... paving the way for future studies.

ELLIS SPICER , Reviews in History ,
Institute of Historical Research

Elizabeth Rosners Survivor Caf is about how we inherit, not just our histories, but the complexities of how we survive them. With the heart of a poet, Rosner unpeels the layers of trauma in a way that will stay with you long after you read the last page.

EMILY RAPP BLACK , author of

The Still Point of the Turning World

In Survivor Caf , Elizabeth Rosner brilliantly captures both the enormity of war and its enduring aftershocksthe devastating legacies for victims, perpetrators, and societies who suffer through and beyond it. A mixture of history, personal narrative, and research, the book expertly documents how atrocities are passed down through generations and how we may find ways to contain this pernicious inheritance. Survivor Caf is a vital, living document that proves the end of war is far from the end of the battle.

ANDREW CARROLL , editor of the New York Times bestsellers

War Letters and Behind the Lines

Elizabeth Rosner explores how trauma infiltrates minds and bodies and language. In lyrical, luminous prose, she takes on the obligation to remember lives lost. Genocide, war, nuclear bombs, lynchingRosner does not turn away from unceasing violence and its aftermath. Urgent and necessary, this book offers brave witness to the world we have made and must repair.

SARAH SENTILLES ,
author of Draw Your Weapons

A staggering work of intellectual vigor and raw emotion, Survivor Caf mines the darkest recesses of our collective past, excavating both the hate and hope of human history. Rosners intimate handling of intergenerational trauma, as well as the need to acknowledge and transcend it, reminds us of the power and mercy of stories. In our current age of hyper-immediacy, with increasingly short news cycles and even shorter memories, Rosners work reminds us of our sacred duty to carry these stories forward like a lantern in the dark.

ALINE OHANESIAN , author of Orhans Inheritance

Using the Holocaust as a focal point, Survivor Caf renders a profound and unflinching portrait of trauma and the memory of trauma, the consequences of inhumanity, atrocities that do not end with one generation but are inherited as nightmare, memory, and affliction, passed on to the next generation and the next and the next. With vivid stories and brilliant insights, this book must be required reading for those who want to understand not just our collective history but the present moment.

SUSAN GRIFFIN ,
award-winning author of A Chorus of Stones

In this haunting and poetic book, Elizabeth Rosner summons her readers to a deep and abiding commemoration of genocide. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Rosner describes scientific evidence that deep trauma persists not only emotionally but also physically through generations. This is an inspired, illuminated bookthe fruit of hard experience and deep study. I salute Elizabeth Rosners Survivor Caf , a work of wisdom and, ultimately, hope.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH , author of A Train Through Time

Deeply moving.

Berkeleyside

Rosners writing is crafted like the poet she is, and her ability to meld and transcend her own story with those of survivors of wars, slavery, and genocide is nothing less than brilliant and more importantly, healing.

ACEs Connection

Rosner demonstrates a rare blend of scholarly assessment and personal revelation, tempering her singular passion with an encompassing mercy. In this important and vital contribution to the conversation about legacy and responsibility, Rosner distills the magnitude of such burdens and defines the scope of memorialization with an elegance and eloquence that reverberates with both depth and nuance.

Booklist (starred review)

A thoughtful, probing meditation on the fragility of memory and the indelible inheritance of pain.

Kirkus Reviews

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?... 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... Themes of memory, language, and the bodily imprint of trauma are powerful, as are Rosners accounts of revisiting Buchenwald with her father... Rosners conclusionsthat 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 againopen the door to understanding and, optimistically, show a path to peace.

Publishers Weekly