Survivor Café

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

An "impressive, highly readable" exploration of "atrocity, trauma, and memory" that examines the legacies of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and other mass trauma events"a powerful book" (Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Sympathizer).

As firsthand survivors of many of the 20th century's most monumental eventsthe Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Killing Fieldsbegin to pass away, Survivor Cafe addresses urgent questions: How do we carry those stories forward? How do we collectively ensure that the horrors of the past are not forgotten?

Elizabeth Rosner organizes her book around three trips with her father to Buchenwald concentration campin 1983, in 1995, and in 2015each journey an experience in which personal history confronts both commemoration and memorialization. She explores the echoes of similar legacies among descendants of African American slaves, descendants of Cambodian survivors of the Killing Fields, descendants of survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the effects of 9/11 on the general population. Examining current brain research, Rosner depicts the efforts to understand the intergenerational inheritance of trauma, as well as the intricacies of remembrance in the aftermath of atrocity. Survivor Cafe becomes a lens for numerous constructs of memoryfrom museums and commemorative sites to national reconciliation projects to smallgroup crosscultural encounters.

Beyond preserving the firsthand testimonies of participants and witnesses, individuals and societies must continually take responsibility for learning the painful lessons of the past in order to offer hope for the future. Survivor Cafe offers a cleareyed sense of the enormity of our 21st-century-human inheritancenot only among direct descendants of the Holocaust but also in the shape of our collective responsibility to learn from tragedy, and to keep the everchanging conversations alive between the past and the present.

"Each page is imbued with urgency, with sincerity, with heartache, with heart . . . [Rosner's] words, alongside the words of other survivors of atrocity and their descendants across the globe, can help us build a more humane world."
San Francisco Chronicle

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