Elizabeth Rosner

Gravity Elizabeth Rosner

A fearless new work from the acclaimed author of the prize-winning novels THE SPEED OF LIGHT and BLUE NUDE. Composed over a period of some twenty years, GRAVITY is Elizabeth Rosner's profoundly searching account of her experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. In an extraordinarily powerful mix of poetry and prose, Rosner traces the earliest remembered resonances of her parents' past and her dawning awareness of the war history that colored her family home during her youth. She recounts her false starts in raising the subject with her father (a survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp), his piecemeal revelations and their eventual travels together to the sites of the nightmare in Germany. And she evokes, courageously and heart-wrenchingly, her search for identity against the gravitational pull of her parents' experience and the traditional upbringing they've given her. Like Rosner's celebrated novels, GRAVITY plumbs the deep complexities of inherited grief, but here the author discloses, with breathtaking candor and sensitivity, "what it felt like to grow up inside my family." Also featuring spellbinding artwork by Lola Fraknoi, these astonishing pages remind us that history happens at home and that the past is something we all embody, knowingly or not.