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 Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer).

As firsthand survivors of many of the 20th century's most monumental events -- the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Killing Fields -- begin 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 camp -- in 1983, in 1995, and in 2015 -- each 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 memory -- from museums and commemorative sites to national reconciliation projects to small-group cross-cultural 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 clear-eyed sense of the enormity of our 21st-century-human inheritance -- not only among direct descendants of the Holocaust but also in the shape of our collective responsibility to learn from tragedy, and to keep the ever-changing 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

• We started tracking this book on May 15, 2017.
• This book was $22.10 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 43 times in the past 2,530 days.
• The current price of this book is $11.99 last checked 4 hours ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past 90 days.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is $1.99.
• The lowest price to date was $1.99 last reached on April 8, 2023.
• This book has been $1.99 7 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $22.10 last reached on May 15, 2017.
• This book has been $22.10 one time since we started tracking it.

• HistoryHistorical StudyHistoriography
• Politics & Social SciencesSocial SciencesViolence in Society

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled