Gravity

Through an extraordinarily powerful mix of poetry and prose, the author shares her experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. 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. Through her work 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. These astonishing pages remind us that history happens at home and that the past is something we all embody, knowingly or not.

Elizabeth Rosner has been teaching and writing for more than thirty years. Her fiction has been translated into nine languages and her essays have appeared inThe New York Times Magazine, Elle, The Forward, and numerous anthologies. She is the author ofBlue Nude, Electric City, and The Speed of Light. She lives in Berkeley, California.