Histor Sociolog Nonfictio HTML:Named a Best Book of the Year by The San Francisco Chronicle

"Survivor Café . . . feels like the book Rosner was born to write. Each page is imbued with urgency, with sincerity, with heartache, with heart.... Her words, alongside the words of other survivors of atrocity and their descendants across the globe, can help us build a more humane world." â??San Francisco Chronicle

As firsthand survivors of many of the twentieth century's most monumental eventsâ??the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Killing Fieldsâ??begin to pass away, Survivor Café 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 campâ??in 1983, in 1995, and in 2015â??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 Café becomes a lens for numerous constructs of memoryâ??from museums and commemorative sites to national reconciliation projects to smallâ??group crossâ??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 Café offers a clearâ??eyed sense of the enormity of our twentyâ??firstâ??century human inheritanceâ??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 everâ??changing conv