Synopses & Reviews
A fearless new work from prize-winning writer Elizabeth Rosner, author of the novels
The Speed of Light, Blue Nude, and
Electric City.
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 in Schenectady, New York. 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.
Review
"Gravity is a profound work of true beauty and mystery." LUIS ALBERTO URREA, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist The Devil's Highway and The Hummingbird's Daughter
Review
"Whatever form she chooses for whatever story she has to tell, Rosner's work stays close to home, and close to the bone....[She] paints...with a fine artist's brush, the assuredness of her hand on the page...making poetry out of circumstances that are anything but." Chicago Tribune
Review
"Sharp, emotionally layered....Brilliant in concept and execution....Rosner's precise language, magnificent and unpredictable, guid[es] the reader through an untangling of history, love, anguish, and, ultimately, the hard beauty of revelation." INDIGO MOOR, author of Taproot and Through the Stonecutter's Window
Review
"Stunning....This is a personal history that becomes, through Rosner's unflinching honesty and unerringly precise images, universal in its import....[Rosner defies] the sentimental even as she dares to be beautifully tender." LYNNE KNIGHT, author of Again and Night in the Shape of a Mirror
Review
"Gravity is admirable for its transparency of feeling and understated precision....Perhaps the truest test of any book is whether you feel compelled to share it with a friend. By the time I was halfway through, I was eager to share it with many!" ELLEN BASS, author of Like a Beggar and The Human Line
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
ELIZABETH ROSNER is the author of the novels The Speed of Light, Blue Nude, and Electric City. Her fiction has been translated into nine languages, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, the Forward, and numerous anthologies. She has taught literature and writing for more than thirty years, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.