Gravity

Composed over a period of some twenty years, GRAVITY is 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 own search for identity against the gravitational pull of her parents' experience and the traditional upbringing they've given her. GRAVITY reminds us that three-quarters of a century is a blink of an eye, that history happens at home, and that the past is something we all embody, knowingly or not.