In award-winning author Elizabeth Rosner's book Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma, and the Labyrinth of Memory, she confronts what it means to live in the aftermath of the Holocaust — not as a direct witness, but as a child of survivors. In this episode, our host Rabbi Jeff Salkin discusses with Rosner: How do we carry inherited pain? What role does storytelling play in transforming trauma into meaning? And how can remembering help us heal? Elizabeth Rosner has published six books with a new book of poetry, Gravity, coming out in March 2026. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Elle, and others. Speaker Bio: Elizabeth Rosner is the acclaimed author of six books, including three novels, two nonfiction books, and a poetry collection, of which all are full or part memoir. Her latest two nonfiction books are Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma and The Labyrinth of Memory, and Third Year, Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening. Hew newest book of poetry, Gravity, was released in March 2026. Her essays and poetry have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, Hadassah Magazine, CNN Opinion, the Forward, and many anthologies. Her works have been translated into 12 languages and have received many literary awards. TRANSCRIPT: Everyone has five senses. Taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight. But for Jews, there is one more sense. Memory is a sense. The author, Jonathan Safran Foer, writes that for Jews, memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. Welcome to this podcast, TO BE CONTINUED…Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and to ask, how did those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? And what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? I am your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Our guest is Elizabeth Rosner. She is the acclaimed author of six books, including three novels, two nonfiction books, and a poetry collection, of which all are full or part memoir. Her latest two nonfiction books are Survivor Cafe, The Legacy of Trauma, and The Labyrinth of Memory, and Third Year, Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening. Her essays and poetry have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, Hadassah Magazine, and CNN Opinion, the Forward, and many anthologies, and her works have been translated into twelve languages and have received many literary awards. In Survivor Cafe, this deeply reflective and poetic work, she confronts what it means to live in the aftermath of the Holocaust, not as a direct witness, but as a child of survivors. She asks, "How do we carry inherited pain? What role does storytelling play in transforming trauma into meaning? And how can remembering, rather than forgetting, help us heal?" So, we're going to be talking about the enduring power of memory, the role of narrative and survival and what resilience looks like across generations of Jewish memory and of Jewish identity. Jewish insights are abundant in her work, and she reminds us of William Faulkner's quote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." So welcome, Elizabeth. It's great to have you here. Thank you, Rabbi. That was a beautiful introduction. I have to say that I reread your book, Survivor Cafe. I can't begin to tell you how many pages have little post-its in them because there are things that I wanted to remember, and it's a book about the burden and the gift of memory. And so, you struggle in this book with whether or not you, as a daughter of survivors, and the rest of us who are witnesses to so many survivor stories, have a right to tell their story. So, I'm going to ask that you briefly tell us about your family's story of survival and loss. Yeah. You know, that could easily take up the entirety of our conversation depending on how much detail I fill in. But I first want to say thank you for having me in this conversation and for giving me the chance to talk about things I care about so much, and that really, as you say, have shaped almost everything about me. I have always felt that the gift slash burden of inheriting my parents' histories is something I think of as a loved obligation, that I recognize it's something I didn't necessarily choose, but that I have come to really honor it as something that really gives shape and purpose to my life. And so, by telling their stories, even in brief snippets like I'll try to do right now, it keeps them alive. They've both passed away. And it also keeps me focused in a way on what I believe is so important about keeping memory in the present, recognizing that it has affected the present and that therefore naming it is just an acknowledgement of what's true. So, my mother was born in Vilna, which was at the time Lithuania/Poland. It was changing nationalities in some ways throughout its existence. She, in 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, she was an only child with her parents. They were herded into the Vilna Ghetto, where they remained until just prior to the liquidation of the ghetto, when they were able to arrange to be hidden by a Polish peasant in the countryside outside of the ghetto walls. And they survived the war that way. In 1944, when the Russians liberated Poland, my mother and her parents realized that Poland was still not in any way a safe place to remain as Jews. And so, they made their way, first to Sweden, while they were waiting for visas to come to America. And it was in Sweden, as a refugee, that she actually met my father, whose story goes like this. He was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1929. My mother was born in 1930. My father was the eldest of three children, all born to a German Jewish family that was very assimilated. My father's given name was Karl Heintz. His next brother was named Wolfgang. And the third child was named Helmut, which I think is a really strong... These are good Jewish names. Good Jewish names. I mean, it's such an indicator of how his parents felt about being German. They were Jewish, but they really, really felt very Germanically identified. And even though they themselves were not German born, but their sons were. And yet they were divorced in 1936 during the time of the establishment of the Nuremberg Laws. They had a small shop that was repossessed by the Nazis. And my grandmother, who was basically abandoned by my grandfather, who went back to Romania where he was from, and she put the children in an orphanage because she didn't know how to take care of them without any means of support. The youngest uncle, Helmut, was on a Kindertransport to Sweden. My grandmother somehow managed to smuggle herself into Sweden to be closer to him. And because she thought from there, she'd be able to get her other two sons out of Germany. She was not able to do that in time. This is such a fast telling of the story, of course, but my father and my other uncle, Wolfgang, were in a Jewish orphanage for a little while. The entire orphanage was deported, except my father and my uncle, who were considered Romanian because of their father. But eventually they too were deported to Buchenwald. My father and my uncle both managed to survive Buchenwald, a year in Buchenwald concentration camp until liberation. They made their way to Sweden. This is where Sweden comes back into the story. And that's where my parents met as teenagers. They were married in Israel. And then they came to the United States where my older sister and I, and my younger brother, were all born and raised. When I hear your story, Elizabeth, it makes it very clear to me why you use the metaphor of labyrinth. Yeah. Yeah, I mean... To talk about memory. Right. You know, the imagery of the wandering Jew, of course, is, you know, far predates the Holocaust and is all the way back to dispersion and diaspora and, you know, all kinds of labyrinths for Jewish journeying, I think, exist already. But memory itself, you know, each time I tell this story, I'm trying in every way to be faithful to the facts as I know them. And yet even my father, even my mother, as they narrated their stories, there would be slight adjustments, slight modifications every time. And when I was writing Survivor Cafe and I began to really study memory as a subject itself, you know, what are memory studies? What are people who understand the way neurological wiring works? It turns out that every time we retell a story, we are actually rewriting it, even in small, kind of almost molecular ways. And so, it opens this huge, you know, chasm of questions. How do we know what the true stories are? How do we know what we're holding on to? If not to simply surrender, as I try to do, to being imperfect in the retelling, to accept that this labyrinth, this image, if you've ever walked a labyrinth or really looked at even a visual depiction of a labyrinth, every time we think we're getting closer to the center, we actually may be drifting farther to the outer rim and vice versa. We do the best we can to follow the path, but we do it imperfectly. It is such a powerful image. So, you actually taught me so much about the dynamics of memory in this book. And I never considered how when we remember and when we tell the story, we become a text. We shape it and we create it. So, I'd like you to share with us a little bit about the difference, if there is one, between personal memory and collective memory. What does that mean? Such a complicated question, really. And thank you for your kind words about my work. I'm really touched to know that it impacts you the way it does. It means a lot to me. This morning, I was
