Rosner’s 2001 debut novel The Speed of Light has been translated into nine languages and was awarded the Harold U. Ribalow Prize administered by Hadassah Magazine and judged by Elie Wiesel. It was shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina and awarded the Prix France Bleu Gironde. Rosner also received the 2002 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer Award for fiction. Her second novel, Blue Nude, was a national bestseller and named a 2006 Best Book by the San Francisco Chronicle. Rosner’s new novel, Electric City, is forthcoming this fall from Counterpoint Press.
Composed over a period of some twenty years, Gravity is Rosner’s profoundly searching, blazingly honest account of her own experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. In these direct and revealing pages, Rosner traces the earliest remembered resonances of her parents’ past and her own 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. This extraordinarily powerful book 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.
Atelier26 will present Gravity in a beautiful paperback edition featuring interior illustrations, with cover art by Nathan Shields (above). We look forward to sharing excerpts, event details, and more as the fall release date approaches.
Check back here for updates (or sign up at the top of our sidebar to receive them automatically). Learn more about Elizabeth Rosner, read excerpts, and find links to her many essays and articles at her website.
An audio reading of Rosner’s poem “Foreign Tongues” may be heard below:
