This week at Atelier26, in advance of the official October 7th release of Elizabeth Rosner's Gravity, we're featuring a series of posts about this extraordinarily powerful new book, which Pulitzer Prize finalist Luis Alberto Urrea hails as "a profound work of true beauty and mystery," and which poet Lynne Knight describes as "a personal history that becomes, through Rosner's unflinching honesty and unerringly precise images, universal in its import."
October promises to be a big month for Ms. Rosner, also bringing the release of her new novel Electric City (Counterpoint Press) on 10/14 (take a look at her exciting tour schedule, and consider coming out to one of these events).
In today's post, we share a moving letter from Ms. Rosner to...well, you! The searching spirit and emotional candor reflected in this letter are the qualities that also make Gravity breathtaking — and such an honor to publish. "I've sought," says Ms. Rosner, "to write with an honesty beyond fear." We readers are all the luckier for that.
Dear Reader,
For several
years in the 1990s I participated in a project called Acts of Reconciliation,
created by drama therapist Armand Volkas, a son of Auschwitz survivors. Armand
brought together descendants of Holocaust survivors, like me, with descendants
of Nazis, gathering us to exchange stories and enact scenes from our
childhoods. Using psychodrama and improvisational theater, Armand encouraged
us to discover the threads of our shared legacy, the complex burdens we had in
common, despite our seemingly polarized histories.I remember my curiosity and dread as I sat in a circle of strangers and we waited to introduce ourselves. A palpable tension filled the room: we all must have been wondering if we could tell one another apart by appearance. When we had to say aloud the names of our parents, I was surprised into nervous laughter realizing how easily I might be ‘mistaken’ for a German. “Frieda and CarlHeinz,” I said. My mother was from Vilna, my father from Hamburg. Then we had to name ourselves. “My name is Elizabeth,” I said. “I am a Jew.”
Also in the circle was Rudi, son of a high-ranking Nazi. In the first surprising twist of that day, I learned that Rudi’s uncle, his father’s brother, was a Communist who died in Buchenwald — the same concentration camp in which my father was imprisoned. Rudi was a police officer with a PhD in Medieval German and a Jewish wife. Just in case I thought I could reduce him to a stereotype. Then there was Hans, also a Nazi descendent, who was a psychotherapist with a house-painting business called German Quality Painting. He too lived with a Jewish woman, and he was a writer.
We each talked about our parents and about ourselves, finding to our astonishment, discomfort, and ultimately relief, that we were more alike than different. As our gatherings continued, we began to openly recognize one another’s pain and mistrust and to understand, slowly, that we had all inherited a war that wasn’t truly ours, and a set of beliefs and nightmares to go with it. But these things might be transformed if we had the courage to reach toward one another.
Urged by
Armand to chronicle this experience, I began to write poems, and my first piece
I addressed to Hans. I called it “Speaking to One of Germany’s Sons.” “Ghosts
float whispering at our shoulders, our parents and the dead,” I wrote. “Did we
ask to be born into this place or that one?” It turned out that many of the
themes and figures haunting my life were simply waiting to be acknowledged out
loud. Short prose pieces I’d been
creating ever since my travels in Europe during my early twenties appeared now
to be “poems in disguise.” Thus I re-dedicated myself to writing across the
vast and confusing gaps between myself and others, whether people I’d been
warned to avoid or members of my own family and community.I still want to transcend the seemingly relentless shame and grief of our inheritances, to travel closer together through compassion and imagination. “Only connect,” E.M. Forster wrote, not long after one Great War had ended. Can we remember the past and move beyond it, creating art in the process? I hope so. And Gravity, in which I’ve sought to write with an honesty beyond fear, is a twenty-year chronicle of my journey toward that hope.
May this book speak to you. Thanks for giving it your attention.
—Elizabeth Rosner
