#Books on intergenerational trauma full

Along the way, he discovers that a Holocaust survivor relative has written a memoir with a cult following, and explores a secret network of underground Nazi tunnels with a ramshackle crew of treasure hunters, among other chaotic adventures. With the help of a Polish lawyer nicknamed “The Killer” and her translator daughter, Kaiser navigates the bureaucracy of the Polish legal system and his own thorny feelings about what taking back the long-lost building would mean for its current residents.

Menachem Kaiser takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather’s twenty-year failed attempt to reclaim the Polish apartment complex stolen from his family by Nazis. Plunder is a wild journey into the dark heart of post-Holocaust Eastern Europe. Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasureby Menachem Kaiser

#Books on intergenerational trauma full

And lest you think these books-mine included-sound depressing as hell: I promise you’re in for a wild ride full of hot bathtub sex in a former Soviet republic, literal treasure hunts, and laugh-out-loud dark comedy. Even when they can’t see it, it’s in the air they breathe. The weight of that inheritance doesn’t hit these characters like a truck. Like my novel, these books reckon with family legacies atmospherically. This reading list features seven books that respect the mystery and nuance of intergenerational trauma and its aftermath. Despite growing up in America to American-born parents, our narrator senses that the horror her ancestors experienced continues to pull the strings of her own life.

The narrator, like Sasha, is of Soviet Jewish descent, albeit several generations ago. That’s when she falls under the wing of an alluring Soviet Jewish refugee, Sasha, who claims to be a psychic tasked with acting as her spiritual guide. Our unnamed narrator, who has always defined herself in relation to Debbie, finds herself consumed with unease over what kind of person to be. A wild night of taking mystery pills at their beloved dive bar turns violent, and Debbie vanishes without a trace. My debut novel, All-Night Pharmacy, tracks the coming-of-age of a young woman in a toxic entanglement with her larger-than-life older sister, Debbie. The sense that I owe my ancestors an unrepayable debt for their sacrifices, my choice of a “stable” day job as a pharmacist, my often boundaryless relationship with my family-all feel connected to what my relatives survived, and what they didn’t survive. Though I can’t distill down into a pithy thesis how this inheritance has shaped me, I know with certainty that it has. Intergenerational trauma is, by nature, a form of collateral damage. But this legacy is a weight I carry at all times. Having grown up under much more stable conditions in Los Angeles, these stories are unrelatable to me. We left the only home my parents had known-the country where my great-grandfather was murdered as an enemy of the state, where my father had to join the army to “earn” one of the few medical school spots open to Jews, where my grandfather had to bribe a government official for me to be named Ruth (it wasn’t an option in the Soviet book of names). from the former Soviet Union as political refugees when I was two years old.