The Survivors: A Story of War, Inheritance, and Healing

by Adam P. Frankel

Overview

The grandson of Holocaust survivors comes to terms with his family’s painful past and a shocking revelation of his own origins in this moving memoir.

Adam Frankel’s maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust and built new lives, with new names, in New Haven, Connecticut. Though they tried to leave the horrors of their past behind, the pain they suffered crossed generational lines—a fact most apparent in the mental health of Adam’s mother.

When Adam set out to examine his family history, he learned a shocking secret that unraveled Adam’s entire understanding of who he is and where he came from.

Through this journey into the past—from the horrors of Dachau to an identity crisis as a speechwriter in the Obama White House to the long road toward healing—Adam is forced to reckon with his family’s psyche and secrets, the science of trauma, the cruelty of mental illness, and the ugly truth of his own origins.

Through the process, he comes to realize that while the nature of our families’ traumas may vary, each of us is faced with the same choice: we can turn away from what we’ve inherited or we can confront it in the hopes of moving on and stopping that trauma from inflicting pain on future generations.

Chicago Tribune Notable Book of 2019

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062258601
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	11/21/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	277
Sales rank:	2,693
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Adam P. Frankel is an advisor to Emerson Collective, a social change organization. He was a speechwriter for President Barack Obama from the 2008 presidential campaign through Obama’s first term in the White House. Adam is a graduate of Princeton University and the London School of Economics, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

09/01/2019

Frankel, an adviser to the Emerson Collective and former speechwriter for Barack Obama, debuts with a distinct account that is part history of the Holocaust, part memoir of a parent living with mental illness, and a behind-the-scenes look at the first Obama campaign and administration. Frankel's maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors. Family stories and research in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archives detail their horrific experiences. The trauma of surviving the Holocaust negatively affected his American-born mother's long-term mental health. Though his mother and father divorced when he was young, he remained close to both parents and both sets of grandparents. When he finished college, he began to ask his mother hard questions about his parentage. What he learned left him reeling just as he was embarking on an outwardly successful professional and personal life. Here, he honestly recounts this difficult journey of relearning identity and belonging. VERDICT Readers of biography, history, and politics, and those interested in the effects of trauma on subsequent generations, will appreciate this thoughtful book. [See Prepub Alert, 4/1/19.]—Laurie Unger Skinner, Highland Park P.L., IL

Library Journal

Brilliantly, achingly told, The Survivors is a painful, shocking and, ultimately, inspiring story of family trauma, betrayal and forgiveness.

David Axelrod

At once heart-wrenching and grippingly suspenseful, Adam Frankel’s memoir explores, in immensely personal terms, the legacy of the Holocaust, as well as the sorrow, grit, and character of his loved ones who survived it. By sharing his own struggle to confront the secrets of the past, Frankel above all illuminates the transcendent, world-changing power of family love.

Samantha Power

I was blown away by The Survivors. Totally. And I promise you will be, too. It’s a wrenching, liberating, and exhilarating emotional journey through the darkest and most nurturing of all forests: family. Beautifully written and emotionally fearless, The Survivors made me cry at the end.

Walter Isaacson

Adam Frankel has brought us a lovely, stark, powerful, beautifully written, revelatory and deeply emotional memoir with a historical framework that extends from the Holocaust to John F. Kennedy and the world of Barack Obama.  Frankel’s breathtaking book has many important lessons for all of us and deserves to be widely read.

Michael Beschloss

The Survivors is an astonishingly beautiful and profoundly moving book.  Frankel’s haunting search to unravel the mysteries of his family is so compelling that it reads like a fine novel.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

2019-08-18
A debut memoir about "the ways the trauma of the Holocaust has reverberated through the generations of [the author's] family."

Frankel, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, focuses first on his maternal grandparents, who not only managed to survive the Nazi death camps, but also thrived, on the surface at least, after their arrival in the United States a few years after the end of World War II. They settled in New Haven, Connecticut, where they ran a jewelry store specializing in watch repair. As the author learned incremental details about their experiences, his respect and adoration for his grandparents only grew. The dominant character in the family chronicle, however, is Frankel's mother, Ellen, a functional career woman but emotionally unstable individual. Ellen grew up understandably marked by the survival saga of her parents, and Frankel speculates about how being the devoted daughter of Holocaust survivors affected Ellen. "All of the drama, the volatility, hardly seemed Mom's fault," he writes. "She was, I knew, at the mercy of her emotions, subject to their fickle swings." The author also looks inward to determine what his family's experiences mean for him as a Jew growing up in a less perilous environment. For students of American politics and history, Frankel's apprenticeship with John F. Kennedy confidant Ted Sorensen and later work for Obama provide welcome relief from the otherwise relentless emotional roller coaster. Frankel's marriage and fatherhood add further poignancy to the narrative, and his well-delineated portraits of his cousins, aunts, uncles, and their extended families provide helpful context to the dramatic family saga. It's a unique addition to the literature of personal accounts that keep the memory of the Holocaust alive at a time when it is "getting harder to teach young people about [it] because the most compelling instructors—survivors—are all passing away."

An emotionally powerful multigenerational memoir.

Kirkus Reviews