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

by Adam P. Frankel, Adam Frankel, Rob Shapiro (Read by)

Overview

A memoir of family, the Holocaust, trauma, and identity, in which Adam Frankel, a former Obama speechwriter, must come to terms with the legacy of his family’s painful past and discover who he is in the wake of a life-changing revelation about his own origins.

“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

Adam Frankel’s maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust and built new lives, with new names, in 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 sat down with her to examine their family history in detail, he learned another shocking secret, this time one that unraveled Adam’s entire understanding of who he is.

In the midst of piecing together a story of inherited familial trauma, Adam discovered he was only half of who he thought he was, knowledge that raised essential questions of identity. Who was he, if not his father’s son? If not part of a rich heritage of writers and public servants? Does it matter? What defines a family’s bonds? What will he pass on to his own children? To rewrite his story in truth and to build a life for his own young family, Adam had to navigate his pain to find answers and a way forward.

Throughout this journey into the past, his family’s psyche, and his own understanding of identity, Adam 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. The stories Adam shares with us in The Survivors are about the ways the past can haunt our future, the resilience that can be found on the other side of trauma, and the good that can come from things that are unspeakably bad.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781094027777
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	10/29/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Adam P. Frankel was a speechwriter for President Barack Obama from the early days of the 2007-2008 presidential campaign until the end of Obama’s first term in the White House. Since then, he has served as executive director of a national education nonprofit and worked in the private sector. Adam is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a graduate of Princeton University and the London School of Economics, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. Adam lives in New York City with his wife Stephanie and two children.

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.

Rob Shapiro is a musician, writer, voice actor, and Earphones Award–winning narrator. He performed several seasons of radio comedy on Minneapolis Public Radio and voiced the titular lion in Leo the Lion. He is a musician and composer with his critically acclaimed band Populuxe. He is also a business consultant and software system designer.

Editorial Reviews

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