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Book Summary and Reviews of Gravity by Elizabeth Rosner

Gravity by Elizabeth Rosner

Gravity

Poems

by Elizabeth Rosner

  • Published:
  • Mar 2026, 256 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

A fearless work from the prize-winning acclaimed author, composed over a period of some twenty years, Gravity is Elizabeth Rosner's profoundly searching account of her experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors.

Composed over a period of some twenty years, Gravity is Elizabeth Rosner's profoundly searching account of her experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. In an extraordinarily powerful mix of poetry and prose, Rosner traces the earliest remembered resonances of her parents' past and her 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 search for identity against the gravitational pull of her parents' experience and the traditional upbringing they've given her.

Like Rosner's celebrated novels, Gravity plumbs the deep complexities of inherited grief, but here the author discloses, with breathtaking candor and sensitivity, "what it felt like to grow up inside my family." Also featuring spellbinding artwork by Lola Fraknoi, these astonishing pages remind us that history happens at home and that the past is something we all embody, knowingly or not.

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This information about Gravity was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Elizabeth Rosner

Elizabeth Rosner is a bestselling novelist, poet, and essayist. Her works include Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and the novel Electric City, named a best book by NPR. Rosner's essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Elle, and numerous anthologies. She lives in Berkeley, California.

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