Book Club Discussion Questions and Guide for Rooms for Vanishing by Stuart Nadler

1. "There are separate rooms, Anya said, when I pressed her to describe how it was she got to talk to my mother. Separate rooms, like separate trains. I am on one side of the wall, you are on the other side of the wall. I am on one train, you are on the other train." (p. 8). Discuss what Anya means by this. How does she speak to her grandmother? How does Sonja respond to her daughter in this moment, and then how does she metabolize this information over time? How does this logic of separate rooms inform the rest of the novel?
2. Sonja, Fania, Moses, and Arnold are all haunted by the loss of their loved ones and re-formed by their grief. Discuss if and how their grief ever opens up a sense of possibility or connection. Does their grief ever give them hope?
3. After Fania meets her doppelgänger, she tells Hermann that she is "coming apart" (p. 99). What does she mean by this? How do the other characters in the novel unravel or come apart? How do doubles, or doppelgängers, inspire these unravelings?
4. For Moses, the youngest, it is the Prague Spring that continues to haunt him for the rest of his life. What do you make of his erasure from the photograph taken on the day his friends were murdered? He thinks "It seems possible ... that on the day my life was to end, I was instead picked up out of history and replaced with nothing, with a wall between myself and my life, a wall I would never cross or break or rest against ... " (p. 127). How does Moses wrestle with the contradiction between experience and evidence? How do the other characters wrestle with this?
5. On the night of his ninety-ninth birthday, Arnold thinks about how "in the world to come, children are reborn with all the world's knowledge. In the world to come, fathers fall forward to wrap the old kingdom in their arms. In the world to come, the blessings of our memories are collected like kite string and let loose into the new sky. In the world to come, I put my hand through the walls that keep us apart to touch my family." (p. 192). Discuss this idea that memory and knowledge continue to exist, to be reborn and let loose into the new sky. How does this idea impact each character's relationship with memory?
6. Although this novel is filled with loss, there are moments of humor throughout. What role does humor play in the novel? What do you make of this balance between darkness and light? Are the two inextricable?
7. Rooms for Vanishing intertwines several narratives about grief alongside broader themes from Jewish history. Did the personal experiences of loss in the book deepen your understanding of the collective trauma, or did the portrayal of collective trauma enhance your insight into individual grief?
8. Arnold spends an entire year waiting at the train station for Sonja's train to arrive. During that time, he receives letters and telephone calls from her, and yet she doesn't come. Discuss what you think has happened. Is she real? Has he been, as Sandrine tells him, deceived by someone playing a cruel joke on him?
9. Throughout the novel, a series of impossible events occur—a man wanders New York and Prague with his ghost, a woman encounters her double, multiple people believe they're hearing the voices of the dead, a one-hundred-year-old man runs through the streets of Vienna. At the same time, all these characters are experiencing a profound sense of grief. Discuss the connections between these two ideas.
10. At the end of the novel, Arnold's old friend explains to him that he had amassed a collection of blank books because he'd begun to "feel consumed with the idea that in one of these books someone had written the story of his family, and that he had missed it somehow, overlooked it, he had not paid good enough attention to the world in front of him." (p. 441) What do you think these books mean to Arnold? What did they mean to you?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Dutton. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.