100 Books Like The Inheritors

I found this book decades ago symbolically languishing on a remainders table in the back of Moe’s Bookstore in Berkeley. I nearly fainted when I read the title. Could this book be about me and others like me, members of a generation that wasn’t supposed to be born? This groundbreaking book, considered the Bible of children of Holocaust survivors, gives voice to the multigenerational impact of the Holocaust which we, the second generation, inherited directly from our parents who were the lucky few to survive while two-thirds of European Jewry was wiped out. As a psychotherapist, I have recommended this book to clients and their partners to better understand family dynamics, grief, trauma, resiliency, and determination to create a better world.

I loved how this book is a memoir and research into trauma that affects people their whole lives. Through conversations and interviews, Rosner tells the story of the holocaust and its psychological effect on those who survived and those whose relatives perpetrated or witnessed the horrors.

I like that she looks into PTSD that many suffer from and how she states that horrors or abuse have to be acknowledged to be healed. 

My 3rd grade teacher told me I had no artistic talent, and since I could not afford to hire an artist for my book- so I have no illustrations. Thus, I envy Eisenstein’s artistic talent in illustrating her memoir. Actually, I admire her double skills, as both a writer and an artist. Her sensitive, astute, and often humorous, analysis of her childhood with her Holocaust survivor parents was incredibly familiar to me. There were times I laughed hysterically, with tears in my eyes. Some of her anecdotes seemed as if they came right out of my own childhood recollection of family stories, such as her story about a gold wedding band that was hidden during dark days in a concentration camp, the parental silences or tears about the past, her “drug-like-addiction” to learning everything about the Holocaust, in order to envision her parents and their lives before the war,… show more.

If Epstein’s book, published in 1979, was the first expose about the commonalities among the children of the Holocaust, Hass’ book was the second. Hass succeeded in melding oral history, memoir, and his professions as a clinical psychologist and university professor. This book is helpful, not only to those of the second generation, but to mental health professionals, as well. It was also helpful to me, as it explained the unique, and often difficult, relationship between the survivor parents and their children.

I am passionate about the book because as a child of survivors, I have also had to grapple with the effects of my parents’ trauma. Of course, as a young child, I had no idea that my parents’ behaviors were special or different. It was only at an older age, I began noticing the differences between the atmosphere and attitudes in my home vs. those of my friends.… show more.

This is a Holocaust story that no one knows about. 

This graphic novel is a brutal depiction of his father’s survival through boxing in a Nazi concentration camp and his life that followed as an immigrant to the United States. This Holocaust story of how his father’s boxing skills kept him alive in Auschwitz is part of a larger story of boxers who were rounded up and forced into a perverted form of the sport for the entertainment of the Nazis. 

As a nonfiction storyteller who often explores the Holocaust and as the director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Initiative at Penn State, I’m sometimes asked to recommend books about the Third Reich’s murder of 6 million Jews and millions of Romany, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and others. A New History is the tome I often suggest. In a deceivingly simple linear approach, Laurence Rees, who conducted 25 years of primary research to construct this historical account, methodically walks us through the Holocaust’s origins and unfolding, from Hitler’s novice-Nazi days to the Allies’ death-camp liberations. But Rees avoids neat narratives, peeling away complex layers of madness. For instance, he demonstrates that boiled-over antisemitism extended far beyond Germany’s borders in the 1930s and that the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was messier than we may imagine. Only a lucid voice like Rees’ can clue us into and… show more.

Our experiences are quite different; Newmann grew up in Venezuela and didn’t know her father was Jewish, let alone that he’d survived the Holocaust. Yet, what drew me in was her desire to understand the pieces of her family story that were unexplained and the secrets that didn’t quite make sense.

Her quest to understand her father and his family, whom she never got to meet, kept me engaged until the end. We need to understand our past to understand ourselves.

Set at the end of WWII, when the UN authorized the founding of the State of Israel, I thoroughly enjoyed the merging of historical facts with fictional characters to depict the birth of a nation from the Jewish point of view.

I loved the diverse characters, including an American gentile female nurse and teenage Jewish children orphaned during the war as they settled in a hostile land.

It was eye-opening to see what it means to be constantly under attack, on the one hand, fighting militants physically and, on the other hand, fighting various countries politically in order to be acknowledged worldwide.

I also love that the author gives me an authentic look at the behind-the-scenes decision-making by British officials during this chaotic time. 

This powerful story angered many when it was published, but Styron is asking serious questions: How do you survive a terrible experience, especially one that forces you to make an agonizing choice? Can you, in fact, survive that? He takes what I believe is the most extreme case of survivor guilt imaginable, which is the heart-rending decision that Sophie is forced to make and which is the core of the novel.

That’s in the past–the recent past for the characters–and in the present, the three main people in the novel find themselves in a painful love triangle that arises specifically from those terrible events but which I found to be a very perceptive insight into a situation that many of us find ourselves in.

It’s about a different kind of choice but one which will cause pain, whatever is decided. 

The Cloister: A Novel by James Carroll (Anchor, 2019) is a gripping, magical novel that dramatizes the connections between the medieval and modern worlds. Father James Kavanaugh meets Rachel Vedette at the Cloisters, the famous museum and gallery in upper Manhattan dedicated to the art of the Middle Ages. He is a parish priest with doubts and worries; she is a Holocaust survivor; and their relationship brilliantly conjures up the forbidden love affair between the medieval philosopher and “rock star,” Peter Abelard, and Heloise, an immensely talented nun. James Carroll, a former priest, is also the author of Constantine’s Sword, a memorable non-fiction book about the history of the Church and the Jews. The Cloister paints convincing pictures of Abelard and Heloise and creatively blurs the line between modernity and religious tradition.