A memoir of family, the Holocaust, injury, and identity, where Adam Frankel, a former Obama speechwriter, must comprehend the legacy of his family’s painful history and find out who he’s in the wake of a life-changing revelation about his very own origins.

“The Survivors is an astonishingly beautiful and profoundly moving book. Frankel’s haunting search to unravel the mysteries of his family members is so powerful it reads like a fine book.” -Doris Kearns Goodwin

Adam Frankel’s about The Survivors: A Story of Battle, Inheritance, and Recovery maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust and built brand-new lives, with fresh names, in Connecticut. Though they tried to keep the horrors of their past behind, the pain they experienced crossed generational lines-a fact most obvious in the mental health of Adam’s mom. When Adam sat down with her to examine their genealogy at length, he discovered another shocking magic formula, this time one which unraveled Adam’s entire understanding of who he’s.

In the midst of piecing together a tale of inherited familial trauma, Adam discovered he was only half of who he thought he was, knowledge that elevated essential questions of identity. Who was he, if not really his father’s child? If not section of a rich heritage of writers and public servants? Will it matter? What defines a family’s bonds? What will he spread to his personal children? To rewrite his story in truth and to build a life for his own young family, Adam had to get around his discomfort 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 confronted with the same choice. We can turn away from what we’ve inherited-or, we can confront it, in the hopes of shifting and preventing that injury from inflicting discomfort on future decades. The tales Adam shares with us in The Survivors are about the ways the past can haunt our future, the resilience that can be on the additional side of injury, and the nice that can result from points that are unspeakably poor.