In Schenectady the General Electric works runs its shifts and the town carries the company’s name in the air. Inside a house there, a girl listens to what her parents do not say. Six languages move through the rooms. German stays out of the family’s mouth at home, though both parents carry it from the old country. The girl is Elizabeth Rosner (b. 1959). Her father survived Buchenwald. Her mother survived the war hidden in the Polish countryside. The girl learns the shape of their history before she learns its facts, and the shape is silence with weight inside it.
The home is the subject. Rosner spends a writing life returning to it.
Her parents met after the war, married, and crossed to America. Her father reached Buchenwald at fifteen and came out at sixteen, he and a brother the last of their family left alive. Her mother fled the Vilna ghetto at twelve and hid in the countryside for two years, until the Russians drove the Germans out of Poland. The two of them brought that arithmetic of loss into a postwar American town built on turbines and electric light. Rosner grows up among neighbors whose fathers punch a clock at GE and come home to ordinary supper. Her own supper holds a war nobody will name. She watches her parents the way a child watches weather, reading pressure she cannot yet measure.
She leaves for Stanford, then takes a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Irvine, and studies further at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. She writes poems first. The poems teach her a discipline of rhythm and compression she never sets down, and her prose keeps the habit. She teaches. She publishes essays. Fiction comes later, and when it comes it carries the poet’s ear.
Her first novel, The Speed of Light (2001), reaches readers in nine languages. Julian, son of survivors, lives a contained life until a German photographer enters it, a woman shadowed by her own family’s part in the Nazi years. Rosner sets the children of victims and the children of perpetrators in the same frame and asks what passes between them. She does not hand down guilt as a fixed inheritance. She tests whether speech can cross the line that history drew. The book takes the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, lands on the American Library Association‘s Notable list, and reaches the shortlist for the French Prix Femina étranger. It marks her as a novelist who comes at the Holocaust through one room and two faces rather than through the machinery of historical reconstruction.
Blue Nude (2006) turns away from explicit Jewish material and keeps the deeper question. An American painter in Paris befriends an undocumented African immigrant, and the novel moves through displacement, race, and the duties of an artist toward a living model and a living man. The San Francisco Chronicle names it among the year’s best. Trauma still organizes the book, though it wears different clothes.
She comes home to her family’s ground in Electric City (2014), set in Schenectady. She braids family history into the town’s history, the immigrant labor and the postwar identity and the current that runs under all of it, visible and not. NPR lists it among its best books of the year. The same year she publishes Gravity, a collection built over some twenty years, poems that read the body as a place where grief is stored and sometimes, without warning, lifted.
Then she sets down a book that gathers everything.
The first trip is 1983. She travels with her father to Weimar, the cultured town a short distance from the camp, the town of Goethe and Schiller and Bach. Her father knows the German he refused at home, and here it comes back to him. He faints on arrival. The body keeps its own record. They go up to the beech forest the camp was named for, Buchenwald, and the gray of the place settles over the gray of memory. He shows her where a boy of fifteen learned what men can do to men.
The second trip is 1995. The Germans hold a commemoration, and former prisoners, their liberators, and the town’s residents come together at a gathering the organizers call the Survivors’ Café. The name gives Rosner her title and her image: the long tables, the coffee, the old men who were once starved boys, the children and grandchildren of every party to the thing. At one of these tables her father falls into conversation with a German woman, a therapist, granddaughter of a Nazi officer. She counsels the descendants of perpetrators and carries a guilt she has not laid down. He answers her in the German he had buried. Rosner watches her father and the German woman find the same wound from opposite sides, the inheritance of the killers and the inheritance of the killed meeting over a cup at a folding table in Thuringia. On this trip he passes a kidney stone. On the last trip, in 2015, he loses a tooth. Three journeys, three small surrenders of the body, each one the war collecting a late installment.
Out of these trips comes Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory (2017). The book is memoir and more than memoir. Rosner reads deep in the literature of atrocity and in the new science of epigenetics, the study of changes the environment writes into us and passes forward. She wants to know how a daughter inherits a wound she never received, and she finds language for what she has felt since the silent suppers in Schenectady. She opens with what she names the Alphabet of Inadequate Language, an acrostic that runs from A for Auschwitz to Z for Zyklon B, a confession that words come up short before they begin. She holds two truths at once. The cycle of trauma asks to be interrupted through care and therapy. The stories ask to be carried forward so the past survives the death of the last witness. She quotes a survivor who predicts the Holocaust will die with its survivors, and she sets her hope against him: that the generations after will keep individual losses as singular, a man, a child, a name, and not let them dissolve into the round numbers of mass death.
She does not keep the inquiry inside the Holocaust. She moves to the descendants of American slaves, to the children of the Cambodian killing fields, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the population marked by September 11. Reviewers split on the reach. Some find the gathering of catastrophes too wide for one book. Others find in the synthesis a true advance, clinicians among them who had waited for a book that puts the research on intergenerational trauma beside a daughter’s account. The work reaches the finalist round for the National Jewish Book Award in Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice. Viet Thanh Nguyen (b. 1971) calls it powerful.
Her father, near ninety, tells her that she is almost lucky to have this to write about. He means the Holocaust. He means the material of her life’s work. He says it the way a survivor says a hard thing, and she carries the line as she carries the rest. In 2017 she brings him an early copy at his home in Schenectady. He is eighty-eight. He holds the book. She had wanted him to hold it before the threshold arrived, the day when no survivor is left to hold anything. Her mother does not see the book. She died in 2000, the girl who hid in the forest for two years now gone the quiet way.
Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening (2024) widens the project. Rosner grew up in a house of six languages, and she turns that childhood into an inquiry about listening as a discipline and an ethic. She braids memoir with neuroscience, psychology, multilingual experience, animal communication, music, and philosophy. She argues that attention is a skill a person can train, that deep listening builds empathy, and that empathy might begin to mend what violence breaks. The book reads as the natural sum of the earlier ones. She had spent decades on the transmission of memory. Here she studies the act that receives it.
Her nonfiction reaches into craft as well. She contributed to The House on Via Gombito: Writing Tutorials from the Center for Writers (2014), with reflections on structure and the writing process, work that fits a long practice of mentoring. Her essays and criticism appear in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lectures on trauma, remembrance, creativity, listening, and the ethics of storytelling, and she crosses freely between literature and psychology and history and neuroscience rather than speaking only as a novelist.
She teaches creative writing for years, at the University of California, Berkeley Extension and at conferences across the country, and she works as an editor and manuscript consultant and writing coach. Writers come to her for the craft and for the harder thing under it, the vision a book needs before its sentences can find their order.
A reader can name the line that holds her work together. She refuses to sentimentalize the suffering or the recovery. Trauma in her pages is neither a permanent name a person wears nor an obstacle a person clears and forgets. Healing is an ongoing labor of witness, conversation, and attention, never finished and never guaranteed. Her novels rarely stage the historical horror at the center of the frame. They watch the horror keep working in ordinary lives decades on, in a marriage, a studio, a kitchen, a body that faints in Weimar.
She is rooted in Jewish history and she keeps reaching past it, to genocide and displacement and racial violence and migration and inherited grief, holding the universal and the particular in the same hand. Memory in her account is an active practice of listening and answering, the present taking responsibility for the dead.
Rosner lives in Berkeley, California, and goes on writing fiction, poetry, essays, and nonfiction while she lectures here and abroad on memory and resilience and the art of listening. She occupies a place in American letters that few others hold, where literary art meets psychology and neuroscience and Holocaust study and the plain question of how a person inherits a history and what a person owes it. She put the answer in one sentence in Survivor Café. She carries the words. She passes them on.
The Carrier
At a folding table at Buchenwald in 1995, three people drink coffee and listen, and each one listens for a different thing.
The first is a man who came into the camp at fifteen and came out at sixteen, one of two from his family left alive. He has not spoken German at home in America for half a century. Here the language returns to his mouth like a tooth he thought he had lost. He listens the way a man listens at the edge of a grave he climbed out of once. Across the table sits a German woman, a therapist, granddaughter of a Nazi officer. She counsels other grandchildren of the men who ran places like this. She listens for absolution, or for the nearest thing to it that a survivor might hand a German across a cup of coffee. Beside her father sits Elizabeth Rosner (b. 1959). She listens to both of them, and under both of them, for the dead who are not at the table and who will never be at the table, the family subtracted before she was born.
The organizers call the gathering a Survivors’ Café. The name is gentle and the place is not. Beech trees stand around the cleared ground the way beech trees stand around any clearing in Thuringia, indifferent, German, old. The coffee is hot. The talk is quiet. And the single act these people share, listening, means something different in each chair.
That difference is the whole problem of a hero system, and it is the way into Rosner.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued in The Denial of Death (1973) that a human being lives under two terrors and builds a life to manage them. The first terror is the body’s, the knowledge that the animal dies and rots and ends. The second terror is the meaning’s, the suspicion that the life counted for nothing, that the cosmos will not notice the going. Becker said we answer both with what he called a hero system, a scheme of value that tells a man what counts as significance and hands him a part to play in it. Inside the system he earns a symbolic life that outlasts the physical one. The lawyer wins. The mother raises sons. The scientist publishes. The monk dissolves into God. Each buys the same thing with different coin: the sense that he will not, finally, be erased.
Becker’s sharpest point is the one Rosner’s table illustrates. A hero system does not only rank actions. It assigns meanings. The same word changes its content as it crosses from one system to the next, and a man can hear his own sacred word in another’s mouth and not recognize it. Sacred values are local. They earn their force inside a particular scheme of significance and lose it when carried out.
Take Rosner’s sacred word. Listening.
Walk it through a few hero systems and watch it change shape.
A trial lawyer listens. He listens across a courtroom to a witness he means to break, and his listening is a held breath waiting for the seam in a story, the date that shifts, the verb that hedges. He earns his standing in an order built on combat, and a good ear is a weapon there. He listens to win. When he hears a man falter, his pulse lifts. Listening, in his system, is predation with manners.
A Carthusian listens too, in a stone cell above a valley, under a rule of silence that runs for most of his waking life. He listens for God, which means he listens against himself, against the chatter that proves he is still a separate man with wants. His hero system rewards erasure. The more of him goes quiet, the closer he comes to the thing he wants, which is to stop wanting. Listening, for him, is self-subtraction offered up as worship. Set him beside the lawyer and the word will not hold its meaning across the gap. One listens to assert. The other listens to vanish.
A sonar operator in the sail of a submarine wears headphones in the dark and listens to the sea. He sorts shrimp from screw, biologic from a contact that should not be there. His listening guards the tribe inside the hull. A missed sound is a hundred dead men. He earns his place by vigilance, and the sea answers him with threat or with nothing. His ear serves fear. Listening, in his system, is the body of the watch standing between the crew and the deep.
A simultaneous interpreter sits in a glass booth above a hall and listens in one language while speaking in another, three seconds behind the man at the rostrum, never her own words, always his. Her hero system prizes the vanishing act. The better she works, the less anyone knows she is there. A diplomat hears his counterpart and forgets that a woman in a booth lifted the meaning across the chasm and set it down whole on the far side. She earns significance by erasing her own trace. Listening, for her, is carriage. She is a channel and takes pride in leaving the water clear.
A hospice nurse listens at a bedside to a man with days left, and she listens for what he needs said before he cannot say it. She does not listen to win or to vanish or to guard. She listens to accompany. Her system rewards presence at the one door no one walks through twice with company. Listening, in her chair, is the refusal to let a man die unheard.
Five chairs, five sacred ears, five meanings. The word travels and the content does not. Becker would say each ear earns a different immortality, and he would be right.
Now set Rosner in a sixth chair and the word changes again.
Her listening braids several of these and belongs to none. She listens like the interpreter, to carry meaning across a gulf, but the gulf she works is death, and the speakers on the far side cannot lean toward her. She listens like the hospice nurse, in the presence of the dying, but her dying came two generations back and reach her as silence and as the look on a father’s face. She listens like the Carthusian, against the noise of her own life, to hear a register most people screen out. She does not listen like the lawyer, for the crack she can exploit, and she does not listen like the sonar man, for the threat she can sink. Her ear serves transmission, and what it carries is the named dead.
This is where the inheritance shows. Rosner took her title, Third Ear (2024), from a line that runs back through Theodor Reik (1888-1969) to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche used the phrase in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) to mock readers who could not hear the music inside German prose, the ones who lacked, he said, a third ear. Reik, a Viennese analyst and an early student of Freud, lifted the phrase for Listening with the Third Ear (1948) and turned it toward the consulting room. The third ear, for Reik, hears what the patient does not say, the meaning that moves under the words and arrives through a gesture, a pause, a tightening of the hand. Rosner inherits the term and turns it again. Her third ear hears the dead. It is an organ for picking up the frequency that silence carries, the register her parents broadcast at the supper table in Schenectady without ever choosing a word.
That table is the subtraction story. Most hero systems answer a loss. Rosner’s answers a loss she never witnessed. Her family in Europe was taken before her birth. Her father came out of Buchenwald with a brother and almost no one else. Her mother fled the Vilna ghetto at twelve and hid in the Polish countryside for two years. They married, crossed to America, and built a house in a General Electric town, and inside that house they spoke six languages and refused the seventh, German, the language of the killing. Their daughter grew up reading pressure she could not measure. She inherited a wound with no memory of the wounding. The thing was subtracted before she could lose it, and her listening became the search for an event she did not attend.
Becker helps name the two terrors that drive her.
The first is the camps, the ash, the body burned into the round number. The second is harder, and it is the one she works. Becker called significance the deeper hunger, and Rosner found the form of insignificance she fears most. She fears the second death, the one that comes when the last witness dies and the story goes with him, when the individual loss dissolves into the statistic and a man who had a name and a knife and a brother becomes a fraction of six million. She says it plainly in Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory (2017). A survivor she interviews predicts the Holocaust will die with the survivors. She sets her hope against him, that the generations after will keep the dead singular, a man, a child, a name, against the gravity that pulls every atrocity toward arithmetic.
Her hero system answers both terrors at once. If she carries the words, the dead are not finally dead. And if she is the carrier, she is not finally insignificant. She has a cosmic job. The role solves her death and her meaning in a single move, which is what a hero system does when it works.
She reaches for biology to seal the claim. In Survivor Café she takes up epigenetics, the study of changes the environment writes into the body and passes forward, and she finds in it a proof that the wound lives in her, that she carries the parents’ trauma in her own wiring, in mother’s milk drenched in sadness. The science does identity work here. It tells her she is not separate from the dead. The murdered run in her chemistry, which means she is already what she wants to be, a vessel, a continuation, a place where the lost keep going. A reader can grant the feeling and still notice the load the science is asked to bear. The research on intergenerational transmission is young and contested, and studies out of Israel cut both ways. Rosner needs it to mean more than it has shown, because her hero system needs the wound to live in the body and not only in the telling.
Watch what the system costs her, because the cost is the honest part.
A carrier needs cargo, and the cargo is grief. Her hero role asks the wound to stay open. Transmission and healing pull in opposite directions, and she knows it. She writes that the culture must interrupt the cycle of trauma through care, and in the same book she writes that the culture needs the stories kept alive so the past is not forgotten. A healed wound transmits nothing. An open wound transmits forever. She holds both and cannot fully reconcile them, and the strain shows in the work, which circles the camps and returns and circles again. The third ear that hears the dead must keep the channel open, and an open channel is another name for a wound that will not close.
There is a second cost. The carrier’s claim can crowd the carried. To make oneself the vessel of the dead is to stand between the dead and everyone else, and the posture can shade from service into ownership. Her father felt the edge of it and named it. Near ninety, he told her she was almost lucky to have this to write about. He meant the Holocaust. He meant that his catastrophe had become her material, her standing, her subject. He said it the way a survivor says a hard thing, and she kept the line, which is to her credit, since it indicts the very role she has chosen. The man who lived it hands the daughter who inherited it a small, exact warning about the trade she has made.
A third cost shows in the reach. Survivor Café moves from Buchenwald to the descendants of American slaves, to the Cambodian killing fields, to Hiroshima, to the population marked by September 11. The move is generous and it adds value, because it offers the carrier’s gift to others and refuses to hoard the wound as Jewish property alone. It also dilutes. A book that holds every atrocity holds each one more loosely, and reviewers split on the reach for that reason. The hero system wants to be universal, because a universal carrier is a larger hero, and the universalizing pull works against the singular naming the same book defends. She wants the dead kept singular and she wants the form of inheritance kept universal, and those two wants do not sit easy together.
None of this unmakes the work. It locates it. Rosner is not a chronicler of the camps, which she did not see, and she is not a survivor, which she says clearly. She is a carrier, and the carrier is a real and old office, older than the term, the one the tribe assigns to the person who keeps the names. The Alphabet of Inadequate Language that opens Survivor Café, running from A for Auschwitz to Z for Zyklon B, is the carrier’s confession that the freight exceeds the cart, that words come up short and remain the only thing she was handed. She carries them anyway. That is the part she will not put down.
So three coordinates, for the reader who wants to know where to watch.
Watch the open wound. Her hero system runs on transmission, and transmission needs the cut to stay fresh, so look for the moments when healing and remembering pull against each other and she chooses remembering. She will keep the channel open because the role requires it, and the cost lands on her own body, which is the body she says the dead already inhabit.
Watch the science. When she reaches for epigenetics, she is reaching for proof that she is not separate from the lost. The reach tells you less about the research than about the need, which is the need to belong to the dead by blood and not only by love.
And watch the father’s warning. He gave her the truest line in her own book, the one about luck, and it cuts at the office she holds. A carrier earns significance by standing close to the dead, and the man who climbed out of the grave once told her, across the distance between the one who lived it and the one who tells it, what that closeness can become. She wrote it down. She listened with the third ear, and what it heard, that time, was the cost of listening.
Novelist Elizabeth Rosner – Blue Nude, The Speed of Light
I call her Tuesday, September 12, 2006.
She's the middle child. "My parents were Holocaust survivors and that found its way into everything. They wanted us to be able to take care of ourselves. That I wanted to become an artist made them nervous."
"My father was from Hamburg, Germany, and my mother was from Vilna, Lithuania.
"My father was a research scientist and then an entrepreneur. My mother was a homemaker and then an interpreter."
"They were big on education. My boyfriend calls me an overachiever. It was instilled in all of us."
Luke: "What you found that children of Holocaust survivors have in common?"
Elizabeth: "We feel that we're carrying our parents' histories. We want to compensate our parents for what they endured. Sometimes this is imposed by the parents — when kids are named after the dead, after lost children. Some children resent this and leave their parents.
"There's an unusually high frequency of artists and psychotherapists. We want to express ourselves and to heal."
Luke: "How do you react to the rampant victimology in our society? How do you ration your compassion?"
Elizabeth: "I want to say that compassion should never be rationed. It should be infinite."
Luke: "Do you ever tell anyone, 'Buck up! I'm a child of Holocaust survivors!'"
Elizabeth laughs. "No. People feel equally strongly about their own drama. I have a hierarchy about which dramas are more deserving of empathy.
"I grew up in an environment in which my suffering was never counted as legitimate. It was measured against something so extreme, so incomparably excruciating… I was denied a sensibility about my suffering."
Luke: "Should survivors of great evil and their children be held to the same standards of moral accountability as anyone else or do they deserve a break?"
Elizabeth: "That question comes up around Israel. In some ways, people who've suffered should be held to a higher moral standard."
"I was always infuriated and saddened when I'd hear anything that sounded like racism from my parents or from other survivors. You of all people should know that that is completely unacceptable under any circumstances."
Luke: "What crowd did you hang out with in highschool?"
Elizabeth: "I was somewhere between the nerds and the cool people. I never felt like I belonged to any of the crowds."
Luke: "What attitude were you raised with vis-à-vis God and Judaism?"
Elizabeth: "It was complicated. We were Modern Orthodox in our affiliation. My parents had huge disagreements about how to observe [Jewish law]. We kept kosher. We kept the Sabbath. My father and the kids would walk to synagogue on Saturday mornings and my mother would go shopping. We went out to dinner, we'd eat fish and vegetables and she'd have a shrimp cocktail. It'd piss my father off. My mother's way of being Jewish was internal, how she felt and identified. My father was more about observance and rules and affiliations. Yet, it was shocking to me to find out in my early teens that my father did not believe in God. It wasn't a theology for him but a way of life.
"It was a brutal way to grow up. I became a feminist at a young age because I felt so pissed off about being a second class citizen. My father and I had fight after fight about it. He blamed my mother for setting a bad example.
"I went to a public school and then to Hebrew school in the afternoons.
"When I became an adult, I rejected [Judaism and God]. I became a kosher vegetarian. It was a way of retaining a tribal identity. I searched in vain for a Jewish community but I'm not much of a joiner. I was looking for a place with more liberal interpretations of love and no longer referring to God with male pronouns, but even that didn't do it for me. I had mixed feelings about declaring myself as part of us vs. them.
"I feel a lot more drawn to Buddhist and other Asian notions of God that are more abstract and less patriarchal and domineering, more god in the self, god in the collective, god in oneness."
Luke: "That picture of you on the dust jacket of Blue Nude. Is it just me or is that a very sensual photo?"
Elizabeth: "It is. The photos for Speed of Light and Blue Nude were taken on the same day by the same photographer. It was a five hour session. I hadn't written Blue Nude yet. I decided to use that photo for that book because I felt it went with the book. A lot of the themes in Blue Nude are reflected in that photograph."
Luke: "How important is it to you to look good?"
Elizabeth: "That's a loaded question. In our culture there's so much emphasis on appearance. We respond to beauty. That was reinforced by my mother. The theme in Blue Nude — can beauty save your life? That has a literal association for me with the Holocaust. I did hear stories from my mother that implied or even stated explicitly that a particular kind of non-ethnic beauty saved her life.
"One of the reasons that I chose writing over other art forms was that it wasn't going to be about me and what I looked like."
"The things that writers do to get their books read and how willing they have to be to put themselves out there. John Updike wrote recently that in the early stages of his career, he never went on the road. He never put himself out there. It was just the books went out. Now there's so much emphasis on book tours and interviews and making sure your name is on everybody's internet site.
"I was dumbstruck by how many people asked me if they were going to turn my book into a movie. I'm asked if I'm going on a book tour and how many cities I'll be going to. Everybody knows the marketing lingo now."
Luke: "How necessary were the science definitions in The Speed of Light?"
Elizabeth: "To whom?"
Luke: "To you."
Elizabeth: "I loved them as metaphor.They were useful to me as a fourth voice in the novel, as a way for Julian's inner voice to become visible to the reader. Structurally they were important for transitions and framing.
"There were times when I thought that if some readers skip these, I'd be OK with that. They were there for people who wanted to make use of them.
"I had a lot more in my draft than my editor allowed me to keep. He was right.
"Did you not like them?"
Luke: "I started skipping them."
"Do you write your books so that they are a pleasure to read or is there something more important to you than the reader's pleasure?"
Elizabeth: "I'm not thinking about pleasure, either my own or the reader's. I'm trying to get at some emotional honesty. I want the reader to feel met in some deep place."
"I have a short attention span. I watched a lot of television as a kid. I can be focused but for a short period. So I listen for the sound of one of my characters and that would last as long as it lasted [even if just for two paragraphs in the case of The Speed of Light]. For a while, I just wrote in pieces thinking I'd assemble them and they'd be longer but it felt more mosaic and I just had to surrender to telling the novel as a braid of three overlapping interweaving narrations. Any number of readers said that was challenging for them. Most people who talked to me said that once they got used to it, they loved it.
"When I started working on Blue Nude, I knew I did not want to repeat that structure. It felt right to linger longer with each character [there are two main characters, a German artist and an Israeli model]."
Luke: "How has your choice of vocation affected you?"
Elizabeth: "I have a lot of freedom. I'm free of the day-to-day grind. I choose my own schedule. I have a more insecure life, wondering when my next check is going to come. I feel that I use my best self when I write.
"I felt the same way about teaching, which I did for 20 years at the college level [Elizabeth graduated with her MFA from U.C. Irvine in 1985].
"When I get up on stage or at a book store to talk about my work, I feel lucky to do that. Having this conversation with you feels like a great privilege to me. There was a lot about my childhood that made me feel I wasn't being listened to. Now I feel seen and I feel listened to."
Luke: "If a reader feels that Julian and Paula [two of the three main characters in Light] are self-absorbed spoiled brats, is that a legitimate interpretation?"
Elizabeth: "Are you speaking personally?"
Luke: Yes. I wanted to say to them, "If you had to work for a living, you wouldn't have this privilege of self-absorption." Did you have sense of them?
Elizabeth: "I saw them as damaged and needing to grow. I was more empathetic towards them and less judgmental. I feel that's my job as a writer. If I had those judgments, I wouldn't have been able to keep going.
"I had more critical feelings about [the German artist] Danzig in Blue Nude than I did about either Julian or Paula. Danzig's more narcissistic.
"Writing for me is an exercise in compassion."
Luke: "You love that word 'compassion.'"
"How has your choice of vocation affected your relationships?"
Elizabeth: "It matters what people close to me think of my work and their willingness to read my work and talk about it with me and respond to it, preferably positively. I remember having a brief involvement with someone who was dismissive of my writing, and that was completely unacceptable. When I write, it's on my mind all the time and I want to be able to talk about it."
"It's heightened my sensitivity. I'm more easily affected by other people."
Elizabeth Rosner writes in The New York Times Sunday Magazine May 28, 2006:
Twenty-five years ago, while an undergraduate at Stanford, I got a job on campus as a lifeguard, deepening a love of swimming and water that has lasted throughout my life. I took the duties seriously and studied the swimmers with professional vigilance, relieved at the end of each day that no emergency rescue had been required. But the greatest challenge of the job was standing poolside in a bathing suit with my body on display.
Work began in the locker room, where I changed into my Speedo and surveyed my reflection, assessing what would be on view for the next few hours. I was plagued by self-criticism. I imagined the swimmers judging my shape, until I made myself remember that I was there to guard their lives, not their fantasies. Later I performed my variation of the same ablutions everyone else did, showering and hair washing, the application of lotion and makeup — preparations for re-entering the other world of walking upright on solid land.
I call her Thursday afternoon, Sept 14, 2006.
Luke: "When did you first attempt a novel?"
Elizabeth: "When I was in graduate school in my early twenties, I was supposed to be writing fiction. I kept on feeling pulled toward memoir, so I wrote a pretend fictionalized memoir that felt like a deformed baby. I got my degree but I wasn't happy with the writing outcome. I gave the narrator the name Irene so I could trick myself that I was still writing in first person. As someone pointed out, every time I inserted an ellipse, I was hiding something, which was a good point that I did not take kindly to at the time.
"I ended up discovering that it was a [free verse] poetry collection in disguise.
"All my poetry is free verse.
"My prose has always been lyrical and my poetry prosaic.
"In my new novel, I'm working in autobiographical territory. I'm expecting it to become more fictionalized as I work with it. It might end up a memoir."
Luke: "How do you know that people are engaging with your poetry when the audience for poetry is so tiny?"
Elizabeth: "That's the truth. I don't know. I imagined that more people would find my poetry after I became published as a novelist but I'm not sure that has happened. I have this collection of poems that I sell when I do readings and speaking engagements. It is the autobiographical companion to my novels."
Luke: "How did your life change after you published a novel?"
Elizabeth: "I felt legitimized. Even so, there was something about the publication of the second novel that really affirmed that. Several people said to me after the second book came out, 'Now you're a real novelist.' As though the one book was a fluke.
"I left my teaching job when my first book was bought. That was a leap to full-time writing that I wouldn't have made [without a book contract]."
"For a long time as a kid, I was aware of being different from my peers. I grew up in a WASPy part of upstate New York (Schenectady). I was an Orthodox Jew with parents who survived the Holocaust. I was odd. When people would talk about WWII, it was so abstract, and I would think, 'My parents were there.'
"A lot of my parents closest friends were also European Jews but most of my friends were not Jewish.
"I graduated highschool at 16 and went to live in the Philippines for a year by way of a scholarship from Rotary International, who, many years later, sponsored me to live in Australia for a year.
"That (the Philippines) added a bizarre layer to my life, living in this Catholic and exotic landscape, where, again, I was a complete freak."
Luke: "Have you sought out situations where you would be isolated?"
Elizabeth: "It's starting to sound like that. I know I've sought out experiences where I would be challenged. My father turned 16 in Buchenwald. I had a profound realization of how different my life was from his, and at some level, I wanted to test myself in a difficult place. I don't have anything like a death wish. I don't choose life endangering things."
"I lived in Israel for three months in 1980. I was 20. I stayed on a radical kibbutz in defiance of my father. It was about experiencing Israel through my own awareness, not as it was imposed upon me by my family.
"I was with Israelis who were communists. They were Zionists in a completely different way.
"I had an Israeli boyfriend but it never occurred to me to imagine my life there. I never felt like I belonged there. I have mixed feelings about even traveling there now."
Luke: "Did you find teaching enervating?"
Elizabeth: "Yeah. I love teaching, but to teach well, you have to draw from the same sources as writing. You have to be present and spontaneous and attentive. I use that up in the classroom and when I get home, I'm empty."
