The Survivors: A Story of War, Inheritance, and Healing Audiobook (Free)

A memoir of family, the Holocaust, trauma, and identity, where Adam Frankel, a former Obama speechwriter, must come to terms with the legacy of his family’s painful history and discover who he is in the wake of the life-changing revelation about his personal origins.

“The Survivors can be an astonishingly beautiful and profoundly moving publication. Frankel’s haunting search to unravel the mysteries of his family is so convincing it reads such as a fine novel.” -Doris Kearns Goodwin

Adam Frankel’s about The Survivors: A Story of War, Inheritance, and Healing maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust and built new lives, with brand-new titles, 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 wellness of Adam’s mother. When Adam sat down with her to examine their family history in detail, he learned another shocking secret, this time one which unraveled Adam’s entire understanding of who he’s.

Amid piecing together a story 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 simply he, if not his father’s kid? 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 tale in truth and to build a life for his very own young family, Adam had to get around his pain to discover answers and a way forward.

Throughout this journey into the past, his family’s psyche, and his own knowledge of identity, Adam involves realize that as the nature of our families’ traumas can vary greatly, each of us is faced with the same choice. We are able to turn from what we’ve inherited-or, we can confront it, in the expectations of shifting and preventing that injury from inflicting pain on future decades. The tales Adam shares with us in The Survivors are about the ways days gone by can haunt our long term, the resilience that can be found on the various other side of trauma, and the good that can result from factors that are unspeakably poor.