The long half-lives of love and trauma / by Helen Epstein.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Many people have written memoirs of childhood trauma but few have written as beautifully about the psychological obstacles and creative aids to healing. In midlife, well settled in marriage and motherhood, Helen Epstein is impelled to revisit her growing up in a family and community of Holocaust survivors. Epstein, the daughter of Czech anti-Communist refugees, contacts her first love, the son of blacklisted American Communists, to be her partner in the investigation of their adolescent past. In this twist on the age-old Romeo and Juliet story, the two uncover more than they bargained for.This memoir stands alone but can also be seen as the third of a trilogy, following Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (Putnam, 1979) and Where She Came From: A Daughter¿s Search for Her Mother¿s History (Little, Brown, 1997), both still in print and widely translated. As Gloria Steinem wrote about the second, ¿In Epstein¿s hands, truth becomes not only stranger than fiction but more magnetic.¿Veteran journalist Helen Epstein employs a full arsenal of narrative and investigative techniques. She researches the literature of trauma and false memory, and draws on the tools of psychoanalysis, social and cultural history, and journalism. She also draws on her own eight years of work with a psychoanalyst. The story Epstein tells stretches back to the Holocaust that damaged everything in its path. This is a rare narrative, Sherry Turkle has written, ¿in which everyone becomes more human and multi-dimensional as it unfolds.¿