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5 Things About Your Book

‘The Survivors’ Unpacks a Family’s Trauma

Credit...Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times

Adam Frankel was part of Barack Obama’s speechwriting team from the beginning of Obama’s presidential campaign through his first term in the White House. But Frankel’s memoir, while it offers glimpses of his interactions with Obama and of his time in government, is about something far more personal than his career.

“The Survivors” begins with the story of Frankel’s maternal grandparents, Holocaust survivors who ended up living in Connecticut after the war. Through the rest of the book, Frankel explores the impact of his grandparents’ experiences on his mother and has to confront a revelation about his parents that changes his understanding of his own identity.

Below, Frankel talks about a Nazi plan to build an “underground airport,” the ways writing helped him deal with trauma and the inspiration he found in the work of Lady Gaga.

When did you first get the idea to write this book?

It’s complicated. When I left the White House at the end of 2011, I wanted to write a book about my grandparents on both sides: My mother’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and my grandfather on my father’s side served in World War II for the United States Army in the South Pacific. I wanted to tell their stories, but I was also wrestling with a revelation that I had learned about my own identity, and the idea of writing about that was inconceivable to me at the time.

It was only years later, after a conversation with my editor, that I decided that rather than just write about my grandparents, I would write about what I had been grappling with and the larger legacy of the war — the way their trauma had reverberated through the generations, to my mother and then to me.

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Adam Frankel, whose new memoir is “The Survivors: A Story of War, Inheritance, and Healing.”Credit...Victoria Will

What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?

There are two different ways I think about that. Historically, I was fascinated by what I learned about my grandfather’s time during the war. He had a thick Yiddish accent and never described his experience in much detail. My grandmother rarely talked about the war. I asked my grandfather how he spent his days at Dachau, and he said, “I built an underground airport.” And I thought: Something’s getting lost in translation. Then I started doing research for the book, and he was almost exactly on the mark, which I should have assumed. He was part of a crazy, ambitious plan, authorized by Hitler himself, to re-import 10,000 Jews as workers to relocate the entire German aviation industry underground, where it would be presumed safe from Allied bombing. I was fascinated by my grandfather’s role as a slave laborer in this extraordinary plot that is not widely known.

More profoundly and powerfully for me, I was surprised by the degree to which writing about all of this and my own experience helped me process it. I don’t know if I should have been surprised. There’s a lot of research on what’s called expressive writing — pioneered by James Pennebaker, who’s now at the University of Texas at Austin — and about how writing about things that are weighing on us can mitigate them. I did quickly find that as I started writing about my own disorientation and pain, it helped me in very noticeable ways. What had been a jumbo of emotions and thoughts and confusions — once I put them on paper and added sequencing and structure to them, I began to understand myself, and that helped me manage everything and move on.

In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?

HarperCollins acquired the book, and my editor at the time was Tim Duggan. I wrote a manuscript and did the research. Virtually all of the research in the final book about my grandparents and the Holocaust I did as part of that version of the book.

But Tim left, and Jonathan Jao came in, and we sat down and had a conversation. We decided to shift — shift would be an understatement — to do a different book. He wanted to take the book in a different direction. He didn’t have a specific idea; he invited me to think about it. I came back to him later, I don’t know how many months, and told him that I had been grappling with this crazy family story and that I thought I wanted to write about it. The idea of writing a book about all of this was unthinkable for the vast majority of a decade, from 2006 to 2016.

Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?

I reference some painters and other artists in the book, but the honest answer is Lady Gaga. First of all, she’s amazing. She has such a mastery of her artistry and her voice, and she has such high standards of excellence. But she is also so honest in her music. For much of the time I was working on this version of the book, I commuted an hour and a half each way to work. Much of the book was dictated during that time, with the audio-to-text feature on my iPhone. It wasn’t good enough to be a first draft, but it got the ideas down, which is the hardest part, for me, of writing. I also listened to music on those commutes, and I would listen to her album “Joanne.” I didn’t think about it this way at the time, but her rawness and emotional power helped me access my own feelings about my family’s trauma.

Persuade someone to read “The Survivors” in 50 words or less.

Everyone has trauma in their life or their family’s life, whether it’s invisible war wounds, addiction, abuse or anything else. Understanding how it inflicts pain from one generation to the next can help us move on. My book explores how I did that, and I hope it’s helpful to others.

Follow John Williams on Twitter: @johnwilliamsnyt.

The Survivors
A Story of War, Inheritance, and Healing
By Adam P. Frankel
Illustrated. 271 pages. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.

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