Narrative Grace: Elizabeth Rosner w/ Nicole Krauss

Goodbye, Portnoy.

Nicole Krauss has been called many things over her career. A “New Yiddishist,” dubbed by Vanity Fair in 2009, might be the most peculiar. No matter what she is labeled, though, her work continues to project an unmistakable grace and a profound ability to capture the human experience.

One thing we do know is that Krauss will not be mistaken for the Roths and Malamuds of your father’s bookcase. In her most recent work, Forest Dark, Krauss takes us from the cozy streets of Brooklyn and the Upper East Side to the bustling sidewalks of Tel Aviv, all in an effort to stare down the question of what it truly means to be Jewish-American. The startling result of her journey back to the homeland, which never quite feels like home, turns the traditional novel inside out and stands alone as one of Krauss’s best novels yet.

Join her live on-stage at Kepler’s as she sits down with one of the Bay Area’s brightest Jewish-American voices, Elizabeth Rosner, for a conversation on the contemporary Jewish novel, the importance of literature, and how the past informs the present.

Rosner’s first work of nonfiction, Survivor Cafe: the Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, also forthcoming this September describes the traumas of war and dislocation. Rosner, who is the acclaimed author of three previous novels, uses her new work as springboard to speak to the immense weight of history that Forest Dark and Krauss herself write toward.

Be a part of the conversation!