Pass the Trauma, Please
By Todd Diamond
If Mel Brooks and Amy Schumer adopted a second-generation Holocaust survivor, raised him, then sent him off to a writer’s retreat, you’d get Pass the Trauma Please.
“Pass the Trauma, Please isn’t just about the death camps, the gas chambers, the incomprehensible evil. It’s about the Holocaust and its aftershocks. The unrelenting ripple effect of a unique trauma that echoes through children raised in the long shadow of tragedy.”
—ABE FOXMAN, former national director of the Anti-Defamation League.
“This original, provocative, and irreverent memoir presents us with a unique second-generation Holocaust survivor viewpoint that is worthy of a film script. It helps us fathom the unfathomable and even manages to make us laugh along the way. This is not your typical Holocaust story in any way, shape, or form, and therein lies its strength.”
—JAY ROSENBLATT, Academy Award–nominated director
“It takes great courage to confront one’s demons by sharing them with your children, especially when they are now adults. Yet, that’s exactly what ninety-year-old Holocaust survivor David Diamondstein finally does—before his time runs out. Written with much love and wit, his son Todd comes to grips with his own trauma by connecting the historic dots between the Holocaust and the rise of current global antisemitism in the post–October 7th world. Pass the Trauma, Please stands as a unique memoir among Holocaust literature because it does far more than document the past. It connects the past to the present.”
—HAYA MOLNAR, author of Under a Red Sky: Memoir of a Childhood in Communist Romania, winner of the National Jewish Book Award
“The enormity of the Holocaust could not possibly be dissipated in one generation. Todd Diamond’s daring, transgressive, entertaining memoir reads like a roller-coaster speeding from past to present and then back again, reimagining the unimaginable, looking for a finishing line that can never be crossed and a legacy that can’t be ignored.”
—THANE ROSENBAUM, author of the post-Holocaust trilogy: The Golems of Gotham, Secondhand Smoke, and Elijah Visible.
“I laughed so hard at some of this and felt sick in other places. Definitely, a whirlwind of emotions. I sure wish I could meet Todd’s father. What a story.”
—ELIZABETH ASDORIAN, creative director, Ancestry.com
