The Choice

The Choice is Dr. Edith Eger's 2017 memoir, the canonical contemporary American Holocaust survivor memoir that has been widely adopted as required reading in trauma-therapy clinical training programs across the broader American psychology profession. The structural premise is Edith Eger's biographical arc from her Hungarian ballerina childhood in 1930s and early-1940s Kassa (modern Kosice, Slovakia), through her May 1944 deportation to Auschwitz at age sixteen with her parents and her older sister Magda, through the camp selections during which Josef Mengele personally selected her to dance for him the night she arrived (saving her life and her sister's that night), through the broader Auschwitz year and the Bergen-Belsen death march of early 1945, to the May 1945 liberation by the U.S. 71st Infantry Division. The novel runs the post-war seventy-year arc through Eger's 1949 emigration to the United States, her clinical psychology training, and her forty-year career as a California therapist specializing in trauma recovery.

Eger's structural method is the patient first-person memoir construction with the clinical-psychology operational material woven across the broader biographical arc. The Auschwitz chapters across the front of the book carry the structural emotional weight that the rest of the memoir depends on; the post-war chapters across the middle and back of the book carry the structural moral argument the entire memoir makes about the relationship between traumatic survival and the operational mechanics of clinical-psychology recovery work. The book has been widely adopted in trauma-therapy training programs across the American psychology profession and is structurally adjacent to the broader contemporary American trauma-literature tradition (Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score, Gabor Mate's The Myth of Normal). The novel's structural argument (that the operational mechanics of traumatic survival can be transformed into a specific kind of clinical-therapeutic practice across the post-traumatic decades) is made through the texture of Eger's California clinical practice rather than through any direct argument.

Recommended as required contemporary American memoir reading, as one of the canonical contemporary American Holocaust survivor memoirs, and for fans of The Body Keeps the Score, Crying in H Mart, Born a Crime, and contemporary American trauma-and-survival memoir. Read The Gift (2020) next as the structural clinical-practice follow-up. The Tovah Feldshuh audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.