Thane Rosenbaum is a contemporary Jewish American novelist who belongs to the "second generation," the children of Holocaust survivors. He has been described by Holocaust scholar Alan L. Berger in a 2000 article as "one of the most eloquent and anguished of American second-generation voices." His triptych, Elijah Visible (1996), Second Hand Smoke (1999), and The Golems of Gotham (2002), portrays the post-Holocaust world from the vantage point of the children of survivors.

Rosenbaum does not write directly about the Holocaust, which he considers to be beyond the bounds of the imagination, but rather about its effect on the legacy of the second generation. They carry the burden of their parents' experiences and memories without having gone through the Holocaust themselves. Rosenbaum explained in an unpublished March 2002 interview that in his works the imagination is "deployed to answer, or to try to answer . . . large, ultimately unknowable, post-Holocaust riddles." Rosenbaum's novels and short...