Abstract: Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds is an autobiographical narrative tracing Rosen’s decadeslong perspective on his childhood friend Michael Laudor, a brilliant young man endowed with a “best mind,” who develops severe schizophrenia. His deterioration is portrayed as a tragedy: a gradual, relentless decline culminating in a terrible act of violence. This essay explores how Holocaust trauma persists through ubiquitous safety concerns and hypervigilance among the Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated to the United States from Europe after World War II, as well as among their descendants. It argues that intellectual achievement serves as a stress-reducing safeguard through gained respectability and engrossing purpose, and as a mask concealing existential anxieties. The essay further examines how, within this context of intergenerational trauma and intellectual elitism, the schizophrenia disrupting Michael’s promise of a bright future contributed to a dangerous convergence of severe illness, anxiety, and denial—that led to tragedy.
Anne L. Glowinski (Mon,) studied this question.