What If You Remembered a Life That Wasn’t Yours

 

What if, in your most vulnerable state: broken, unconscious, powerless, you began having visions of a life that wasn’t yours… and yet felt more real than your own?

This is the premise of Traceback by David Benjamin. It’s the emotional engine behind Rafi Ciprone-Hantz’s extraordinary journey, a psychological, spiritual, and historical awakening that begins in the silence of a coma.

A Collapse of Identity

Rafi is a young, high-achieving Yale Law student, living a life built on structure, expectation, and quiet restraint. However, a traumatic accident leaves him in a coma, and everything changes. What follows isn’t a simple medical recovery; it’s a breakdown of boundaries between past and present, self and other.

In his unresponsive state, Rafi becomes a witness to vivid scenes from across centuries: a bride-to-be in 19th-century Vilnius, a terrified young man aboard a ship to America, a survivor of the Great Storm in 1703 England. These visions seem like full, textured lives—complete with pain, fear, hope, and love.

The brilliance of Traceback lies in the way it blurs the line between personal trauma and ancestral experiences. Rafi begins to wonder: Are these hallucinations? Genetic echoes? Or something more?

Author David Benjamin never offers easy answers. Instead, he invites readers into a haunting thought experiment: what if we carry the weight of those who’ve walked the earth before us, not just in blood, but in experiences?

A Thread That Binds Across Time

Each life Rafi experiences is different, separated by centuries, languages, and customs. And yet, there’s a quiet thread that runs through them all. Love. Loss. Displacement. The fear of being forgotten.

That thread is made literal in the form of a ring, introduced at the very beginning of the novel: a golden heirloom engraved with Hebrew words—Zachor (Remember), Ahavah (Love), Zara Zerayim (Sow Seeds for the Future). 

Why This Question Haunts You

What makes Traceback unforgettable isn’t just the mystery, but the emotional aftermath. Rafi doesn’t just survive his coma. He emerges changed. And not in the cliché “near-death experience” way. He emerges fragmented, searching, unable to dismiss what he saw.

If you’ve ever wondered why you react a certain way. Why a place feels familiar when it shouldn’t. Why grief hits harder than it should’ve, Traceback offers an unsettling theory.

Read the book to learn more.