After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the HolocaustAs the Holocaust recedes in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the next generation. How should they, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors? And what are the second-generation's responsibilities to its received memories? In this meditation on the long aftermath of atrocity, Eva Hoffman -- a child of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust with the help of neighbors, but whose entire families perished -- probes these questions through personal reflections, and through broader explorations of the historical, psychological, and moral implications of the second-generation experience. She examines the subterranean processes through which private memories of suffering are transmitted, and the more willful stratagems of collective memory. She traces the "second generation's" trajectory from childhood intimations of horror, through its struggles between allegiance and autonomy, and its complex transactions with children of perpetrators. As she guides us through the poignant juncture at which living memory must be relinquished, she asks what insights can be carried from the past to the newly problematic present, and urges us to transform potent family stories into a fully informed understanding of a forbidding history. |
From inside the book
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Page i
... Polish background to the Shoah . . . [a] wonderful memoir.” —Financial Times “This dazzling blend of the personal and the political, unsettling sentiment and unyielding cultural examination marks Hoffman's book—and her earlier work—as ...
... Polish background to the Shoah . . . [a] wonderful memoir.” —Financial Times “This dazzling blend of the personal and the political, unsettling sentiment and unyielding cultural examination marks Hoffman's book—and her earlier work—as ...
Page x
... Polish part of the Ukraine, with the help of Polish and Ukrainian neighbors; but their entire families perished. Those were the inescapable facts—the inescapable knowledge—I had come into. But the knowledge had not always been equally ...
... Polish part of the Ukraine, with the help of Polish and Ukrainian neighbors; but their entire families perished. Those were the inescapable facts—the inescapable knowledge—I had come into. But the knowledge had not always been equally ...
Page 4
... Polish countryside, the ru- ined cities were part of my primal landscape—as, through films and photographs, they became part of my generation's primal iconography. Some of us grew up in or near ruined cities, some of us knew them only ...
... Polish countryside, the ru- ined cities were part of my primal landscape—as, through films and photographs, they became part of my generation's primal iconography. Some of us grew up in or near ruined cities, some of us knew them only ...
Page 5
... Polish part of the Ukraine. That was where they had both grown up, in their still Orthodox, premodern shtetl families; and that was where they re- mained, through the war and the annihilation of their families and community. They ...
... Polish part of the Ukraine. That was where they had both grown up, in their still Orthodox, premodern shtetl families; and that was where they re- mained, through the war and the annihilation of their families and community. They ...
Page 6
... Polish-Ukrainian territory, was declared to be part of the Soviet Union, my parents made the wise decision to head for the nearest Polish city, which happened to be Cracow. They had just gone through an inferno of hiding and hunger, of ...
... Polish-Ukrainian territory, was declared to be part of the Soviet Union, my parents made the wise decision to head for the nearest Polish city, which happened to be Cracow. They had just gone through an inferno of hiding and hunger, of ...
Contents
II From Fable to Psyche | 31 |
III From Psyche to Narrative | 75 |
IV From Narrative to Morality | 101 |
V From Morality to Memory | 149 |
VI From Memory to the Past | 201 |
VII From the Past to the Present | 235 |
Selected Bibliography | 281 |
Acknowledgments | 293 |
Index | 295 |
Other editions - View all
After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust Eva Hoffman Limited preview - 2005 |
After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust Eva Hoffman Limited preview - 2005 |
After Such Knowledge: A Meditation on the Aftermath of the Holocaust Eva Hoffman No preview available - 2017 |
Common terms and phrases
adult aftermath American annihilationist anti-Semitism atrocity Auschwitz become behavior caust childhood children of survivors collective concentration camps conflict consciousness course cultural death emigration emotional Eva Hoffman experience extreme fate father feel felt generation’s genocide German groups guilt happened Holo Holocaust horror Hryczko human I. F. Stone idea identity images imagination Israel Israeli Jedwabne Jedwabne massacre Jewish Jews kind knowledge legacy lives loss Majdanek massacre matter meanings memory ment mind moral mother mourning murder narratives Nazi one’s pain parents past people’s perhaps perpetrators persecuted Peter Osnos Poland Poles Polish Polish-Jewish political post-Holocaust postwar prejudice psyche psychic psychological questions realities relation remember response Rwanda Rwandan genocide second-generation seemed sense September 11 Shoah shtetl sister sometimes Soviet stories suffering survived sympathy things tion trauma Trial of Socrates turn understand victims violence vivors wabne Załosce