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
Results 1-5 of 18
Page 6
... Soviet Union, my par- ents 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 fear and hairsbreadth escapes, of hearing regular ...
... Soviet Union, my par- ents 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 fear and hairsbreadth escapes, of hearing regular ...
Page 8
... Soviet-sponsored victory. On the fifteen-minute newsreels shown before the movies we went to on Sunday mornings, the ruined skeletons of buildings were re- placed by images of buildings going up, filmed against sunny skies, with teams ...
... Soviet-sponsored victory. On the fifteen-minute newsreels shown before the movies we went to on Sunday mornings, the ruined skeletons of buildings were re- placed by images of buildings going up, filmed against sunny skies, with teams ...
Page 17
... Soviets to enable them to march into Poland from east and west with impunity; then by the Soviet armies, which waited on one side of the Vistula River while the Nazi armies ruthlessly put down the Warsaw Uprising, in which 250,000 ...
... Soviets to enable them to march into Poland from east and west with impunity; then by the Soviet armies, which waited on one side of the Vistula River while the Nazi armies ruthlessly put down the Warsaw Uprising, in which 250,000 ...
Page 18
... Soviet control, witnessed a virtual civil war as non-Communist partisans continued to be killed by the victorious Communists, Poles and Ukrainians con- tinued to murder each other in the east, and in the western ter- ritories, horrific ...
... Soviet control, witnessed a virtual civil war as non-Communist partisans continued to be killed by the victorious Communists, Poles and Ukrainians con- tinued to murder each other in the east, and in the western ter- ritories, horrific ...
Page 19
... Soviet territories were brutally attacked by an enraged mob. The Kielce episode, however, was untypical in be- ing politically provoked. Mostly, the murders were spontaneous and committed out of sheer greed, petty vendettas, or pure ...
... Soviet territories were brutally attacked by an enraged mob. The Kielce episode, however, was untypical in be- ing politically provoked. Mostly, the murders were spontaneous and committed out of sheer greed, petty vendettas, or pure ...
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 Cracow cultural death emigration emotional Eva Hoffman experience extreme fate father fear feel felt genocide German groups guilt happened Holo horror Hryczko human idea identity images imagination Israel Israeli Jedwabne Jedwabne massacre Jewish Jews kind knowledge legacy lives loss Majdanek massacre matter meanings memory ments mind moral mother mourning murder narratives Nazi one’s pain parents past people’s perhaps perpetrators persecuted Peter Sichrovsky Poland Poles Polish Polish-Jewish political post-Holocaust postwar prejudice psyche psychic psychological questions realities relation remember response Rwanda Rwandan genocide Second World War second-generation seemed sense September 11 Shoah shtetl sister sometimes Soviet stories suffering survived sympathy things thought tion trauma turn understand victims violence vivors W. G. Sebald wabne witness Załośce