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 ix
... course, do not have memories of the Shoah, nor, often, sufficient means for apprehending that event. How should we, then, from our distance, apprehend it? What meanings does the Holocaust hold for us today—and how are we going to pass ...
... course, do not have memories of the Shoah, nor, often, sufficient means for apprehending that event. How should we, then, from our distance, apprehend it? What meanings does the Holocaust hold for us today—and how are we going to pass ...
Page 6
... course, they didn't; and in that elision, that caesura, much of the postgeneration's problematic can be found. The Holocaust, in my first, childish reception, was a deeply internalized but strangely unknown past. It has become routine ...
... course, they didn't; and in that elision, that caesura, much of the postgeneration's problematic can be found. The Holocaust, in my first, childish reception, was a deeply internalized but strangely unknown past. It has become routine ...
Page 13
... course, no persons. When my parents did allude to their lives in Załosce, it was as if they were talking about a very remote, quaint world seen through a diminishing telescope. The six years of the war had created a geo- logical fissure ...
... course, no persons. When my parents did allude to their lives in Załosce, it was as if they were talking about a very remote, quaint world seen through a diminishing telescope. The six years of the war had created a geo- logical fissure ...
Page 16
... course, of the circumstances visited upon Poland during the cataclysm, or the contemporaneous situation within which our lives unfolded in postwar Cracow. In this respect, the postgeneration's trajectory is the opposite of the more ...
... course, of the circumstances visited upon Poland during the cataclysm, or the contemporaneous situation within which our lives unfolded in postwar Cracow. In this respect, the postgeneration's trajectory is the opposite of the more ...
Page 17
... armies ruthlessly put down the Warsaw Uprising, in which 250,000 people died in the course of six weeks; and finally at Yalta, where the postwar order was established and Poland was delivered into the Soviet 17 After Such Knowledge.
... armies ruthlessly put down the Warsaw Uprising, in which 250,000 people died in the course of six weeks; and finally at Yalta, where the postwar order was established and Poland was delivered into the Soviet 17 After Such Knowledge.
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