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 11
... fate, while a stranger downstairs, who is really a good fairy in disguise, is fending off that fate by muttering invocations under her 11 After Such Knowledge.
... fate, while a stranger downstairs, who is really a good fairy in disguise, is fending off that fate by muttering invocations under her 11 After Such Knowledge.
Page 12
... fate by muttering invocations under her breath and bringing to the hiding place a bowl of soup. The sister, young, innocent, and loved, standing naked above a pit that is soon to become her own mass grave . . . Brutal-faced Germans with ...
... fate by muttering invocations under her breath and bringing to the hiding place a bowl of soup. The sister, young, innocent, and loved, standing naked above a pit that is soon to become her own mass grave . . . Brutal-faced Germans with ...
Page 18
... fate and one's own sensibility. But it took me many years to begin discerning the structure of those events; as, indeed, it took a while for the adult world to learn the full facts, to sort out various kinds of violence from each other ...
... fate and one's own sensibility. But it took me many years to begin discerning the structure of those events; as, indeed, it took a while for the adult world to learn the full facts, to sort out various kinds of violence from each other ...
Page 19
... fate of the Jews—amidst other horrors of the war—understood? This would also later become important knowledge, not only for those of us to whom it was personal but for the world at large. In retrospect, it has 19 After Such Knowledge.
... fate of the Jews—amidst other horrors of the war—understood? This would also later become important knowledge, not only for those of us to whom it was personal but for the world at large. In retrospect, it has 19 After Such Knowledge.
Page 24
... fate of the Jews during the war, and even the ex- istence of a distinct Jewish identity, became taboo subjects in Poland. So did many other issues, including the activities of the non-Communist resistance movement. The reign of ...
... fate of the Jews during the war, and even the ex- istence of a distinct Jewish identity, became taboo subjects in Poland. So did many other issues, including the activities of the non-Communist resistance movement. The reign 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