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 ii
... feeling, the profundity ofher perceptions, astound. She has read widely and effortlessly weaves histories, psychological studies and memoirs into her own writing. She is at once hard-minded and tenderhearted, poet and dialectician ...
... feeling, the profundity ofher perceptions, astound. She has read widely and effortlessly weaves histories, psychological studies and memoirs into her own writing. She is at once hard-minded and tenderhearted, poet and dialectician ...
Page x
... feel that I wanted to return to and foreground further this aspect of my own and my generational history. Some of the recent manifestations, and proliferations, of the “memory cult” have left me uneasy. At the same time, my parents died ...
... feel that I wanted to return to and foreground further this aspect of my own and my generational history. Some of the recent manifestations, and proliferations, of the “memory cult” have left me uneasy. At the same time, my parents died ...
Page 7
... feeling. Not that my parents or others within the war-ravaged community wanted to dwell on the recent past. The war—it was not yet the Holocaust—was not my parents' or their friends' main theme or conscious focus. Their energies, their ...
... feeling. Not that my parents or others within the war-ravaged community wanted to dwell on the recent past. The war—it was not yet the Holocaust—was not my parents' or their friends' main theme or conscious focus. Their energies, their ...
Page 11
... feeling, as much as any specific content, that I took in as a child. The fragmentary phrases lodged themselves in my mind like shards, like the deadly needles I remember from certain fairy tales, which pricked your flesh and could never ...
... feeling, as much as any specific content, that I took in as a child. The fragmentary phrases lodged themselves in my mind like shards, like the deadly needles I remember from certain fairy tales, which pricked your flesh and could never ...
Page 16
... feeling, we were the furthest removed from their grounded, worldly—that is, political, social, historical—meanings. This, I think, is a crucial distinction: that whereas adults who live through violence and atrocity can understand what ...
... feeling, we were the furthest removed from their grounded, worldly—that is, political, social, historical—meanings. This, I think, is a crucial distinction: that whereas adults who live through violence and atrocity can understand what ...
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