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 65
Page xiii
... kind of informal synthesis, to bring the various approaches to this vast subject into dynamic interaction. Most scholarly works on the impact of the Holocaust and its “reception” in the postwar world emphasize either the psychocultural ...
... kind of informal synthesis, to bring the various approaches to this vast subject into dynamic interaction. Most scholarly works on the impact of the Holocaust and its “reception” in the postwar world emphasize either the psychocultural ...
Page 4
... kind of melancholy beauty. War penetrated the very fabric of my childhood. It interwove itself into other, more sunny sensations with a somber poetry of its own. But it was also the heavy ground of being, the natural condition to which ...
... kind of melancholy beauty. War penetrated the very fabric of my childhood. It interwove itself into other, more sunny sensations with a somber poetry of its own. But it was also the heavy ground of being, the natural condition to which ...
Page 5
... kind of story about the basic elements and shape of the world, a childish mythos or fable. . . . My parents endured the terrible years in the small town of Załosce, situated about two hundred miles east of Lvóv (now Lviv), in what was ...
... kind of story about the basic elements and shape of the world, a childish mythos or fable. . . . My parents endured the terrible years in the small town of Załosce, situated about two hundred miles east of Lvóv (now Lviv), in what was ...
Page 6
... kind from which everything else grows, or explodes, or follows, and which it takes a lifetime to unpack and decode. The facts seemed to be such an inescapable part of my inner world as to belong to me, to my own experience. But of ...
... kind from which everything else grows, or explodes, or follows, and which it takes a lifetime to unpack and decode. The facts seemed to be such an inescapable part of my inner world as to belong to me, to my own experience. But of ...
Page 8
... kind of official optimism, a sense of hardship overcome, and of triumphant, 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 ...
... kind of official optimism, a sense of hardship overcome, and of triumphant, 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 ...
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