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 vii
... Past 201 PART vii From the Past to the Present 235 SELECTED BiBLioGRAPHy 281 ACkNoWLEDGMENTS 293 295 iNTRoDUCTioN And so, after all, the Holocaust. Sixty years after. iNDEx vii Contents.
... Past 201 PART vii From the Past to the Present 235 SELECTED BiBLioGRAPHy 281 ACkNoWLEDGMENTS 293 295 iNTRoDUCTioN And so, after all, the Holocaust. Sixty years after. iNDEx vii Contents.
Page x
... past within me all my life; but it was only now, as I began pondering it from a longer distance and through the clarifying process of writing, that what had been an inchoate, obscure knowledge appeared to me as a powerful theme and ...
... past within me all my life; but it was only now, as I began pondering it from a longer distance and through the clarifying process of writing, that what had been an inchoate, obscure knowledge appeared to me as a powerful theme and ...
Page xi
... past . In a sense , I needed to address frontally what I had thought about obliquely : the profound effects of a traumatic history , and its paradoxical richness ; the kinds of knowledge which the Shoah has bequeathed to us , and the ...
... past . In a sense , I needed to address frontally what I had thought about obliquely : the profound effects of a traumatic history , and its paradoxical richness ; the kinds of knowledge which the Shoah has bequeathed to us , and the ...
Page xii
... past are a strong clue to the problems we must grapple with if we would grasp the meanings and consequences of historical horror. In their mediated but immediate relation to the Holocaust, children of survivors have had to live out and ...
... past are a strong clue to the problems we must grapple with if we would grasp the meanings and consequences of historical horror. In their mediated but immediate relation to the Holocaust, children of survivors have had to live out and ...
Page 7
... past. The war—it was not yet the Holocaust—was not my parents' or their friends' main theme or conscious focus. Their energies, their efforts, were pointed towards the present. That mix of carpe diem en- ergy and carpe diem cynicism ...
... past. The war—it was not yet the Holocaust—was not my parents' or their friends' main theme or conscious focus. Their energies, their efforts, were pointed towards the present. That mix of carpe diem en- ergy and carpe diem cynicism ...
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