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 xi
... responses to the Holocaust, the direct descendants of survivors—the so-called second generation—form a particular subset and story. The existence of the “second generation” was probably announced in 1979 with the publication of Helen ...
... responses to the Holocaust, the direct descendants of survivors—the so-called second generation—form a particular subset and story. The existence of the “second generation” was probably announced in 1979 with the publication of Helen ...
Page xiv
... response to the Holocaust. At the same time, the sections delineate the stages of understanding, or the modalities of knowledge, which children of survivors move through as they struggle with the burden of a powerful psychic inheritance ...
... response to the Holocaust. At the same time, the sections delineate the stages of understanding, or the modalities of knowledge, which children of survivors move through as they struggle with the burden of a powerful psychic inheritance ...
Page 16
... response to events. For while the adult world asks first “what happened,” and from there follows its uncertain and sometimes resistant route towards the inward meaning of the facts, those who are born after calamity sense its most ...
... response to events. For while the adult world asks first “what happened,” and from there follows its uncertain and sometimes resistant route towards the inward meaning of the facts, those who are born after calamity sense its most ...
Page 18
... responses to Nazi aggression in various countries within occupied Europe. Neither could I be aware, as I was growing up, of the continuing conflicts that consumed Poland in the years immediately after the war. Those years, with their ...
... responses to Nazi aggression in various countries within occupied Europe. Neither could I be aware, as I was growing up, of the continuing conflicts that consumed Poland in the years immediately after the war. Those years, with their ...
Page 21
... responses came even as the Holocaust was being executed. Czesław Miłosz, the Nobel laureate who spent the war years in Warsaw, wrote some of his greatest poems after witnessing the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. In “A Poor Christian ...
... responses came even as the Holocaust was being executed. Czesław Miłosz, the Nobel laureate who spent the war years in Warsaw, wrote some of his greatest poems after witnessing the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. In “A Poor Christian ...
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