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 i
... sometimes even rhythmic prose is at once modest and challenging , humane and unromantic ... An evening or two spent thinking along with her in these pages is time well spent . " -Chicago Tribune " Hoffman covers the vast terrain of ...
... sometimes even rhythmic prose is at once modest and challenging , humane and unromantic ... An evening or two spent thinking along with her in these pages is time well spent . " -Chicago Tribune " Hoffman covers the vast terrain of ...
Page ii
... Sometimes she speaks with per- suasive intimacy while limning the relationships between parents who have endured a world - devouring catastrophe and their offspring who know it vicariously ... Hoffman is at her keenest when she probes ...
... Sometimes she speaks with per- suasive intimacy while limning the relationships between parents who have endured a world - devouring catastrophe and their offspring who know it vicariously ... Hoffman is at her keenest when she probes ...
Page 4
... Sometimes, the pavement along which we walked gave out as well, and my father and I stumbled as we picked our way across rubble-covered streets. The greyness, the mounds and crumbling hillocks of stone, had an almost lyrical ...
... Sometimes, the pavement along which we walked gave out as well, and my father and I stumbled as we picked our way across rubble-covered streets. The greyness, the mounds and crumbling hillocks of stone, had an almost lyrical ...
Page 7
... sometimes nearly embodiments of psy- chic matter—of material too awful to be processed and assimilated into the stream of consciousness, or memory, or in- telligible feeling. Not that my parents or others within the war-ravaged com ...
... sometimes nearly embodiments of psy- chic matter—of material too awful to be processed and assimilated into the stream of consciousness, or memory, or in- telligible feeling. Not that my parents or others within the war-ravaged com ...
Page 8
... sometimes straightening up to look far into the horizon, mas- culine hand put up against the brow to shield the eyes from the promise of the sun. Rebuilding, reconstruction: the mood, or idea, that governed much of the postwar world ...
... sometimes straightening up to look far into the horizon, mas- culine hand put up against the brow to shield the eyes from the promise of the sun. Rebuilding, reconstruction: the mood, or idea, that governed much of the postwar world ...
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