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 6-10 of 40
Page 6
... seemed to be such an inescapable part of my inner world as to belong to me, to my own experience. But of course, they didn't; and in that elision, that caesura, much of the postgeneration's problematic can be found. The Holocaust, in my ...
... seemed to be such an inescapable part of my inner world as to belong to me, to my own experience. But of course, they didn't; and in that elision, that caesura, much of the postgeneration's problematic can be found. The Holocaust, in my ...
Page 7
... seemed extremely well marked just then— even as it seemed very liminal to those of us who had just come into the world. In the world at large, one could also sense a dynamism—per- haps the sheer surge of a collective life-instinct ...
... seemed extremely well marked just then— even as it seemed very liminal to those of us who had just come into the world. In the world at large, one could also sense a dynamism—per- haps the sheer surge of a collective life-instinct ...
Page 8
... seemed to me, was al- ways in the air, although the adults often tried to reassure us children that nobody would go to war so soon after the cata- clysm had ended; that people had suffered too much from its evils; that perhaps, after ...
... seemed to me, was al- ways in the air, although the adults often tried to reassure us children that nobody would go to war so soon after the cata- clysm had ended; that people had suffered too much from its evils; that perhaps, after ...
Page 13
... seemed to be no reality and no past. It was true of my parents, as it was of many survivors, that they did not talk much about their prewar lives. Perhaps the impact of the subse- quent events overwhelmed and deleted everything else. Or ...
... seemed to be no reality and no past. It was true of my parents, as it was of many survivors, that they did not talk much about their prewar lives. Perhaps the impact of the subse- quent events overwhelmed and deleted everything else. Or ...
Page 14
... seemed nearly physical. The pain of their psyches reverberated in my body al- most as if it were mine. Whatever the cause, I certainly under- stood in the marrow of my bones that, no matter how I might want to hurt my parents, or how ...
... seemed nearly physical. The pain of their psyches reverberated in my body al- most as if it were mine. Whatever the cause, I certainly under- stood in the marrow of my bones that, no matter how I might want to hurt my parents, or how ...
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