After Such Knowledge: Where Memory of the Holocaust Ends and History Begins

By Eva Hoffman

Book Overview

As 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1586483048
• ISBN13: 9781586483043
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

A profound reflection on the Shoah- with a critical omission

This profound work is a reflection of a person of the ' second generation' the Holocaust. It contains a detailed and moving description of the kinds of ` learning' the children of survivors have gone through . It describes the particular burdens including ` significance envy ` that the second - generation lives with. It in the course of this is also a memoir in which Hoffman tells the story of her own parents and family.She describes what it meant to grow up first in Poland, then in Vancouver as the child of two people who had been saved by hiding during the war. It is a work written with great intellectual acuity and humane feeling. And its reflections on various themes related to the Shoah, such as emigration, or ' collective memory ' are deep and insightful. The book is so rich in thought and understanding that to quarrel with it seems somehow irreverent. But there is it seems to me a major omission in the work. The work centers on the relationship between the first and second generations. But how is it possible to speak of the Shoah without speaking of ` the third generation ` also? For clearly one of the major themes of many of the survivors is the theme of continuity of their own families and of the Jewish people. Here I think Hoffman under-emphasizes one major point about the Shoah. The Nazis aim was to destroy the Jewish people entirely. Therefore for many of the survivors the goal of building new families was strongly connected with the goal of keeping the Jewish people alive. Perhaps this was not so in Hoffman's own family. But it clearly is the case for a tremendous share of the survivors of the Holocaust. And thus surely one of the major questions for second- generation people is their own ' duty' to bring a ' third- generation into the world. I again want to emphasize the great value of this work. This review has not even touched upon most of its themes. I have been reading it through ' Yom HaShoah' in Israel and I will just add one thought here. And this I think is something that Hoffman also mentions. And it is how ' ungraspable ' the horror is, how ungraspable the immensity of the destruction, how ungraspable too the Evil of the perpetrators, and how ungraspable the fact that so many of the survivors did manage to make ' new lives'. This work in a way is a work of tribute by a child of survivors to those who did manage to somehow, living with all the nightmares and taking them with them to the grave , make new lives.

The second generation reflects on the Holocaust

This profound work is a reflection of a member of the ` second- generation' on the Holocaust. It contains a detailed and moving description of the whole experience of ` learning' that the second- generation goes through. It describes the particular burdens including ` significance envy ` that the second - generation lives with. It in the course of this is also a memoir in which Hoffman tells the story of her own parents and family.She describes what it meant to grow up first in Poland, then in Vancouver as the child of two people who had been saved by hiding during the war.There is an extremely interesting section telling of her and her sister's return to their parents native village in the Ukraine, and their meeting with the family who hid them for two years. There are extremely poignant and painful revelations. One is of her father's only near the end of his life describing how he had to alone go out and bury his two beloved brothers killed just near the end of the war when they had apparently been saved. It is a work written with great intellectual acuity and humane feeling. The book is so rich in thought and understanding that to quarrel with it seems somehow irreverent. But there is it seems to me a major omission in the work. The work centers on the relationship between the first and second generations. But how is it possible to speak of the Shoah while barely mentioning ` the third generation ` also. For clearly one of the major themes of many of the survivors is the theme of continuity of their own families and of the Jewish people. Here I think Hoffman under-emphasizes one major point about the Shoah. The Nazis aim was to destroy the Jewish people entirely. Therefore for many of the survivors the goal of building new families was strongly connected with the goal of keeping the Jewish people alive. Perhaps this was not so in Hoffman's own family. But it clearly is the case for a tremendous share of the survivors of the Holocaust.

deep thoughts written in polished, gem-like prose

Eva Hoffman's book-length meditation on the Holocaust, written from her perspective as a daughter of survivors, is beautifully written. Her well crafted sentences reveal the careful thinking she has done as she ponders how her generation, born into sunny safety after the horrors their parents had known, has viewed those events that cast a shadow over their parents' lives. Hoffman is highly intelligent, well educated, with broadbased understanding of the atrocities, the loss and the uprooting, the courage to begin anew, of those who emerged from the camps. She perceives the ambiguous borders between victimhood and dangerous resistance, the fateful choices her parents faced on a daily basis. Her book is a highly valuable contribution to a world where conditions of genocide still exist.

Remembering beyond the survivors.

As the Holocaust passes further into history so are the survivors. The direct memories are being replaced by stores, books, museums. The author is a child of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust with the help of neighbors, but whose entire families perished. She investigates the historical, psychological and moral implications of the second generation experience. How do you maintain an authentic version of its events.It would be nice to say that the Holocaust was a unique experience in world history. And in some ways, its magnitude, and its mechanistic operation. Perahaps even more so with its publicity and the presence in our society. Unfortunately with Pol Pot's followers in Cambodia and the horribly named ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and several countries in Africa it isn't unique.

The motion of knowing

In addition to a being a powerful memoir that asks probing questions about the legacy of the Holocaust, this book creates an image of the living nature of knowledge: its origins, its protection, its growth and advance from the private mind into the public domain and beyond- from a private lived experience into public art. I think her vision of knowledge spills beyond the borders of the Holocaust, if such an event can be said to have "borders." This is really a great book.