After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust

Abstract

As the Holocaust recedes from us 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 the second-generations responsibilities to its received memories? In this meditation on the long aftermath of atrocity, Eva Hoffmana child of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust with the help of neighbors, but whose entire families perishedprobes these questions through personal reflections, and through broader explorations of the historical, psychological, and moral implication of the second-generation experience. 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 narratives into a fully informed understanding of a forbidding history. * A New York Times Notable Book 2003

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