Holocaust Mothers and Daughters: Family, History, and Trauma

5 | From the Third Diaspora

[ 203 i am the way into the city of woe. i am the way to a forsaken people. i am the way into eternal sorrow. [ DANTE ALiGhiERi, Inferno, Canto III So far this book has focused on mothers and daughters who experienced the holocaust firsthand. but the vortex of pain does not end there, and we can follow its spiraling effects through the complicated relation that postwar children had with their Shoah parents.1 Although existential, historical, psychological, and geographical rupture is the predicament of the Shoah survivor, the last two and a half decades of work on second-generation testimonies have clearly shown that the children of Shoah victims are not immune to the aftershocks of the trauma experienced by their parents. in fact, it is tempting to say that they are predisposed to an array of symptoms that show the devastating repercussions of genocide. Therefore, this work cannot consider only those women who stared at the abyss of the holocaust themselves and who testified to the lifeaffirming bond with their mothers, after surviving the unsurvivable (the Shoah is an experience that one never really “goes beyond,” to return to the meaning of supervivere, from which the word “survive” is derived). it must also consider the way in which daughters born in the second half of the twentieth century had to “survive,” to combat not the threat of death but the psychological threat that the holocaust projected into their lives through their damaged, tormented Shoah mothers. These sons’ and daughters’ psyches show signs of traumatic lesions as well. The body of autobiographical works by children of holocaust survivors, especially in the United States, is astonishingly large. The narratives of the postwar generation (whose members have found expression not only in literature but through a wide range of media) stage the persistent problem of how to represent the genocide, as well as implicitly or explicitly articulate the question of how its memory will be preserved in the future, after the few generations ChAPTER 5 FROM ThE ThiRD DiASPORA Helena Janeczek and the Shoah Second Generation’s Disorders 204 holocaust mothers & daughters chronologically close to it will have disappeared. Once the living connection with the historical experience thins with the passing of time, and eventually vanishes, under whose custody will this story be preserved and how?2 it is an anxiety-ridden question, and an urgent one too. “At stake is precisely the ‘guardianship ’ of a traumatic personal and generational past with which some of us have a ‘living connection,’ and that past’s passing into history or myth,” writes Marianne hirsch.3 The issue of the holocaust’s aftereffects and representation after the fact generated a rich and influential branch of studies in what hirsch famously labels “postmemory,”4 a new term describing “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. but these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply, and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”5 Postmemory is not the direct memory represented in survivors’ narratives and testimonies after the war, but the secondhand memory the children of the firsthand witnesses inherited from their parents and their parents’ generation: a mediated memory (“mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation”6 ); a mosaic memory to which many voices, inputs, and filters must contribute. in other words, the second generation narrates memories that are not entirely theirs and that yet are entirely part of their memory. As hirsch explains, she arrived at the “postmemory” neologism when she was trying to define a memory she could not have of a past she did not herself experience, but that she knew so well it was imprinted in her mind as if it belonged to her: Strangely,thestreets,buildings,andnaturalsurroundingsofCzernowitz[her family’s hometown]—its theaters, restaurants, parks, rivers, and domestic settings, none of which i had ever myself seen, heard, or smelled—figure more strongly in my own childhood memories and imagination than do the sites and scenes of Timisoara, Romania, where i was born, or bucharest, where i spent my childhood. Some of these same places, however, were also the sites of my childhood nightmares of persecution, deportation, and terror. When i began to write about my own early memories . . . i needed a special term to refer to the secondary, belated quality of...