In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Memory of the Holocaust in Australia
  • Paul R. Bartrop
The Memory of the Holocaust in Australia, Tom Lawson and James Jordan, eds. (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007), 152 pp., pbk. $29.95.

A few years ago I attended a conference sponsored by the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. One of the plenary speakers was a highly placed official from the recently opened Imperial War Museum North—a state-of-the-art, cutting-edge institution that relies more on modern technology and interactive displays than it does on the more traditional display of artifacts, framed documents, or photographs. In his address he remarked on the reaction to a statement he had made at the opening of the museum a few weeks earlier. Addressing the veterans who sat before him, he had said that "this museum was not created for you, ladies and gentlemen, but for your great-great-grandchildren." The comment created a furor. The idea that veterans would not have a say in how their experience of war was remembered, but that control of this memory would instead reside in the hands of computer artists, audiovisual technicians, and educators, was appalling to many members of the older generation. It was a salutary moment in the appreciation of how memory can be stimulated and events recalled many years later.

The issues raised in this story are equally relevant to the public memory of the Holocaust. Their immediacy is compounded by the fact that the descendants of genocide survivors are often more traumatized than are the children of war veterans. The collection of essays under review considers the nature of memory of the Holocaust, with a focus on the perspective of children and grandchildren of survivors.

Having said that, I am not entirely certain what it is that the editors of this volume set out to achieve. If the book was intended as a thoroughgoing analysis of second- and third-generation perspectives of Holocaust memory and memorialization, then the purpose of the volume would be self-evident. But there is instead a [End Page 311] mish-mash of themes that makes it difficult to identify a unifying concept. The essays include Konrad Kwiet's biography of Bully Schott, a Polish-born Berlin Jew who survived the Holocaust; Suzanne D. Rutland's account of the early days of Moriah College, Sydney, which was established during World War II and developed as a memorial to the victims; David Ritter's analysis of how Australians responded to the trial of Adolf Eichmann; a somewhat turgid essay by John Docker on Patrick White's novel Riders in the Chariot; and three on Holocaust memorialization by younger scholars (Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Amelia Klein, and Avril Alba).

The essays form a disparate collection that does not hang together well. While they have a general theme in common—the diverse character of Holocaust memory in Australia—it must be said that this is about all they have in common when taken together. Moreover, while the editorial foreword is intended as a unifying analytical introduction to the volume, it leaves room for skepticism as to why the volume was produced in the first place. As I finished reading the essays, I wondered what motivated the editors to put together such a collection. Any suggestion that it represents how Australians have remembered or memorialized the Holocaust is simply unsatisfactory, as the one question I would ask of any such volume—namely, how representative are the essays of wider scholarship in the area—remains unanswered. There is, for example, an over-representation of essays relating to Sydney or New South Wales. Only one (by Amelia Klein, on the Melbourne Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre) focuses on Melbourne—home of the largest Jewish population in Australia and the city with the highest per capita population of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel. That this is not recognized by the editors in a volume with the word "Australia" in its title is both misleading and disappointing.

This is not to say that the essays themselves are uninteresting. On the contrary, some are first-rate and refreshing—even provocative in one or two cases. Kangisser Cohen, Klein, and...

pdf

Share