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

Eva Hoffman has proven herself a perceptive writer about the myriad ways in which the massive upheavals of twentieth-century Europe have inscribed trauma and loss into people's lives and psyches. Her new book, After Such Knowledge, offers a refreshingly candid, sincere, and profound reflection on the tasks and responsibilities of those born after 1945. As in previous works, Hoffman, born in Poland in 1945 to two Holocaust survivors, speaks from a deeply personal place through which she filters her understanding of the moral challenges in the wake of the Holocaust. Lost in Translation (1989) told the story of the uprooting and disorienting experience of the Hoffman family's move from Cracow to Vancouver in the late 1950s; Exit into History (1993) recounted the author's travels in Poland and other Eastern European countries in 1990 and 1991. Caught by the demands of the past—a past marred by parental narratives of extreme suffering, death, and survival as well as her own experience of loss of home, language, and roots—she is also committed to renew life in the present. Hoffman eloquently moves back and forth between her private memories and her suggestions for social strategies to commemorate the past and to respond to atrocities in the present.

After Such Knowledge is, in some ways, the author's renewed attempt at translation: to translate the specificity of her experience as a Jewish child of survivors into a general framework that allows people from different backgrounds to participate in a global, moral community. The private and public realms, though incommensurate, need to inform each other, she argues, because this would enable us to extricate a comparative, ethical perspective from the passionate morality located in subjectivity. On the one hand, Hoffman accurately and caringly describes the children of Holocaust survivors (including herself) as having to live with the "internal impact of gratuitous violence and the transmission of traumatic experiences across generations" (p. xii). On the other hand, she is wary of uncritical submergence in memory, wary of a kind of "self-indulgence" (p. 189) in the suffering of the past that no longer allows for an appreciation of the joys and calamities of the present. Today, "an international, cross-cultural, or culturally intermingled perspective," she writes, is preferable to "certain kinds of exclusive ethnic and religious attachments...to our ancestors" (p. 197). The trauma of the past must be rescued from fixation on a nostalgic view of loss. The task of translating the private into the public should no longer be hampered by fears of getting lost and forgetting but, instead, be inspired by the power of transforming the past into a viable present and future. "Stand too close to horror, and you get fixation, paralysis, engulfment; stand too far, and you get voyeurism or forgetting. Distance matters" (p. 177).

It is the appropriate amount of distance to traumatizing events that Hoffman negotiates in her book. She has no choice but to struggle with her parents' stories of survival that have inhabited her childhood world as familiar yet terrifying and utterly true tales. Very movingly, she describes what it meant for a child to grow up in a family of survivors in the 1950s and 1960s—before there was a therapeutic language of trauma, memory, and identity; before there was even recognition of the profound devastation of the "event" (as she calls it), either in private or in public. The event, in her case, took place in the attic in which her parents had survived in hiding in a small Polish town, located today in Ukraine. Only as an adult was she able to translate the raw, frighteningly intimate fragments of her parents' survival into a coherent narrative. The event, in her child's mind, was a dark, primal place populated by forces of good and evil and the ghosts of the dead. What was transmitted to us, she writes, "was bodily, palpable, densely affective" (p. 33), the sensation...