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

This is an important book by well-known writer Eva Hoffman that is certain to cause some rethinking about the Holocaust and how it will be remembered. Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation and Shtetl, has sufficient credentials both as a writer and member of the second generation to probe difficult questions relating to the Holocaust. In particular, Hoffman is interested in a most important question that has been raised by academics about transference of meaning of the Holocaust to future generations.

Hoffman is frank in her confession about doubts associated with Holocaust memory. She observes that a discourse about the complexity of passing the Holocaust from generation to generation, a serious enough subject, seems to be evolving into what she calls a "memory cult" (p. x). This situation she believes is more the effect of traumatic memory than working through the critical questions on a rational basis. So what transpires in this highly readable volume is in one sense a study of the second generation, with many of its variations due to age, geography, and level of transmitted trauma, plus reflections on how the story of the Holocaust is and might be told in the future.

Hoffman is also, refreshingly, interested in comparative approaches. She suggests using the Holocaust "as a template for thinking about other tragic events" (p. xiii). On several occasions, she reflects on the world's failure to intervene in Rwanda, and hence questions the repetition of the cliché, "never again." Survivors and the second generation are critical to her analysis. She makes it clear that the second generation does not have memories of the Holocaust, but what she calls "emanations" (p. 7), fragments that came from parents to children in non-narrative ways in the home. She makes the important notation that although the second generation was close to the real sources of memory, it was less equipped to deal with these stories from the Holocaust because "we were the furthest removed from their grounded, worldly—that is, political, social, historical meanings" (p. 13).

The author suggests that she has perhaps learned more from artistic responses to the Holocaust than historical narratives. Her own family's history of survival appears to her, in retrospect, as "fables." For example, she finds Czeslaw Milosz's poem, "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto," and Zofia Nalkowska's Medallions, published in 1946, most authentic in their understanding of what happened to both Jews and Poles during the Nazi occupation. It is perhaps no accident that a multi-media art work by French artist Christian Boltanski graces the cover of the volume. Boltanski has suggested that any group can become victims.

Yet Hoffman is able to transmit the complexity of her own and her parents' experiences through a mixture of personal and academic studies. She asserts the acquired story of suffering is neither an epic nor master narrative. Rather, she views this history conveyed from parents to children as a fragmented story full of trauma. She also suggests that while survivors often tell the full stories, they do not understand the full implications of what happened to them. These dialectical elements help explain why the legacy of the Holocaust has become "corrosive and psychologically disabling" for some of the second generation, while others experienced growing up without trauma. Her most acute observation about the second generation is that "it has inherited not experience, but its shadows" (p. 58). In assessing these questions, she raises interesting issues: confidentiality among survivors about their stories, the impact of geographic resettlement away from Europe, the impact of parents' memories of a "normal" prewar life, and the author's own memories of growing up with Poles with whom she shared experiences and history of the German occupation.

It is perhaps Hoffman's late immigration to Canada that has led her to be interested in both the descendants of the perpetrators and her former neighbors, the Poles. She asks, for...