The Burden of Inheritance

Nicole Krauss’s A History of Love and Great House are paradigmatic third-generation representations of inheriting the Holocaust trauma. Krauss attests that her interest is in response to catastrophic loss and in a survivor’s ability to deal with the trauma of dispossession, exile, and the capacity to “start a second life.” This article focuses on images and symbols utilized by the third generation to find adequate artistic means by which the third-generation artist comes to grips with the intergenerational transmission of memory within a postmodern context. Krauss’s novels instantiate Cathy Caruth’s observation that “History is not only the passing on of a crisis but also the passing on of a survival that can be possessed within a history larger than any single individual or any single generation.”