Holocaust Mothers and Daughters: Family, History, and Trauma by Federica K. Clementi (review)

In his slim but unforgettable volume This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen, Polish author and journalist Tadeusz Borowski tells the story of a mother arriving in Auschwitz with her small child. She quickly grasps that her only chance of remaining alive is to physically distance herself from her child, as small children and their mothers are sent to their death. “She is young, healthy, good-looking, she wants to live,” writes Borowski. But the child runs after the mother, wailing: “Mama, mama, don’t leave me!” “Pick up your child, woman!” she is told, “It’s not mine, sir, not mine!” she shouts hysterically and runs on, covering her face with her hands. “She wants to hide, she wants to reach those who will not ride the trucks, those who will go on foot, those who will stay alive.” Ultimately, the mother is caught and sent to the truck with her child—to death. “That’s the way to deal with degenerate mothers,” states the SS man overseeing the procedure.¹ The scene is unnatural and disturbing, and goes against all expectations: the mother does not act as mothers are supposed to, but abandons her child during the child’s final moments. After all, mothers are meant to remain with their children no matter what the cost, even to the point of sacrificing their own lives.

How accurate is this biologically or socially contrived expectation, particularly with regard to life-and-death crises? In her poignant and path-breaking volume, Federica K. Clementi probes the mother-daughter relationship in the context of the Holocaust, exploring it through the critical perspective of Jewish family dynamics. Questioning the idealization of the Jewish mother-daughter relationship as it was depicted during and after the war, Clementi uses a psychoanalytic lens to view this often conflictual relationship.

Clementi deconstructs the depiction of the mother-daughter relationship using six memoirs, some less familiar to the English reader than others: Edith Bruck, a Hungarian-born writer and poet who at age 11 witnessed her mother’s murder at Auschwitz; Ruth Klüger, who survived Auschwitz together with her mother; Sarah Kofman who writes about being torn between her mother and the non-Jewish Frenchwoman who saved their lives; Milena Roth, a Kindertransport refugee in England whose British foster mother and savior was a friend of her biological mother (Roth’s mother perished in Auschwitz); Helena Janeczek, a “Second Generation” child who was brought up as a Jew in postwar Germany; and, finally, Anne Frank, who describes in her diary the difficulties of her relationship with her mother during the time when the family was in hiding.

In each section, Clementi expands upon the particular mother-daughter relationship described, analyzing the complexities of what she refers to as the “vortex of pain” within the writer’s Holocaust-related experiences and family relationships. Among the means by which the author probes the narratives is the deconstruction of what Clementi terms “the hidden patterns in the mother-daughter plot,” particularly during the Holocaust (p. 42). Her goal in exploring this relationship is to better understand the human aspect of Holocaust survival in general, and in particular the plight of mothers and daughters.

To assess the author’s success in this endeavor, we must examine the various literary, textual, and contextual aspects involved. The first test of such a book is its style. This work is easy to read. Clementi’s style is straightforward, and she rarely lapses into the long paragraphs, punctuated by literary jargon, that tend to make works in this field impossible for uninitiated readers to understand. She weaves her narrative by going back and forth between the personal and the general, the individual and the collective, the literary and the historical, fleshing out descriptions and taking the reader along on the adventure of analysis.

The next test is textual coherency. Are there elements that...