Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory by Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger (review)

Attention to third-generation Holocaust representation within the fields of Holocaust literature and Holocaust history has lagged behind trends in Holocaust criticism more broadly. Professors Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger's timely book, entitled Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory, turns our attention to the relevance of third-generation Holocaust representation as a shaping force in Holocaust literature and history, while also exhibiting a keen awareness of the psychological, religious, ethical, aesthetic, and sociopolitical factors at work in Holocaust remembrance and representation.

Third-Generation Holocaust Representation is a remarkable work of scholarship from two senior scholars with deep knowledge of Holocaust literature, Jewish history, and literary criticism who offer the reader a thoroughly researched account of the everyday struggles and successes of third-generation Holocaust authors. In the process, Aarons and Berger also uncover subtle distinctions between various third-generation authors and provide a window into the individual, nuanced struggle of each representative writer grappling with the enormity of his or her task.

The authors, who have already written an impressive number of books and articles both theorizing and historicizing Holocaust representation, move flawlessly in the seven chapters of the book from signaling to the reader the survivors' unique testimonial writing to analyzing second- and third-generation representation of this cataclysmic event in the history of the Jewish people. The authors begin by focusing on the third generation's personal histories and their multilayered challenges, and proceed to mapping the literary trajectories of a solid sample of very talented, bold, third-generation authors who, according to Berger and Aarons, are unanimously animated by an imperative to preserve memory of the Holocaust.

In the book's first chapter, "On the Periphery," Aarons and Berger underscore that third-generation writers are "digging around the ruins of memory," with "an anxious fear of belatedness," perpetually in a double bind between the impossibility of knowing and the duty to tell, with a feeling that "time is running out and that the meaningful things were always left unspoken."¹ While privileging third-generation representations, the authors examine painstakingly the issues faced earlier by Holocaust survivors whose writing has become the "landscape of memory" and bemoan the loss of their powerful voices.

The authors further instruct the reader by offering next brief incursions into the outstanding work of second-generation authors and critics, including Melvin Bukiet, Art Spiegelman, Thane Rosenbaum, and others, whom they categorize as "witnesses to memory." The third and the fourth chapters focus on third-generation writing, which is described as a "call to memory" that is governed by an "impulse to transmit the knowledge of the Holocaust by shifting to fictionalized accounts and to literature" (29).

Aarons and Berger handle with expert flair complex personal accounts and fictionalized representations using historical data as well as literary and psychoanalytic tools. Grounded in theoretical work by established Holocaust scholars, including Dan Bar On, Lawrence Langer, Susan Suleiman, Henry Raczymow, Jacob Lothe, David Roskies, Gary Weissman, Gulie Ne'eman Arad, Miri Sharf, Nava Semel, and many others, the authors of Third-Generation Holocaust Representation examine writing by David Mendelsohn, Marianne Litvak-Hirsch, Joanna Adorján, Julie Orringer, Alison Pick, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon, Rachel Kadish, Sara Houghteling, Joseph Skibell, and others.

While previous scholars have offered mainly insights into the first-or second-generation representation, Aarons and Berger boldly broach their argument in support of continuity and transgenerational transmission of Holocaust memory by focusing their research on third-generation writers. In this work, the authors identify a strand that is distinct from—yet interwoven with—the texture of third-generation representation and that has not been clearly articulated in extant books on this subject: a predominant sense of belatedness evident in third-generation representation.

Third-Generation Holocaust Representation offers poignant case studies. A Blessing on the Moon by Joseph Skibell, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of...