After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture

2: Nostalgia and the Holocaust

41 2 Nostalgia and the Holocaust SARA R. HOROWITZ In her  memoir of exile and acculturation, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (), Eva Hoffman reflects on her status as an immigrant to North America: “One of the ways in which I continue to know that I’m not completely assimilated is through my residual nostalgia—which many of my friends find a bit unseemly, as if I were admitting to a shameful weakness—for the more stable, less tenuous conditions of anchoring, of home” (). Born in Cracow to Polish Jewish survivors of the Shoah and brought to western Canada as an adolescent , Hoffman struggled to recognize herself in a new language and a new culture. In many ways, Lost in Translation is a coming-of-age memoir, tracing intergenerational struggles as they are inflected by issues of immigration and punctuated by differences between Holocaust survivors and their children. Eventually Hoffman left Canada to enroll in an American university, and then, beyond the pages of this memoir, left the United States to live in London. Lost in Translation meditates on transition and acculturation, identity and belonging , depicting the inner mosaic of the immigrant, the border crosser. Hoffman’s self-confessed nostalgia permeates the memoir. Such longing for the lost terrain of her childhood, for her homeland, is the natural response for many immigrants , particularly for those who did not leave their homeland willingly. A combination of pervasive postwar antisemitism and economic pressure propelled Hoffman’s parents from Poland to North America. Needless to say, their young daughters, Eva and her sister, had no voice in the decision, and Eva conveys this sense of departing against one’s will. Eva’s yearning for the home left behind, then, is prompted by the condition of the immigrant: her lack of familiarity with North American culture; her sense of not fitting in; her struggle with a language that does not convey her inner world; her feeling of denaturalization in the world; her need to invent a self that is suited to the new culture, a self that she feels to be inauthentic and unrooted. While the memoir conveys her longing in poignant terms, for Hoffman’s readers this nostalgia has a discomfiting edge. The readers can be counted upon to know (as Hoffman herself knows) that this idyllic homeland, this childhood terrain so poignantly longed for, is the wasted postwar landscape of Eastern Europe, a once vibrant center of Jewish life and culture, now transformed into a vast cemetery in the wake of the Holocaust. The physically impoverished postwar Poland, the destroyed Jewish community that her parents recollect, the site of Nazi atrocity, and the place of continued Polish antisemitism are all overlaid on the same geographical space as Hoffman’s own lost paradise. These multiple images occupy the same memory space, inscribing upon it conflicting meanings . Hoffman’s parents mourn the loss of their extended family and their community, their easy place in a native culture, and the richness and diversity of Jewish life that was once Poland, while Hoffman mourns the loss of the world she was born into—a place already stripped of Jewish community, already marked by death and atrocity, but also a place of natural and unself-conscious intimacies. In that sense, although Hoffman takes great care to distinguish between her parents’ lost Poland and her own, postwar Poland is the creation of World War II and the Holocaust, especially for its Jews. The war itself may be seen as Hoffman’s lost home, the place of origins to which she yearns to return. It remains, always, the fixed correlative against which she measures and reshapes her identity as a North American immigrant woman. It is instructive to read Hoffman’s grappling with intersections of nostalgia, home, and destruction alongside the  republication of Israeli writer Nava Semel’s original  collection of short stories, Kova Zechuchit (Hat of Glass). Like Hoffman, Semel was born soon after the war to survivors of the Nazi genocide . In “Celine’s Park,” a  story added to the republished version of the collection, a young mother regularly takes her children to a neighborhood playground that has been named after a seven-year-old girl murdered in the Shoah. The child’s parents, who survived the war and immigrated to Israel, established the playground in her memory. The mother, who traverses the park and narrates the story, is a child of Holocaust survivors. Bringing her own children to Celine...