The Holocaust Across Generations

The Holocaust Across Generations
Author: Janet Jacobs
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2017-01-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1479814342

Winner of the 2017 Outstanding Book Award for the Peace, War, and Social Conflict Section presented by the American Sociological Association Brings together the study of post-Holocaust family culture with the study of collective memory Over the last two decades, the cross-generational transmission of trauma has become an important area of research within both Holocaust studies and the more broad study of genocide. The overall findings of the research suggest that the Holocaust informs both the psychological and social development of the children of survivors who, like their parents, suffer from nightmares, guilt, fear, and sadness. The impact of social memory on the construction of survivor identities among succeeding generations has not yet been adequately explained. Moreover, the importance of gender to the intergenerational transmission of trauma has, for the most part, been overlooked. In The Holocaust across Generations, Janet Jacobs fills these significant gaps in the study of traumatic transference. The volume brings together the study of post-Holocaust family culture with the study of collective memory. Through an in-depth study of 75 children and grandchildren of survivors, the book examines the social mechanisms through which the trauma of the Holocaust is conveyed by survivors to succeeding generations. It explores the social structures—such as narratives, rituals, belief systems, and memorial sites—through which the collective memory of trauma is transmitted within families, examining the social relations of traumatic inheritance among children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Within this analytic framework, feminist theory and the importance of gender are brought to bear on the study of traumatic inheritance and the formation of trauma-based identities among Holocaust carrier groups.

The Holocaust in Three Generations

The Holocaust in Three Generations
Author: Gabriele Rosenthal
Publisher: Barbara Budrich
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2010-02-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3866492820

Victims and Perpetrators What form does the dialogue about the family past during the Nazi period take in families of those persecuted by the Nazi regime and in families of Nazi perpetrators and bystanders? What impact does the past of the first generation, and their own way of dealing with it have on the lives of their children and grandchildren? What are the differences between the dialogue about the family past and the Holocaust in families of Nazi perpetrators and in families of Holocaust survivors? This book examines these questions on the basis of selected case studies.

The Ones Who Remember

The Ones Who Remember
Author: Rita Benn
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2022-04-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1947951513

How do you talk about and make sense of your life when you grew up with parents who survived the most unimaginable horrors of family separation, systematic murder and unending encounters of inhumanity? Sixteen authors reveal the challenges and gifts of living with the aftermath of their parents’ inconceivable experiences during the Holocaust. The Ones Who Remember: Second-Generation Voices of the Holocaust provides a window into the lived experience of sixteen different families grappling with the legacy of genocide. Each author reveals the many ways their parents’ Holocaust traumas and survival seeped into their souls and then affected their subsequent family lives – whether they knew the bulk of their parents’ stories or nothing at all. Several of the contributors’ children share interpretations of the continuing effects of this legacy with their own poems and creative prose. Despite the diversity of each family's history and journey of discovery, the intimacy of the collective narratives reveals a common arc from suffering to resilience, across the three generations. This book offers a vision of a shared humanity against the background of inherited trauma that is relatable to anyone who grew up in the shadow of their parents’ pain.

Children of the Holocaust

Children of the Holocaust
Author: Helen Epstein
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 337
Release: 1988-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0140112847

"I set out to find a group of people who, like me, were possessed by a history they had never lived." The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Helen Epstein traveled from America to Europe to Israel, searching for one vital thin in common: their parent's persecution by the Nazis. She found: • Gabriela Korda, who was raised by her parents as a German Protestant in South America; • Albert Singerman, who fought in the jungles of Vietnam to prove that he, too, could survive a grueling ordeal; • Deborah Schwartz, a Southern beauty queen who—at the Miss America pageant, played the same Chopin piece that was played over Polish radio during Hitler's invasion. Epstein interviewed hundreds of men and women coping with an extraordinary legacy. In each, she found shades of herself.

Fear and Hope

Fear and Hope
Author: Dan Bar-On
Publisher:
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2013-10
Genre:
ISBN: 9780674418905

Genia spent two years in Auschwitz. Ze'ev fought with the Partisans. Olga hid in the Aryan section of Warsaw. Anya fled to Russia. Laura lived in Libya under the Italian fascist regime. All five survived the Holocaust, emigrated to Israel, and started families there. How the traumatic experience of these survivors has been transmitted, even transformed, from one generation to the next is the focus of Fear and Hope. From survivors to grandchildren, members of these families narrate their own stories across three generations, revealing their different ways of confronting the original trauma of the Holocaust. Dan Bar-On's biographical analyses of these life stories identify several main themes that run throughout: how family members reconstruct major life events in their narratives, what stories remain untold, and what is remembered and what forgotten. Together, these life stories and analyses eloquently explore the intergenerational reverberations of the Holocaust, particularly the ongoing tension between achieving renewal in the present and preserving the past. We learn firsthand that the third generation often exerts a healing influence in these families: their spontaneous questions open blocked communications between their parents and their grandparents. And we see that those in the second generation, often viewed as passive recipients of familial fallout from the Holocaust, actually play a complex and active role in navigating between their parents and their children. This book has implications far beyond the horrific reality at its heart. A unique account of the interplay between individual biography and wider social and cultural processes, Fear and Hope offers a fresh perspective on the transgenerational effects of trauma--and new hope for families facing the formidable task of "working through."

Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives

Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives
Author: Victoria Aarons
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2016-09-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 149851717X

This collection of new essays examines third-generation Holocaust narratives and the inter-generational transmission of trauma and memory. This collection demonstrates the ways in which memory of the Holocaust has been passed along inter-generationally from survivors to the second-generation—the children of survivors—to a contemporary generation of grandchildren of survivors—those writers who have come of literary age at a time that will mark the end of direct survivor testimony. This collection, in drawing upon a variety of approaches and perspectives, suggests the rich and fluid range of expression through which stories of the Holocaust are transmitted to and by the third generation, who have taken on the task of bearing witness to the enormity of the Holocaust and the ways in which this pronounced event has shaped the lives of the descendants of those who experienced the trauma first-hand. The essays collected—essays written by renowned scholars in Holocaust literature, philosophy, history, and religion as well as by third-generation writers—show that Holocaust literary representation has continued to flourish well into the twenty-first century, gaining increased momentum as a third generation of writers has added to the growing corpus of Holocaust literature. Here we find a literature that laments unrecoverable loss for a generation removed spatially and temporally from the extended trauma of the Holocaust. The third-generation writers, in writing against a contemporary landscape of post-apocalyptic apprehension and anxiety, capture and penetrate the growing sense of loss and the fear of the failure of memory. Their novels, short stories, and memoirs carry the Holocaust into the twenty-first century and suggest the future of Holocaust writing for extended generations.

The Holocaust and History

The Holocaust and History
Author: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 856
Release: 2002-07-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780253215291

"A huge and hugely significant collection of much of the best Holocaust scholarship to appear in the last half-century." --Kirkus Reviews "... magnificent... surely among the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's] greatest achievements to date.... The range of the essays is nothing short of breathtaking." --Jerusalem Post Fifty-four chapters by the world's most eminent Holocaust researchers probe topics such as Nazi politics, racial ideology, leadership, and bureaucracy; the phases of the Holocaust from definition to expropriation, ghettoization, deportation, and the death camps; Jewish leadership and resistance; the role of the Allies, the Axis, and neutral countries; the deeds of the rescuers; and the impact of the Holocaust on survivors.

Second Generation Voices

Second Generation Voices
Author: Alan L. Berger
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2001-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780815606819

Heirs to the legacy of Auschwjtz, the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators have always been thought of as separated by fear and anger, mistrust and shame. This groundbreaking study provides a forum for expression in which each group reflects candidly upon the consuming burdens and challenges it has inherited. In these intensely personal and frequently dramatic pieces, understandable differences surface. The Jewish second generation is unified by a search for memory and family. Their German counterparts experience the opposite. Yet surprising common ground is revealed. Each group emerges out of households where, for vastly different reasons, the Holocaust was not mentioned. Each struggles to break this barrier of silence. Each has witnessed the continued survival of parents and must grapple with living in households haunted by denial. And each knows it is his or her charge to shape the Holocaust for future generations. To be sure, there is disagreement among the groups about the need for-or wisdom of-dialogue. Yet Second Generation Voices boldly engenders authentic grounds for discussion. Issues such as guilt, anger, religious faith, and accountability are explored in deeply felt poems, essays, and narratives. Jew and German alike speak openly of forming and affirming their own identities, reconnecting with roots, and working through their own "psychological Holocaust."

Witness

Witness
Author: Eli Rubenstein
Publisher: Second Story Press
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2015-09-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1772600083

For 25 years, the March of the Living has organized visits for adults and students from all over the world to Poland, where millions of Jews were enslaved and murdered by Nazi Germany during WWII. The organization's goal is not only to remember and bear witness to the terrible events of the past, but also to look forward. They want to inspire participants to build a world free of oppression and intolerance, a world of freedom, democracy and justice for all members of the human family. Rooted in a touring exhibit launched at the United Nations, this book is a compilation of photographs and text that give firsthand accounts from the survivors who have participated in March of the Living programs, together with reactions and responses from the people, young students in particular, of many faiths and cultures worldwide who have traveled with the group over the years.

The Generation of Postmemory

The Generation of Postmemory
Author: Marianne Hirsch
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2012
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0231156529

Can we remember other people's memories? The Generation of Postmemory argues we can: that memories of traumatic events live on to mark the lives of those who were not there to experience them. Children of survivors and their contemporaries inherit catastrophic histories not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories--multiply mediated images, objects, stories, behaviors, and affects passed down within the family and the culture at large. In these new and revised critical readings of the literary and visual legacies of the Holocaust and other, related sites of memory, Marianne Hirsch builds on her influential concept of postmemory. The book's chapters, two of which were written collaboratively with the historian Leo Spitzer, engage the work of postgeneration artists and writers such as Art Spiegelman, W.G. Sebald, Eva Hoffman, Tatana Kellner, Muriel Hasbun, Anne Karpff, Lily Brett, Lorie Novak, David Levinthal, Nancy Spero and Susan Meiselas. Grappling with the ethics of empathy and identification, these artists attempt to forge a creative postmemorial aesthetic that reanimates the past without appropriating it. In her analyses of their fractured texts, Hirsch locates the roots of the familial and affiliative practices of postmemory in feminism and other movements for social change. Using feminist critical strategies to connect past and present, words and images, and memory and gender, she brings the entangled strands of disparate traumatic histories into more intimate contact. With more than fifty illustrations, her text enables a multifaceted encounter with foundational and cutting edge theories in memory, trauma, gender, and visual culture, eliciting a new understanding of history and our place in it.