After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust - Softcover

Hoffman, Eva

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1586483048 ISBN 13: 9781586483043

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2005

Synopsis

As the Holocaust recedes in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the next generation. How should they, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors? And what are the second-generation's responsibilities to its received memories? In this meditation on the long aftermath of atrocity, Eva Hoffman- a child of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust with the help of neighbours, but whose entire families perished- probes these questions through personal reflections, and through broader explorations of the historical, psychological, and moral implications of the second-generation experience. She examines the subterranean processes through which private memories of suffering are transmitted, and the more willful stratagems of collective memory. She traces the "second generation's" trajectory from childhood intimations of horror, through its struggles between allegiance and autonomy, and its complex transactions with children of perpetrators. As she guides us through the poignant juncture at which living memory must be relinquished, she asks what insights can be carried from the past to the newly problematic present, and urges us to transform potent family stories into a fully informed understanding of a forbidding history.

About this title

Review

"New in paperback, Eva Hoffman's "extraordinarily clear-eyed and unsentimental meditation" on our relationship to the Holocaust. New York Times Book Review "Hoffman believes in supplanting moral passion with moral thorught, which means incorporating memory into our consciousness of the world. Her graceful and honorific book is the sincere expression of that belief" The Guardian "The wisest and most sensitive writer about the Polish background to the Shoah...(a) wonderful memoir..." Financial Times"

About the Author

Eva Hoffman was born in Cracow, Poland, and emigrated to Canada at the age of thirteen. She is the author of three highly acclaimed works of nonfiction, Lost in Translation, Exit into History, and Shtetl, and one novel, The Secret. She divides her time between London and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a visiting professor at MIT.

Edition details

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1586483048
• ISBN 13: 9781586483043
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320