After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust [Hardcover]

Eva Hoffman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 2004

Sixty years after the Holocaust, the author of Lost in Translation explores the difficult process of preserving an authentic version of its tragic events. 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 neighbors, 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Sixty years after the Holocaust took place... [and] this immense catastrophe recedes from us in time, our preoccupation with it seems only to increase," writes Hoffman in this beautifully wrought, deftly argued examination of how we might attempt to understand the Holocaust. In seven short essays, Hoffman (Lost in Translation, etc.) focuses on the consciousness and experience of the Holocaust's second generation-the children of survivors-as theirs is a "strong case-study in the deep and long-lasting impact of atrocity." Synthesizing personal history (born in Cracow, Poland, in 1945, Hoffman left at the age of 13 with her parents) with astute gleanings from the fields of psychoanalysis, sociology and literary criticism, the book considers such diverse concepts as how the "trauma" of the Holocaust is constructed, the role of emigration and national identity in shaping the second generation's narratives of their lives and how works as diverse as Marguerite Duras's The War: A Memoir and Bernhard Schlink's The Reader helped shape a series of conflicting ideas about victimhood and responsibility. But the power of Hoffman's vision comes in her posing vital questions: "what happens when we focus on `memory' itself rather than its object"; how do we sort through the question of personal and collective responsibility, "distinguish shadows from realities and fable from history" in order to understand what can be done to redress the past? Hoffman writes with a subdued but vibrant passion. In the end, she suggests that Holocaust studies now take on the difficult question of "the range of Jewish behavior during the Holocaust," particularly the missed opportunities for resistance. Such a daring, controversial challenge is emblematic of Hoffman's brave and forthright thinking and places this volume in the vanguard of Holocaust studies.
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Review

"...it merits perusal by everyone who is interested in the Holocaust and its consequences." -- Ha'aretz Daily, 10/8/2004

"Elegant and moving... An evening or two spent thinking along with her in these pages is time well spent." -- Chicago Tribune, February 8, 2004

"Hoffman is one of the most eloquent spokespeople of the second generation... [she] covers a wide range of topics intelligently." -- Women's Review of Books, September 2004

"Hoffman...speaks with persuasive intimacy...Hoffman is at her keenest when she probes the difference between tragedy and trauma..." -- Washington Post Book World, February 1, 2004

"Moving...it is this conflict, the relentless honesty of her self-examination that gives the book its power and force." -- The Winnipeg Free Press, February 29, 2004

"One of the best responses to [the Holocaust]...the breadth and depth of her latest book is astounding." -- New Jersey Jewish News, April 15, 2004

"Superb... Hoffman is both an excellent writer... and a deep thinker." -- The Houston Jewish Herald-Voice, March 18, 2004

"[Hoffman is] hard-minded and tenderhearted, poet and dialectician... a powerful and important book to be read with love." -- Hadassah, April 2004

"[Hoffman's] graceful and honorific book is...sincere expression." -- The Guardian [UK], April 4, 2004

"moving...it is this conflict, the relentless honesty of her self-examination that gives the book its power and force." -- The Winnipeg Free Press, February 29, 2004

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs; First Edition edition (January 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586480464
• ISBN-13: 978-1586480462
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #805,327 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The second generation reflects on the Holocaust, May 6, 2005

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (Hardcover)

This profound work is a reflection of a member of the ` second- generation' on the Holocaust. It contains a detailed and moving description of the whole experience of ` learning' that the second- generation goes through. It describes the particular burdens including ` significance envy ` that the second - generation lives with. It in the course of this is also a memoir in which Hoffman tells the story of her own parents and family.She describes what it meant to grow up first in Poland, then in Vancouver as the child of two people who had been saved by hiding during the war.There is an extremely interesting section telling of her and her sister's return to their parents native village in the Ukraine, and their meeting with the family who hid them for two years. There are extremely poignant and painful revelations. One is of her father's only near the end of his life describing how he had to alone go out and bury his two beloved brothers killed just near the end of the war when they had apparently been saved.
It is a work written with great intellectual acuity and humane feeling.
The book is so rich in thought and understanding that to quarrel with it seems somehow irreverent. But there is it seems to me a major omission in the work. The work centers on the relationship between the first and second generations. But how is it possible to speak of the Shoah while barely mentioning ` the third generation ` also. For clearly one of the major themes of many of the survivors is the theme of continuity of their own families and of the Jewish people. Here I think Hoffman under-emphasizes one major point about the Shoah. The Nazis aim was to destroy the Jewish people entirely. Therefore for many of the survivors the goal of building new families was strongly connected with the goal of keeping the Jewish people alive. Perhaps this was not so in Hoffman's own family. But it clearly is the case for a tremendous share of the survivors of the Holocaust.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The motion of knowing, May 21, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (Hardcover)

In addition to a being a powerful memoir that asks probing questions about the legacy of the Holocaust, this book creates an image of the living nature of knowledge: its origins, its protection, its growth and advance from the private mind into the public domain and beyond- from a private lived experience into public art. I think her vision of knowledge spills beyond the borders of the Holocaust, if such an event can be said to have "borders." This is really a great book.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars deep thoughts written in polished, gem-like prose, December 4, 2004

By 

Karen Sampson Hudson "Karen Sampson Hudson" (Reno, NV United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (Hardcover)

Eva Hoffman's book-length meditation on the Holocaust, written from her perspective as a daughter of survivors, is beautifully written. Her well crafted sentences reveal the careful thinking she has done as she ponders how her generation, born into sunny safety after the horrors their parents had known, has viewed those events that cast a shadow over their parents' lives.

Hoffman is highly intelligent, well educated, with broadbased understanding of the atrocities, the loss and the uprooting, the courage to begin anew, of those who emerged from the camps. She perceives the ambiguous borders between victimhood and dangerous resistance, the fateful choices her parents faced on a daily basis.

Her book is a highly valuable contribution to a world where conditions of genocide still exist.