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

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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.

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.

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.

As the Holocaust passes further into history so are the survivors. The direct memories are being replaced by stores, books, museums. The author is a child of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust with the help of neighbors, but whose entire families perished. She investigates the historical, psychological and moral implications of the second generation experience. How do you maintain an authentic version of its events.

It would be nice to say that the Holocaust was a unique experience in world history. And in some ways, its magnitude, and its mechanistic operation. Perahaps even more so with its publicity and the presence in our society. Unfortunately with Pol Pot's followers in Cambodia and the horribly named ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and several countries in Africa it isn't unique.