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After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust
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.
322 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 7, 2004
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311 people want to read
About the author
Eva Hoffman
69 books103 followersEva Hoffman is a writer and academic. She was born Ewa Wydra July 1, 1945 in Cracow, Poland after her Jewish parents survived the Holocaust by hiding in the Ukraine. In 1959, during the Cold War, the thirteen years old Eva, her nine years old sister "Alinka" and her parents immigrated to Vancouver, Canada, where her name has been changed to Eva. Upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship and studied English literature at Rice University, Texas in 1966, the Yale School of Music (1967-68), and Harvard University, where she received a Ph.D. in English and American literature in 1974.
Eva Hoffmann has been a professor of literature and creative writing at various institutions, such as Columbia University, the University of Minnesota, and Tufts. From 1979 to 1990, she worked as an editor and writer at The New York Times, serving as senior editor of “The Book Review” from 1987 to 1990. In 1990, she received the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1992, the Guggenheim Fellowship for General Nonfiction, as well as the Whiting Writers' Award. In 2000, Eva Hoffman has been the Year 2000 Una Lecturer at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008, she was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Warwick. Eva leads a seminar in memoir once every two years as a part of CUNY Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.
She now lives in London.
Her sister, Dr. Alina Wydra is a registered psychologist working in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Hoffman
Eva Hoffmann has been a professor of literature and creative writing at various institutions, such as Columbia University, the University of Minnesota, and Tufts. From 1979 to 1990, she worked as an editor and writer at The New York Times, serving as senior editor of “The Book Review” from 1987 to 1990. In 1990, she received the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1992, the Guggenheim Fellowship for General Nonfiction, as well as the Whiting Writers' Award. In 2000, Eva Hoffman has been the Year 2000 Una Lecturer at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008, she was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Warwick. Eva leads a seminar in memoir once every two years as a part of CUNY Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.
She now lives in London.
Her sister, Dr. Alina Wydra is a registered psychologist working in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Hoffman
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
April 2, 2012
Eva Hoffman’s After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust treads many different areas surrounding the fallout of the Holocaust. At its most basic level, the book is an exploration of the experiences of the second-generation, or the children of Holocaust survivors, of which Hoffman is herself one. Hoffman’s personal experiences are interspersed throughout the work, and her own process of contending with a Holocaust both intimately near and far away comprise the structural form of the book. On a broader scale, however, Hoffman is relating her own experiences in a loose allegory to the experiences of the first generation of baby boomers as a whole, and the ways that Holocaust scholarship has been shaped and molded during their time. The book is, from the start, undergirded by Hoffman’s insistence that this generation, which was uniquely positioned in that it had both intimate knowledge of the Holocaust as a politically recent event, and yet enough distance to be able to engage with it, is coming to an end. Her main concern, therefore, seems to be how to in some way grapple with the fact that the Holocaust slips ever further back into history, as well as determine what the appropriate legacy of this “hinge generation,” which decided whether “the past is transmuted into history or into myth.” (198)
Hoffman’s first two chapters are perhaps the most explicitly personal, and it is in these chapters that Hoffman positions the second-generation. The first chapter focuses on how the Holocaust, for many children of survivors, becomes a fable, full of both sinister and beautiful places and people, yet lacking in any sense of realism because children simply cannot comprehend it. As she says, “Whereas adults who live through violence and atrocity can understand what happens to them as an actuality – no matter how awful its terms – the generation after receives its first knowledge of the terrible events with only childish instruments of perception, and as a kind of fable.” (16) The ways that this story is told are multifold; often the children do not hear the stories in words but they are transmitted nonetheless as parents awake from horrid nightmares, engage in strange, paranoiac behaviors, or alternate between struggling to show love and smothering their children. Hoffman iterates that this has deep emotional impacts on children’s psyches as well, often resulting in several types of disorders such as fear of constant disaster or intense feelings of insignificance compared to their parents.
It is in the period of adolescence that Hoffman first relates the experiences of the second-generation with society as a whole, claiming that “the so-called latency period, when the Holocaust seemed to recede from public consciousness, coincided with our own developmental latency” in which the psychic problems of the second generation were not dealt with, but are instead buried in favor of dealing with the day-to-day. (77) For most of this generation, this meant dealing with immigration and the silence surrounding the Holocaust, as well as the strange shift in parental roles, as children who were often more easily able to learn new languages and cultural habits, often had to guide their parents through the new landscape.
Hoffman pinpoints the 1970s as the moment when discussions of the Holocaust began to re-emerge with vigor. It is also at this point that her own narrative becomes broader, as she discusses the trajectory of the study of the Holocaust as a whole. Hoffman discusses her own ambiguous feelings as Holocaust survivors became voguish. (She includes an example of two people at a party attempting to one-up one another with the Holocaust stories of the guests they brought with them.) While she is happy that the Holocaust was able to be discussed and admits that this did provided an excellent space to begin working through the events and several historical insights, she does not see this movement as unambiguously good, either, particularly the shift toward memory and identity politics as they relate to Holocaust research. Both of these elements include a dilution and misunderstanding of what actually occurred in the Holocaust. For instance, on memory, Hoffman states:
This body of thought and the phenomenon sometimes all too smoothly referred to as “memory of the Holocaust” has inspired a body of secondary and tertiary critique, in which it is the responses to the Holocaust (or its “memory”) that are the subject of disputation. In all of this, the Holocaust itself – the Event – can seem very far away, an increasingly abstract point of reference, a pretext for strangely gratifying emotional gestures or curiously abstruse theoretical debates. In other words, in our increasing preoccupation with it, the Holocaust has become a cultural phenomenon. (157)
There is a similar fear that the actualities of the Holocaust are lost in discussions of trauma and identity:
Our rhetoric is ever more pervaded by the professional and sociological vocabulary of victimhood – and in that vocabulary, suffering becomes reified into pathology or aggrandized into martyrdom. Suffering becomes Trauma; a person who has experienced adversity or been treated harshly becomes the Victim. Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that the excesses of identity politics are themselves a kind of displacement, wherein the actualities of suffering are placed at a safe distance and relegated to the sphere of abstract compassion and morality. (276)
Such a belief in trauma and victimization results in what, for Hoffman, are profound misunderstandings not only of the Holocaust, but of present events. For instance, she describes her befuddlement at feelings of many Americans at having “deserved” the 9/11 attacks. She describes this as a form of narcissism, in which Americans are secretly still seeing themselves as the number one aggressor and any one else as their victims, and likewise a result of the “gradual but decisive shift in the postwar decades from the older politics of triumphalism to the politics of trauma, from the belief that victory vindicates to the conviction that victimhood confers virtue.” (259) For Hoffman, the key way to move forward, then, is first, to allow the Holocaust to become something of the past, respectfully minded and available to learn from, but not something acceptable for political use in the present. Historians need to be more understanding of the fact that “even those greatly sinned against are capable of greatly sinning” and it is impossible “to reprieve even those who have been greatly persecuted from the normal responsibilities of life.” (95) We need to be more willing to look closely at Holocaust victims to truly understand them as they were, including their moral flaws. She also says that understanding fanaticism, particularly the conditions under which people are drawn to it, is of fundamental importance in understanding how to prevent such actions in the future. Our key focus should be less about the morality of the Holocaust, which for most people is fairly clearly settled, but in learning what it can teach us about how genocides happen and how they can be prevented in the future.
Ultimately, Hoffman’s account is a masterful account of where research into the Holocaust has been and how it might continue. Although the work is sometimes difficult to follow because it flows so seamlessly between the registers of intense personal account and cultural analysis, this is also one of the strengths of the work. By placing living memory – those children now left to embody the experiences of their Holocaust survivor parents – in dialogue with more abstract broad analysis, Hoffman forcefully shows that just as her own life has changed in complicated and unexpected ways and yet remained intensely her own, so must the research into the Holocaust continue to move forward, all while remembering the real, lived experiences at the heart of it.
Hoffman’s first two chapters are perhaps the most explicitly personal, and it is in these chapters that Hoffman positions the second-generation. The first chapter focuses on how the Holocaust, for many children of survivors, becomes a fable, full of both sinister and beautiful places and people, yet lacking in any sense of realism because children simply cannot comprehend it. As she says, “Whereas adults who live through violence and atrocity can understand what happens to them as an actuality – no matter how awful its terms – the generation after receives its first knowledge of the terrible events with only childish instruments of perception, and as a kind of fable.” (16) The ways that this story is told are multifold; often the children do not hear the stories in words but they are transmitted nonetheless as parents awake from horrid nightmares, engage in strange, paranoiac behaviors, or alternate between struggling to show love and smothering their children. Hoffman iterates that this has deep emotional impacts on children’s psyches as well, often resulting in several types of disorders such as fear of constant disaster or intense feelings of insignificance compared to their parents.
It is in the period of adolescence that Hoffman first relates the experiences of the second-generation with society as a whole, claiming that “the so-called latency period, when the Holocaust seemed to recede from public consciousness, coincided with our own developmental latency” in which the psychic problems of the second generation were not dealt with, but are instead buried in favor of dealing with the day-to-day. (77) For most of this generation, this meant dealing with immigration and the silence surrounding the Holocaust, as well as the strange shift in parental roles, as children who were often more easily able to learn new languages and cultural habits, often had to guide their parents through the new landscape.
Hoffman pinpoints the 1970s as the moment when discussions of the Holocaust began to re-emerge with vigor. It is also at this point that her own narrative becomes broader, as she discusses the trajectory of the study of the Holocaust as a whole. Hoffman discusses her own ambiguous feelings as Holocaust survivors became voguish. (She includes an example of two people at a party attempting to one-up one another with the Holocaust stories of the guests they brought with them.) While she is happy that the Holocaust was able to be discussed and admits that this did provided an excellent space to begin working through the events and several historical insights, she does not see this movement as unambiguously good, either, particularly the shift toward memory and identity politics as they relate to Holocaust research. Both of these elements include a dilution and misunderstanding of what actually occurred in the Holocaust. For instance, on memory, Hoffman states:
This body of thought and the phenomenon sometimes all too smoothly referred to as “memory of the Holocaust” has inspired a body of secondary and tertiary critique, in which it is the responses to the Holocaust (or its “memory”) that are the subject of disputation. In all of this, the Holocaust itself – the Event – can seem very far away, an increasingly abstract point of reference, a pretext for strangely gratifying emotional gestures or curiously abstruse theoretical debates. In other words, in our increasing preoccupation with it, the Holocaust has become a cultural phenomenon. (157)
There is a similar fear that the actualities of the Holocaust are lost in discussions of trauma and identity:
Our rhetoric is ever more pervaded by the professional and sociological vocabulary of victimhood – and in that vocabulary, suffering becomes reified into pathology or aggrandized into martyrdom. Suffering becomes Trauma; a person who has experienced adversity or been treated harshly becomes the Victim. Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that the excesses of identity politics are themselves a kind of displacement, wherein the actualities of suffering are placed at a safe distance and relegated to the sphere of abstract compassion and morality. (276)
Such a belief in trauma and victimization results in what, for Hoffman, are profound misunderstandings not only of the Holocaust, but of present events. For instance, she describes her befuddlement at feelings of many Americans at having “deserved” the 9/11 attacks. She describes this as a form of narcissism, in which Americans are secretly still seeing themselves as the number one aggressor and any one else as their victims, and likewise a result of the “gradual but decisive shift in the postwar decades from the older politics of triumphalism to the politics of trauma, from the belief that victory vindicates to the conviction that victimhood confers virtue.” (259) For Hoffman, the key way to move forward, then, is first, to allow the Holocaust to become something of the past, respectfully minded and available to learn from, but not something acceptable for political use in the present. Historians need to be more understanding of the fact that “even those greatly sinned against are capable of greatly sinning” and it is impossible “to reprieve even those who have been greatly persecuted from the normal responsibilities of life.” (95) We need to be more willing to look closely at Holocaust victims to truly understand them as they were, including their moral flaws. She also says that understanding fanaticism, particularly the conditions under which people are drawn to it, is of fundamental importance in understanding how to prevent such actions in the future. Our key focus should be less about the morality of the Holocaust, which for most people is fairly clearly settled, but in learning what it can teach us about how genocides happen and how they can be prevented in the future.
Ultimately, Hoffman’s account is a masterful account of where research into the Holocaust has been and how it might continue. Although the work is sometimes difficult to follow because it flows so seamlessly between the registers of intense personal account and cultural analysis, this is also one of the strengths of the work. By placing living memory – those children now left to embody the experiences of their Holocaust survivor parents – in dialogue with more abstract broad analysis, Hoffman forcefully shows that just as her own life has changed in complicated and unexpected ways and yet remained intensely her own, so must the research into the Holocaust continue to move forward, all while remembering the real, lived experiences at the heart of it.
August 16, 2020
I have to admit, looking at the copyright date on this book I was expecting to look at it as an attitude on a specific period in time, a time that I thought was mostly gone. However, I found this book exceedingly relevant especially in this age of social unrest, when we are trying to decide how to confront more genuinely a history of colonization, oppression, and violence that extends far longer than the Holocaust. However, Hoffman’s incisive insights consider many sides of the issue, not just those raised by the stories of survivors and how we can authentically interact with them but also how we can work to make reparations and begin to move on post Holocaust. I found this an interesting mix of a memoir and an intellectual study and while I didn’t agree with all of her points it’s clear Eva Hoffman has had a lifetime to consider from lessons learned as an immediate survivor. As someone temporally and geographically far removed from the conflict by more than 50 years and 4000 miles, with no family members affected, I found it a comprehensive study.
December 14, 2008
Not really what I was expecting, although having finished the book, I can't remember what I was expecting. Hoffman explores the evolution of the Shoah from the point of view of the second generation, but along the way explores the effects the event has had on other groups--the children of perpetrators, for example. She's at her best when connecting her own experiences to her more abstract ruminations; a section on the performative nature of grief while visiting Madjanek is among the best sections, as it her explanation of America's reaction to September 11th as an outgrowth of how we've come to think about the Holocaust.
September 1, 2020
Some books are meant to be re-read, and it seems that for me the time was now to reread Eva Hoffman’s After Such Knowledge: Where Memory of the Holocaust Ends and History Begins. With everything going on in the world today, with global politics tipping right and an election bearing down on us, reading it again was a poignant reminder of that old trope, we must remember and understand history or we are destined to repeat it.
In her last book, Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman showed us what it was like to experience the self-absorbed me-generation of 1960s America as an adolescent emigrant from war-torn Krakow, Poland. In After Such Knowledge, Hoffman reveals her outsider’s perspective once more, only this time as a second generation Holocaust survivor.
Hoffman asks fellow survivors, readers and herself, “What meanings does the Holocaust hold for us today—and how are we going to pass on those meanings to subsequent generations?” As the age of living memory nears its end, sixty years after the Shoah, the legacy—and the responsibility for passing on its moral, historical and psychological implications—is being handed down to the second generation.
Hoffman’s parents survived the Holocaust in what was then the Polish part of the Ukraine with the help of neighbors, but their entire families perished. One of the most poignant moments in the book is when the author finally meets the family who saved her parents’ lives.
Hoffman’s meditation is a dense narrative that interweaves Freudian thought, theories on the transmission of trauma, historical accounts of the Holocaust and other genocides, with her personal stories of loss, restoration and forgiveness. In order to grieve and move on, she says reflecting back Freudian theory, “you have to know what you have lost.” And “transferred loss” is what the children of survivors inherit.
At the end of the book, Hoffman answers her initial question, by saying, “If we do not want to betray the past—if we want to remain ethical beings and honor our covenant with those who suffered—then moral passion needs to be supplanted by moral thought, by an incorporation of memory into our consciousness of the world.” And it is this final thought that makes this book exigent among not only Holocaust literature, but all of literature, for it addresses the extensive implications of atrocity.
In her last book, Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman showed us what it was like to experience the self-absorbed me-generation of 1960s America as an adolescent emigrant from war-torn Krakow, Poland. In After Such Knowledge, Hoffman reveals her outsider’s perspective once more, only this time as a second generation Holocaust survivor.
Hoffman asks fellow survivors, readers and herself, “What meanings does the Holocaust hold for us today—and how are we going to pass on those meanings to subsequent generations?” As the age of living memory nears its end, sixty years after the Shoah, the legacy—and the responsibility for passing on its moral, historical and psychological implications—is being handed down to the second generation.
Hoffman’s parents survived the Holocaust in what was then the Polish part of the Ukraine with the help of neighbors, but their entire families perished. One of the most poignant moments in the book is when the author finally meets the family who saved her parents’ lives.
Hoffman’s meditation is a dense narrative that interweaves Freudian thought, theories on the transmission of trauma, historical accounts of the Holocaust and other genocides, with her personal stories of loss, restoration and forgiveness. In order to grieve and move on, she says reflecting back Freudian theory, “you have to know what you have lost.” And “transferred loss” is what the children of survivors inherit.
At the end of the book, Hoffman answers her initial question, by saying, “If we do not want to betray the past—if we want to remain ethical beings and honor our covenant with those who suffered—then moral passion needs to be supplanted by moral thought, by an incorporation of memory into our consciousness of the world.” And it is this final thought that makes this book exigent among not only Holocaust literature, but all of literature, for it addresses the extensive implications of atrocity.
July 7, 2018
The topic of the book seemed so interesting but, except for a few sections, I just could not get engaged. It did not feel well organized. Also, the vocabulary was quite difficult. She seems to use words that are rare and obscure. I almost never get stymied by vocabulary, but I felt like I needed a dictionary by my side. Sometimes the language seemed odd as well. Both of these issues may be due to the fact that English is not the author’s native language. The one part that really grabbed me was when she visited her parents home town in Poland. I found it very moving.
December 28, 2017
Thoughtful and poignant account of how a Holocaust survivor's trauma can impact their children in so many ways. The book presents a very complex discussion, but the little devil in the back of my mind wants me to say that the author seems a little long-winded.
January 20, 2020
An absolute must-read when it comes to trying to understand the trauma of the Holocaust. It took me some time to get through; parts are a bit recursive and even academic-seeming, but it was well worth it and I highly recommend the book.
April 17, 2020
A very good analysis of the second generation
April 11, 2016
This was incredibly thought provoking and challenging to read. I stumbled upon it in the library stacks when searching for a different book and am very glad I did.
Both with her language and thought processes I struggled to remain completely engaged and interested but only because her intellectuality exceeded mine. She wrote this in 2004 and I tried to read it in that context, remembering that time so soon after 9/11 when life in America suddenly spun so differently.
It feels a little dated since she speaks of events 12 years in the past but that does not diminish the force of her musings and thoughts written in this book. For anyone at all interested in the Holocaust as well as "survivors" and their families whatever the cataclysmic causative conflict, I would suggest a read through these pages.
A gorgeous cover.
Both with her language and thought processes I struggled to remain completely engaged and interested but only because her intellectuality exceeded mine. She wrote this in 2004 and I tried to read it in that context, remembering that time so soon after 9/11 when life in America suddenly spun so differently.
It feels a little dated since she speaks of events 12 years in the past but that does not diminish the force of her musings and thoughts written in this book. For anyone at all interested in the Holocaust as well as "survivors" and their families whatever the cataclysmic causative conflict, I would suggest a read through these pages.
A gorgeous cover.
May 2, 2009
Interesting exploration about psychological responses to trauma on all sides and through various relationships and generations. Includes comparisons of holocaust survivors with other survivors of mass and singular trauma. Good read by a sensitive, thoughtful author.
November 13, 2014
A book by a child of Holocaust survivors about what it did to her and other children of survivors. She has an interesting take on things and there are some really touching stories in here.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews