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

New York, N.Y.: PublicAffairs, 2004. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Format is approximately 5.75 inches by 8.5 inches. xv, [1], 301, [3] pages. Selected Bibliography. Index. Signed and dated by the author on the title page. Eva Hoffman (born Ewa Wydra on 1 July 1945) is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning writer and academic. In all her writing, Hoffman's consistent sensitivity is informed by her wide erudition, from her musical education to frequent Fraudian insight, both psychoanalytic and philosophical. As the Holocaust recedes from us 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 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 oft he second-generation experience. She examines the subterranean processes through which private memories of suffering are transmitted, and the more willful stratagems of collective memory. Hoffman has been a professor of literature and creative writing at various institutions, such as Columbia University, the University of Minnesota, Tufts, MIT, and CUNY's Hunter College. From 1979 to 1990, she worked as an editor and writer at The New York Times, serving as deputy editor of Arts and Leisure, and senior editor of the Book Review, and reviewing regularly herself. 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 Award. In 2000, She has written and presented programmes for BBC Radio, and is the recipient of the Prix Italia for a radio work combining text and music. She has lectured internationally on subjects of exile, historical memory, human rights and other contemporary issues. Her work has been translated internationally. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In her 1989 memoir, Lost in Translation, Hoffman tells the story of her experience immigrating to America from a post-World War II Poland. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: "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 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 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.