After Such Knowledge Where Memory of the Holocaust Ends and History Begins

Harper's Magazine

A ferocious meditation... masterly essays on ethics and political science... Hoffman has smart things to say...

New York Times Book Review

An extraordinarily cleareyed and unsentimental meditation... Hoffman has a psychologically attuned, intellectually compelling voice...

The New York Times

With After Such Knowledge, Hoffman returns to her own lived experience, not of exile this time, but of her parents' memory of the Holocaust, and how this memory has been passed down to her. Not only has she found again a psychologically attuned, intellectually compelling voice, but she has given this voice to the tangled and conflicted inner lives of a generation of children of Holocaust survivors. — James E. Young

Times Literary Supplement

Hoffman's account of her own personal experience and that of... the second generation... is generally shrewd, interesting and valuable.
—July 23, 2004

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. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The psychological effects of the Shoah on the family dynamics of survivors and their offspring have been well documented in two works by Aaron Hass, The Aftermath and In the Shadow of the Holocaust. Hoffman (Lost in Translation; Shtel) investigates a different type of family dynamic: how knowledge about the Holocaust is transmitted and remembered by the second generation. It is always dangerous to use oneself as the model for an entire generation, which Hoffman does but is usually careful to assert that there is no "consensus" among the second generation on any issue. The book is part literary analysis and part memoir, and the line between the two is sometimes blurred. For example, years after reading about the psychological impact of the Shoah on survivors, Hoffman relates her surprise upon learning that both her parents were diagnosed with survivor syndrome (anxiety, depression, panic attacks, recurrent nightmares). Hoffman's prose is sometimes difficult, especially when she is engaged in literary analysis, and obscures what may be some extremely useful insights into how historical memory is reinterpreted across generational lines. One of the more interesting chapters-"From the Past to the Present"-discusses how the Holocaust is used and abused in contemporary political debates on subjects from Israel to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Recommended for specialized collections.-Frederic Krome, Jacob Rader Marcus Ctr. of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Literate if sometimes arid essays on the world-intellectual, cultural, and emotional-of the Holocaust's "second generation." Memoirist Hoffman (Shtetl, 1997, etc.), a representative of that generation, writes, "I was the designated carrier for the cargo of awesome knowledge transferred to me by my parents, and its burden had to be transported carefully, with all the iterated accounts literally intact." Literally intact: to tinker with the narrative of the survivors, she writes, in order to streamline, even to make more comprehensible, would have been "to make indecently rational what had been obscenely irrational. It would have been to normalize through familiar form an utterly aberrant content." It is a terrible responsibility, this burden of keeping alive and unbowdlerized the murder of so many millions; it inserts the realities of the first generation into the lives of the second, such that, she writes, "the facts seemed to be such an inescapable part of my inner world as to belong to me, to my own experience. But of course they didn't; and in that elision, that caesura, much of the post-generation's problematic can be found." The problematic is real, writes Hoffman: it is all to easy for the second generation, laden with the "emotional sequelae of our elders' experiences," to feel that it has no history of its own, that "we are secondary not only chronologically but, so to speak, ontologically." But the burden is necessary, Hoffman suggests, if only as a means of bearing living memory into history and into "our consciousness of the world" in a time when many-whether children and grandchildren of the second generation or a new generation of Germans-look, perhaps understandably, toforget about the past and move on. A commendable contribution-but no match for Melvin Bukiet's superb second-generation anthology Nothing Makes You Free (2002).