After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust
by Eva Hoffman; Public Affairs, New York, 2004, hardcover $25, paperback $14.
Eva Hoffman, whose writing I have long admired, has produced here another fascinating, challenging and frustrating volume. After Such Knowledge defies easy categorization. The marketing of the book as “history” seems a misnomer, unless autobiography with historical musings counts as such. In fact, the focus of the book pertains to the past: Remembrances of the Holocaust are ultimately the source of the author’s need to think about her own identity as a second-generation Holocaust survivor. And Hoffman concentrates on the process of change over time—one way in which historians have defined their craft. But the subject here is that of psychological transformation—how the author herself (and by extension the second-generation survivors) retrospectively understands her life path in connection with this overwhelming event, which she did not experience, but learned as part of her earliest formative years.
In short, the book follows the author from childhood all the way to the present. Hoffman analyzes her youth in Poland as a decisive period that ultimately shaped the rest of her life in terms of relations with her parents and with the country of her birth, as well as her values and identity. Thus, the stories of her parents’ narrow escape from the Holocaust and the tragic fate of the majority of her remaining family members become the primal facts of her life. A mix of shame, estrangement, fear and awe combine to shape Hoffman’s personality.
The book goes on to discuss the growing intricacies and psychological complexes that developed in her personal relationship with the world as she matured. She discusses the related issues of blame (and self-blame), hatred for the perpetrators and inability to forgive in an interesting comparative section that looks at Jews, Poles and Germans of the post–World War II generation. This is the section where the book is closest to offering a powerful historical analysis of what “second generation” might mean in the postwar world in general.
A great deal of the book focuses on the issue of how these traumas (a word the author is very uncomfortable with, but which seems closest to describing the complexity of the phenomenon described here) from early childhood become internalized initially, and then subsequently exorcised over and over, to finally become manageable as a component of Hoffman’s being.
In her organization of the book, the author speaks of turning memory into narrative. This is a great metaphor, and a very optimistic one given the difficulty of the process for the victims. But I’m not sure that what happens at the individual level can be extrapolated for the greater community in general, and the other way around. The process through which collective bodies assimilate painful facts related to the past is so vastly different from the individual process described in the book, that it is hard sometimes to accept Hoffman’s generalizations. Still, the concept of second generation is useful: What she identifies as very personal reactions and processes could be transferred more generally to some of the forces shaping the ways in which other people of her generation formed themselves.
This existential quest is fascinating and captivates the reader with its vivid details and the author’s disarming sincerity. What Hoffman pushes us to contemplate is the power of empathy, but also its limits for understanding the past. By taking us back to her early years in Poland and revealing fragments of her remembrances of that period of her life, Hoffman sends us on a trip back to our own biological origins. Her years growing up and her immigration to Canada are equally evocative and inviting passages. But in the end, her understanding of the choices she made in fashioning a self-identity seems overwhelmingly identified with the reality of her family’s horrific experiences during the Holocaust.
Therefore, what comes through very clearly in the fullness of this detailed story is the reality that those of us who do not share this past (or a similarly horrific one) in an equally personal fashion cannot ultimately fully understand its weight upon Hoffman’s second generation. The limits of this subjective knowledge become the limits of this book in speaking to the audience as history, rather than as autobiography.
Originally published in the September 2006 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.
