Memory Work

The Second Generation

Nina Fischer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137557629
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Memory Work studies how Jewish children of Holocaust survivors from the English-speaking diaspora explore the past in literary texts. By identifying areas where memory manifests - Objects, Names, Bodies, Food, Passover, 9/11 it shows how the Second Generation engage with the pre-Holocaust family and their parents' survival.

1

Introduction Memory Work: The Second Generation

In recent years, we have witnessed a growing preoccupation with memory in public discourses and in academia, with respect to both individual and collective memorial forms. Our times are characterized by considerations and articulations of the meaning of the past in the present, as we see in discussions about the if, where, and how of the United States National Slavery Museum; in the long path to the official apology made in 2008 by Australia’s government for its crimes against the country’s Indigenous populations; or the increase in migrant families’ ‘memory tourism’ to places of origin. In On Collective Memory, one of the seminal studies on memory beyond the individual, sociologist Maurice Halbwachs argues that communication is needed to create memory, asserting that memory is not ‘just there’; rather, it is a process and an activity (1992). Memory is in the hands of many: political decision-makers and private individuals, museums and memorials, life writing authors and documentary filmmakers, to name but a few. From a theoretical perspective, the emerging interdisciplinary field of memory studies has turned to the forms, media, and processes of remembering and forgetting. What unites all these endeavors is a dialogue with the past; whatever form it takes, these efforts show that memory requires and receives humankind’s attention and action.

An underlying understanding of memory studies is, to use the explanation of the cultural studies scholar Richard Terdiman (1993), that memory is the past made present. A connected, although generally implicit, assumption is that memory is a form of work. In this study, I turn my attention to this very aspect of memory as process and to do so, I employ the concept of ‘memory work’. Memory work is a practice that, in the words of the film scholar Annette Kuhn, ‘takes an inquiring attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re)construction through memory’ (2002: 157). It uncovers and interacts with the past’s forms and meanings, both tangible and intangible, in and for lives, identities, and choices in the present. The term has been given different definitions, but I understand memory work as an individual’s conscious, voluntary, and methodical interrogation of the past within collective frameworks, predominantly the familial one.¹ Today, many people engage in memory work to reach for their origins and place themselves within larger collectives, whether it be an Irish-American’s desire to learn more about his genealogy by going to Ireland or a Palestinian documenting his family’s losses during the Nakba, during the establishment of the State of Israel. The shape of memory work depends on the specific cultural and historical contexts and the forms in which memory is available, accessible, and approachable, as well as how these elements function as links between past and present: Ireland can be visited, whereas it depends on Israeli policy whether the Palestinian is allowed into Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza.

In this study, I analyze the particularities of one specific case: the memory work of children of Jewish Holocaust survivors as it presents in their literary texts. Known in Holocaust studies and public discourses as the Second Generation, the children of survivors form a distinct group shaped by personal, familial, and larger cultural processes after the genocide of European Jewry and characterized by strong relational structures, also with others from a similar familial background. Second Generation authors have created a large and multilingual body of writing that has been recognized as a subgenre of Holocaust literature. Memory Work: The Second Generation comparatively reads their English-language literary works across the genres, in which the authors address growing up without extended families in a cultural and genealogical void. Cheryl Pearl Sucher, the American daughter of two concentration camp survivors, describes such a situation of loss that overshadowed post-Holocaust family life: ‘My childhood was not filled with heirlooms, photograph albums, or continuous generations. Everything was gone, memory’s artifacts pillaged and ransacked. My father survived the war alone, his history province to memory’ (1989: 53). The act of writing about these present absences shows that this situation is not just accepted as absolute: quite the reverse, as memory is understood as the connective if precarious tissue between present and past. Memory work – which is then given literary form – is the only way of engaging with the reality of losses and voids, the limits of the imagination, and the remnants of a family’s past. Indeed, I maintain that the complex process of uncovering memory links forms a leitmotif throughout Second Generation literature and is driven by the need to establish relational connections. This historical undertaking also has an ethical component, as it documents Holocaust survival and counteracts human and cultural losses by chronicling family memory of the pre-genocide period. The paramount importance of memory work suggests that, despite the distinctiveness of the experience of being born as a child of Holocaust survivors, neither the literary corpus nor the human position are solely defined by rupture, trauma, and loss.

Previous scholarship on Second Generation literature has focused primarily on the transgenerational transmission of the Holocaust past, which sees the children of survivors as a receptacle of memory (cf. Grimwood 2007, McGlothin 2006), but in this study I shift the attention to this literary generation’s active, conscious exploration of the family’s past and present. The term ‘Second Generation’ refers to those born in the aftermath of the Holocaust, indicating a legacy of traumatic memory, but it has another meaning as well: it highlights a rupture in the (former) European Jewish family. The term implies that the survivors’ children are the ‘second’ generation of a family that only goes back as far as the Holocaust; the multigenerational family connected by genes, tradition, and living memory that was tied into national and ethnic frameworks is gone. But even when the violence of history has ostensibly severed connections with familial origins, the texts emphasize a longing for continuity as the basis for genealogical positioning and sensemaking, as a ‘usable past’. The historian and literary critic Van Wyck Brooks coined the term in the essay “On Creating a Usable Past” (1918), in which he sought to address problems in contemporary American literature and its connection to modernism, asking, ‘What is important for us? What, out of all the multifarious achievements and impulses and desires of the American literary mind, ought we to elect to remember?’ (1993: 225). The term is primarily used in historical studies, but for me, it provides a concept describing the connection to a larger-than-nuclear family. Seen from this vantage point, Second Generation memory work is an attempt to recover a sense of origin through memory, thereby allowing the children of survivors to claim a place in the chain of generations, even in the face of radical rupture: this generation is the second after the Holocaust, but not the second in the family. I propose that the longing to uncover a ‘usable past’ upon which to build identity and continuity, rather than just possessing a past of destruction, drives the memory work and thus the literary endeavors of the Second Generation.

The objective of Second Generation memory work of uncovering a ‘usable past’ (i.e. to learn whatever possible about familial origins) suggests that another longstanding focus of research – the traumatic impact of the Holocaust on the next generation – offers only a partial reading of the corpus.² In particular, texts depicting life in a survivor household can and have been interpreted as examples of secondary trauma narratives. The preeminent Holocaust studies scholar Geoffrey Hartman, among others, has discussed the phenomenon of secondary traumatization, which can be triggered by listening to the traumatic experiences of others (1996: 152) or, in the case of children, by growing up with survivor parents. Texts about the Holocaust from the methodological perspective of trauma studies implicitly understand Second Generation literature as a form of psychic recovery and the creation of a narrative that will enable the healing process. This certainly holds true for elements of the texts, and a significant body of research supports this view. But the emphasis on the representation of trauma in literary analysis is in danger of understanding texts as traces of pathological symptoms, that is, literature becomes a stage for acting out and working through traumata. In contrast, I do not take the Second Generation as a pathological population of traumatized victims but as a group of authors whose texts attempt to uncover family memory despite its truncation. Memory work is not a symptom of psychological damage or an effect of transmitted trauma but a natural human activity. Moreover, my approach complicates a trauma studies reading of Second Generation literature insofar as memory work is not solely concerned with the Holocaust – its interest also predates the genocide.

At the same time, the literary texts also chronicle life in the aftermath, and thus this corpus, in all its individual textual shapes, offers insights into Holocaust memory as mediated within a familial context: That is, Second Generation literature has made the survivor family a part of cultural memory. I conceive of the cultural memory of the Holocaust as a phenomenon that addresses references to the past that are collective in nature, mediated, and culturally determined, as becomes evident when we compare the role of the Holocaust in the national identities of Germany, Israel, and other countries, such as the United States. Using the terminology introduced by the memory studies expert Jan Assmann (2011), cultural memory is often contrasted with ‘communicative memory’, a form of memory that is inhabited and created in everyday communication. Both forms are intrinsically collective; however, I take this further and argue, along with media studies scholar José van Dijck, that ‘cultural memory can only be properly understood as a result of the individual’s and others’ mutual interdependent relationship’ (2007: 14). This view emphasizes relational traits and is more in tune with my interest in links in memory. Memory work requires a sense of connectedness, or at least potential connectedness, to others and to the past; thus, I conceive of collective forms of memory not in terms of binary structures, but rather as multiple interconnected ‘memory systems’. Andrew Hoskins, as an expert on media and memory, suggests that in such a formation, ‘individual, collective and cultural remembering inhabit ongoing, dynamic and more connected [ ... ] sets of relationships’ (2011a: 132). The image of a memory network linking to many formats of remembering, for instance, family stories or the ubiquitous cultural products of Holocaust memory, aptly characterizes Second Generation memory work.

The most prominent memory sphere in which the Second Generation operates is family memory. Maurice Halbwachs maintained that the family is one of the social frameworks that constructs a common fount of memory and creates a specific self-understanding (1992: 58–9), and furthering his thoughts, the literary scholar Astrid Erll has shown that the family is an important link between individual and larger formations of memory (2011: 308). Family memory is never a straightforward structure. For instance, social psychologist Harald Welzer argues that family memories are constituted and kept alive in communication and that they are fleeting, fragmented, and often coincidental (2005: 163–84). But this is not all: family communication tends to be challenging, in part because it is tied up with emotions. In the case of the post-Holocaust family, communication is further complicated by the impact of trauma on the survivors’ ability to speak about their past, the subject matter, and the parental wish to shield children from destructive knowledge. Here, communication patterns in survivor families, as explored in psychological studies, and for which several theoretical models have been proposed, play a role.³ Families living a ‘pact of silence’⁴ are contrasted with families of obsessive communication in which even young children are the audience for mostly fragmentary and repetitive stories, often experienced as violent. However, literary texts written by children of survivors, whether fictional or life writing, cannot be neatly divided into two extremes; rather, they show a fluctuation between the two poles, and the communication styles differ between parents and depend on the subject. Traumatic events, such as the loss of a child or sexual violence, are often shrouded in silence.

But even silence does not preclude awareness. Indirect transmission in an undercurrent of nonverbal communication and in the unspoken but powerful presence of secrets and taboos is also found in families characterized by minimal direct communication. That which is left unsaid or is only alluded to can be as problematic as unstructured, fragmented stories and communication patterns. For the children, this can create what historian Stephen Feinstein has termed ‘nonmemory or lack of memory’ (1998: 201), and what Ellen S. Fine, a literary scholar, calls ‘absent memory’ (1988: 41), which is characterized by ‘blanks, silence, a sense of void, and a sense of regret for not having been there’ (187). French Second Generation author Henri Raczymow (1994) offers the metaphor ‘memory shot through with holes’ – memoire trouée. He locates his generation’s sense of loss in the disconnection from the family’s former life and the multiple gaps in Second Generation memory: the knowledge about family roots, about the destroyed Jewish life and culture in Central and Eastern Europe, and about the actual events of the Holocaust.

The most prominent concept proposed for transgenerational memory after the Holocaust is Marianne Hirsch’s ‘postmemory’. However, as a widely used term applied to many historical cases, it has experienced a certain dilution and has also drawn criticism.⁵ The literary scholar’s original conceptualization for the survivor family highlights a generational distance combined with a paradoxically close relationship to the parents’ past: ‘postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated’ (1997: 22). Hirsch also argues that transmitted traumatic memories leave traces in the offspring’s psyche, and that the past’s predominance can make the children’s own experiences seem insignificant in comparison. She maintains that postmemory ‘seeks connection’ (1996: 664), a notion that resonates with my considerations of Second Generation memory work, as its main characteristic is to seek connection with an earlier past of the family and thus to find elements of a usable past rather than absence, lack, or ‘nonmemory’. Hirsch’s now ubiquitous term is productive for my study insofar as I think of it – in its most conservative familial formulation – as a precondition and impetus for memory work. The state of knowing but not knowing, of proximity without personal knowledge, causes the urge to uncover more about the lost past and to connect to one’s origins, which ultimately triggers memory work.

My conception of memory work, which explores and documents family memory, while not historiography, also goes further than postmemory’s ‘imaginative investment, projection, and creation’ (2008: 107). To illustrate this point, I call on Eva Hoffman, the daughter of two Polish Jewish survivors who survived in hiding. In her family, she experienced ‘loss that has no concrete shape or face’ (2004: 73), a description that points to what Hirsch conceives of as mediated traumatic memory traces. In her attempts to deal with these unfathomable losses, Hoffman realized that ‘there are limits to what the imagination can do’ (217). As a result, she argues that only ‘a confrontation with the past – however uncanny, however unknown – can bring the haunting to an end’ (73). Here, postmemory characterizes the Second Generation experience and results in Hoffman’s decision to consciously engage with the past. Not the imagination, only memory work can ultimately change the author’s relationship to the past by concretizing the haunting and by finding elements of a usable past.

The words of Paula Fass, an American historian born to two Polish Jewish survivors, also present an evocative example of the urge to undertake memory work to find connective points in memory, as an alternative to the imagination:

In trying to reconstruct specific events and the lives of the lost, I have often nothing more than a few bare details, details that I have refused to embellish even with the historical imagination that I have developed as an adult. Instead, I have tried to gather my memories about the lives of all those meaningful people whom my parents knew and about a way of life of which my parents were deprived when they became survivors. To this I have added some of my attempts to find these people in the very few records that remain. (2009: 5)

In light of such deliberations, I propose that if we read Second Generation authors’ attempts to disentangle, contemplate, and write through elements of their family’s past as family memory work, we take a step beyond postmemory as a state and as imaginative investment. Therefore, I primarily refer to Hirsch’s concept in cases in which creative efforts are at the forefront of the textual excerpt being analyzed; otherwise, postmemory is considered part of the experience of living with transmitted but fragmented family memory that inspires memory work.

As mentioned above, I understand Second Generation memory work as the process of deciphering and documenting parental stories about the past, actions related to the past, and other memory traces. Annette Kuhn, similarly highlighting memory work as an active inquiry into the past, defines it as ‘a method and a practice of unearthing and making public untold stories’ (2002: 9–10). In my book, ‘unearthing’ means, first and foremost, an examination of memory by the Second Generation, whereas ‘making public’ entails the production of meaning that is then mediated in a literary text. I am interested in the processes, forms, and themes of Second Generation memory work. Memory work as a process is continually changing and developing as it goes from being an involuntary investment to becoming an adult’s conscious choice. A child faced with the Holocaust as family memory does not have the means of understanding the past of survivor parents, and often, the past is experienced as a burden. An adult with historical knowledge, however, who has chosen to deal with the horrors and losses, is in a better position to uncover usable aspects.

To explore forms and themes of memory work, I work with the premise that certain topoi that embody memory traces – examples are family heirlooms or personal names – recur in these writings, no matter what genre. These topoi come to represent and define areas of concentrated memory work. Naming a child after a family member, for instance...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction Memory Work: The Second Generation
• 2  Objects
• 3  Names
• 4  Bodies
• 5  Food
• 6  Passover
• 7  Experiencing History: 9/11
• 8  Afterword: On Memory Work
• Notes
• References
• Index