Third-Generation Holocaust Representation Trauma, History, and Memory

• Main Author: Aarons, Victoria (auth)
• Other Authors: Berger, Alan (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Evanston, Illinois Northwestern University Press 2017
• Series: Cultural Expressions of World War II
• Subjects: Literature; Jews; Judaism; Nazism; The Holocaust
• Online Access: OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: description of the publication

Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger show that Holocaust literary representation has continued to flourish-gaining increased momentum even as its perspective shifts, as a third generation adds its voice to the chorus of post-Holocaust writers. In negotiating the complex thematic imperatives and narrative conceits of the literature of these writers, this bold new work examines those structures, ironies, disjunctions, and tensions that produce a literature lamenting loss for a generation removed spatially and temporally from the extended trauma of the Holocaust. Aarons and Berger address evolving notions of "postmemory"; the intergenerational transmission of trauma; inherited memory; the psychological tensions of post-Holocaust Jewish identity; tropes of memory and the personalized narrative voice; generational dislocation and anxiety; the recurrent antagonisms of assimilation and alienation; the imaginative reconstruction of the past; and the future of Holocaust memory and representation.