Inherited Memories

In this book, the Israeli children of Holocaust survivors narrate their parents' wartime biographies, and relate their own childhood, adolescence and adulthood to their parents' histories. They tell a harrowing tale of pre-war childhood in workcamps, extermination and internment camps. Other stories are fragmentary tales and secrets, which many children discovered late in life, often after their parents' deaths. The second part of the book opens with a review of the professional literature on "second-generation phenomena". It then deals with issues of the second generation growing up in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, from personal and individual memories of home life, social and school experiences, army life and war experiences, to viewing changing Israeli attitudes to the Holocaust, its survivors and its place in Israeli politics. The experience of the Israeli children of survivors is affected by factors that are unique to Israel: the state was founded out of the Holocaust, which moulds the collective memory of all its citizens.