Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives

Reviews / Votes

This collection considers works written by grandchildren, great nieces and nephews, and other relatives about family members who lived during the Hitler years. The term third generation raises some issues. In speaking about the literature of the Holocaust, "the literature of the first generation" meant the testimony of those who lived through the horrors of the Third Reich, those who either survived the death camps (Primo Levi, Ellie Wiesel, Imre Kertesz, et al.) or lived in hiding in the ghettos or as partisan fighters. It did not include those who lived safely through the Nazi years in protected areas or foreign countries. When critics and scholars begin to use terms such as 3G literature and introduce expressions such as 1.5G, 2G, 2.5G, and 3G, one senses that 3.5G and 4G loom in the future; lost is the emphasis on the quality of the story, novel, memoir, biography, film, or research being produced. Generational criticism privileges familial relationships. At its worse, it exploits the experiences of others. Important in this regard is critique of how writers far removed from the Holocaust preserve memory and provide witness to a past they never experienced. The best of these essays do that well, and this book is valuable for doing that service. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * Choice Reviews * A valuable, searching collection of Third Generation views of the Holocaust, views still proximate to that event and yet increasingly distanced from it. The accounts selectively presented here are both reflective and provide intimate detail, and Aarons' skill in editing brings out with great clarity the effect of time's passage on memory, art, and trauma in the aftermath of the Holocaust. -- Berel Lang, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, SUNY at Albany Victoria Aarons once again firmly establishes that the post-Holocaust universe is her domain. With great sensitivity, editorial skill and insight, she has unearthed the generational consequences of a crime that was beyond description, and yet so many writers were compelled to do that very thing. -- Thane Rosenbaum, Thane Rosenbaum, author of "The Golems of Gotham," "Second Hand Smoke," and "Elijah Visible" In this important and visionary new book on third-generation Holocaust narratives, Victoria Aarons assembles a sturdy architectonic of memory's afterimage. Through a "visible bridge"-the continued outpouring of exceptionally well-written and international memoirs and fiction on the Holocaust-the essays affirm that memory is a structure that leaves third-generation survivors, and those coming later, with no alibi against witnessing. In her remarkably lucid introduction, Aarons reminds us that while some of us witness, all of us are companions on a (still) unfinished search. -- Holli Levitsky, Loyola Marymount University, affiliated professor of the University of Haifa