'After Such Knowledge': A Prisoner of Memory

By JAMES E. YOUNG

New York Review of Books
January 18, 2004

In the beginning was the war. That was my childhood theory of origins, akin perhaps to certain childhood theories of sexuality. For me, the world as I knew it and the people in it emerged not from the womb, but from war. The theory was perhaps understandable, for I was born in Poland, in 1945, that is, on the site of the Second World War's greatest ravages; and so soon after the cataclysm as to conflate it with the causes of my own birth.'' So begins Eva Hoffman's extraordinarily clear and unsentimental meditation on how she was indelibly shaped by the memory of catastrophic events she never knew directly.

Hoffman made a remarkable literary debut with her publication in 1989 of ''Lost in Translation,'' an enthralling memoir of her childhood immigration to North America in 1959. Now heralded as a classic reflection on coming-of-age between two cultures, ''Lost in Translation'' was followed by two meditations on Eastern Europe. While engaging as far as they went, neither could match the luminous prose and self-revelatory thoughtfulness of her memoir.

With ''After Such Knowledge,'' Hoffman returns to her own lived experience, not of exile this time, but of her parents' memory of the Holocaust, and how this memory has been passed down to her. Not only has she found again a psychologically attuned, intellectually compelling voice, but she has given this voice to the tangled and conflicted inner lives of a generation of children of Holocaust survivors.

As it turns out, Hoffman is a refreshingly recalcitrant daughter of survivors and so resists the too-convenient label of ''second generation.'' What common experience actually unites the children of Holocaust survivors -- a generation that has grown up in vastly different postwar cultures, in different countries and under very different political systems? She answers, ''The defining event we have in common belongs not to our allotted time on this planet, but to our prehistory.''

Hers is what she calls ''the hinge-generation'' between experience and memory of the Holocaust. As survivors have written of their experiences from memory, their children will write about memory itself. Of course, Hoffman is acutely aware of the potential for self-indulgence and even narcissism in such work. She warns others in her generation against seeing themselves as ''a victim of victims, as damaged by calamities that had been visited on somebody else.''

At the same time, she finds much that is robust and tough-minded in the works of her ''hinge-generation.'' She singles out ''Maus,'' Art Spiegelman's brilliantly interbraided comic-book depiction of his father's remembered survival during the war and the artist-son's own tortured retrieval of this memory. Like ''Maus,'' like the second generation itself, this book -- something between philosophy and memoir, spiritual autobiography and psychotherapeutic analysis -- defies easy categorization.

Hoffman is properly skeptical of the notion that actual trauma can be transmitted across the generations. ''For who, after all, wants to think of oneself as traumatized by one's very parentage, as having drunk victimhood, so to speak, with one's mother's milk?'' What then is being passed down to her generation? Not the violent events, but the condition of the survivors' wounded psyches.

She reminds us here that as paradoxical as it may seem, ''if we insist on fidelity to our childhood knowledge, we may run the risk of being unfaithful to what our parents themselves knew.'' As illustration, she cites how shocked she'd been to discover, several years after her parents' death, just how impressively coherent their stories actually were as captured in video testimony, how informed and rational -- especially when compared with her own childhood memories.

Her reflections on contemporary Germany, Poland and Israel are similarly against the grain and inflected by acute self-awareness. She notes that while the apologies from German children of perpetrators are numerous and welcome, those from the perpetrators themselves are almost nonexistent. Where are their soul-searching testimonies? Here she realizes that her only true historical counterpoints are Germans born after the war, struggling with the same past, yet from an antithetical position. The differences are instructive, of course. Instead of the sometimes excessive identification children of survivors may have with their parents, the defining gesture for German children of former Nazis is of violent counteridentification.

As she resists turning Holocaust survivors or their children into one-dimensional focus groups, she also rejects the notion of an intrinsic national character or permanent psychonational traits. All the same, she can't let go of exploring the two, often fraught and conflicted, sides of her cultural identity as Jew and Pole. Hoffman's observations come with a special poignancy and authority. As a minutely observant child growing up in Cracow, she experienced Poles discovering the calamity of their Jewish neighbors despite their own sufferings, and Jews gradually learning of the extent of Polish devastation.

Hoffman returns to Poland to check the reality of her memory against the reality of the place, to find the family that had sheltered her parents and to understand as deeply as possible what motivated rescuers, as well as what motivated the killers. These first-person reflections are the most affecting parts of her book. On being shown a large indentation in the ground, overgrown and covered by branches, she can hardly believe that this had once been the bunker her father had dug and in which he had hidden during the war.

And then something else dawns on her, an overwhelming sense of relief, when she realizes that her ''parents really did have a portion of life before the horror, and uncontaminated by its knowledge.'' Think of it, to have lived without such knowledge, to have lived blessedly, in effect, before such knowledge.

Similarly, her personal reflections on being ''in the moment'' of public commemorative rituals are intensely revealing. Attending the 60th anniversary of the massacre of Jews by their Polish neighbors in Jedwabne (told devastatingly by Jan Gross in ''Neighbors''), she is beset by self-conscious questions of decorum. How are we supposed to feel, she asks? ''Can we mourn properly for these dead who to most of us are strangers?'' And ''what does Then mean to us, now?''

She is excruciatingly aware of the public significance in every quirky individual response, from a wailing young tourist she encountered earlier at the concentration camp memorial at Majdanek, to the somber crowd at Jedwabne, where Poland's president speaks beautifully, remorsefully. ''Sixty years later,'' she writes, ''and after all that can be done has been done, it may also be time to turn away, gently, to let this go.'' Sometimes, it turns out, memory is also about letting go, about finding a way to return ourselves to the present.

This said, and despite all the received memory in her bones and the constant subliminal expectation of catastrophe such memory has instilled in her, Hoffman is shocked to discover just how ill-prepared she was for witnessing a new catastrophe in medias res. Watching the images of jetliners smashing into the World Trade Center towers on television on Sept. 11, 2001, she suddenly ''understood palpably'' what she ''had until then known only imaginatively: what it is like to have your entire world shaken at its very foundations.'' That she should feel so unprepared for such a catastrophe after so much thinking of past catastrophes is for Hoffman a signal lesson of all this memory-work: that ''after such knowledge,'' there are still no analogies, nothing in the memory of past destructions that help us make sense of new ones. What broke in her and in so many of us, despite its coming ''after such knowledge,'' was that ''veneer of civilization'' that her parents ''had found to be so thin -- and the uncovering of that irrational universe which had roiled so darkly in my childish mind.''

Only in its last pages does this book lose a bit of its vitality and force. In an attempt to summarize her meditations, Hoffman flattens some of their nuance, veiling a little too neatly the scaffolding of paradox on which so much of this wonderful book rests. Rather than being left with the book's talking points, I prefer to recall her profoundly wise concluding questions on the quotidian value such memory has for life: ''How to find richness, authenticity, depth in the temperate zones of ordinary life? How to find sources of significance that do not derive from extremity and to endow with value not only great losses but modest gains?''

James E. Young is the author, most recently, of ''At Memory's Edge'' and the chairman of Judaic and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.