This article appeared in the Feb. 19, 2004 Jewish Advocate.

Author Eva Hoffman to speak on Holocaust legacy

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

While author Eva Hoffman’s parents were hiding through much of World War II in an attic in Zalosce in the Polish part of the Ukraine, all members of their immediate families perished. After the war, they moved to Cracow, where she was born in 1945. The profound loss of place Hoffman experienced when the family later emigrated to Vancouver, Canada in 1959 set her on a literary path which began with 1989’s “Lost In Translation” and has included a Harvard Ph.D. and the editorship of the New York Times Book Review.

Hoffman, who had been enjoying a happy childhood and young adolescence in Cracow, was not enthused about the move, which resulted in detachment, alienation and severe cultural and political shock. “It took place at a particular time and in particular political circumstances,” she recalled. “It was in 1959, so not in the worst Stalinist, but still during the Cold War years.” She had to accept that they would never return.

Hoffman’s personal yet universal works, which have chronicled her struggles of acclimation as well as the lost world of Polish Jewry and the historical complexities of Polish-Jewish relations, have been translated into several languages and have received numerous grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters prize and a Whiting Award for Writing. She will discuss her new book, “After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust,” at the Newton Free Library tonight, Feb. 19, at 7:30 p.m.

In 1994’s “Exit into History: A Journey through the New Eastern Europe,” Hoffman returned to Poland as well as Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. 1997’s “Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews” studied the complexities of Polish-Jewish relations, dating back to the Middle Ages; 2002’s science fiction novel The Secret followed.

Hoffman, a Visiting Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT, holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Harvard and a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Rice University. She studied at Yale University’s Graduate School of Music, where she played piano in chamber groups and orchestras, the Institute for Psychoanalytic Research and Training in New York, and the Lincoln Institute in London. She has written and lectured internationally and held senior editing positions at Politics Today as well as The New York Times.

"Sixty years after the Holocaust took place... [and] this immense catastrophe recedes from us in time, our preoccupation with it seems only to increase," writes Hoffman in her new book, which contains seven short essays that explore the historic, psychological and ethical consciousness of children of Holocaust survivors, the ‘second generations’. She believes that theirs is a "strong case-study in the deep and long-lasting impact of atrocity."

“As the survivors of the Holocaust begin to pass away, how are their memories of this great atrocity passed on to their children - and what responsibility does the ‘second generation’ have to keep these memories alive?” asked publicist Jaime Leifer and editor Kate Darnton of Perseus Books, which published “After Such Knowledge.”

"I was the designated carrier for the cargo of awesome knowledge transferred to me by my parents, and its burden had to be transported carefully, with all the iterated accounts literally intact," states Hoffman. To attempt to make any cohesive sense of it, she writes, is "to make indecently rational what had been obscenely irrational. It would have been to normalize through familiar form an utterly aberrant content."

Conceptualizing the pathos of child survivors everywhere, she continues: "The facts seemed to be such an inescapable part of my inner world as to belong to me, to my own experience. But of course they didn't; and in that elision, that caesura, much of the post-generation's problematic can be found." The second generation, she feels, is often left feeling like a collective afterthought. “It is all too easy for the second generation, laden with the emotional sequelae of our elders' experiences, to feel that it has no history of its own, that we are secondary not only chronologically but, so to speak, ontologically.” However, Hoffman conveys that though challenging, it is necessary to incorporate living memory into history, as a new generation of Germans seek to forget and move on.

“As the Holocaust recedes in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the next generation,” remark Leifer and Darnton. “How should they, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors? And what are the second generation's responsibilities to its received memories?”

For further information on this free event, held tonight, Thursday, Feb. 19, at 7:30 p.m., please call the Newton Free Library on Homer St. in Newton Centre at 617-796-1360. This event, which will provide books for a signing, is co-sponsored by the Library and the New England Mobile Book Fair.