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 HoffmanÕs 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 1989Õs ÒLost In TranslationÓ
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. ÒIt took place at a particular time and in particular political
circumstances,Ó she recalled. ÒIt was in 1959, so not in the worst Stalinist,
but still during the Cold War years.Ó She had to accept that they would never
return.
HoffmanÕs 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, ÒAfter Such
Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust,Ó at the Newton Free
Library tonight, Feb. 19, at 7:30 p.m.
In 1994Õs ÒExit into History: A Journey
through the New Eastern Europe,Ó Hoffman returned to Poland as well as Hungary,
Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. 1997Õs ÒShtetl: The Life and Death of a
Small Town and the World of Polish JewsÓ studied the complexities of
Polish-Jewish relations, dating back to the Middle Ages; 2002Õs 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 bachelorÕs degree in English
Literature from Rice University. She studied at Yale UniversityÕs 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
Ôsecond generationsÕ. She believes that theirs is a "strong case-study in
the deep and long-lasting impact of atrocity."
ÒAs 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 Ôsecond generationÕ have to keep
these memories alive?Ó asked publicist Jaime Leifer and editor Kate Darnton of
Perseus Books, which published ÒAfter Such Knowledge.Ó
"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. ÒIt 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.Ó 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.
ÒAs the Holocaust recedes in time, the
guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses
to the next generation,Ó remark Leifer and Darnton. ÒHow 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?Ó
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.