Third-Generation Holocaust Representation

de Victoria Aarons, Alan L. Berger

Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger show that Holocaust literary representation has continued to flourish—gaining increased momentum even as its perspective shifts, as a third generation adds its voice to the chorus of post-Holocaust writers. In negotiating the complex thematic imperatives and narrative conceits of the literature of these writers, this bold new work examines those structures, ironies, disjunctions, and tensions that produce a literature lamenting loss for a generation removed spatially and temporally from the extended trauma of the Holocaust. Aarons and Berger address evolving notions of “postmemory”; the intergenerational transmission of trauma; inherited memory; the psychological tensions of post-Holocaust Jewish identity; tropes of memory and the personalized narrative voice; generational dislocation and anxiety; the recurrent antagonisms of assimilation and alienation; the imaginative reconstruction of the past; and the future of Holocaust memory and representation.