Afterword: On Memory Work

Abstract

Approaching Second Generation literature as memory work, I explored in this study how the children of Holocaust survivors delve into their families’ pasts to learn about their parents’ survival and about familial origins that predate the Nazi destruction of European Jewry. Using the lens of memory work has enabled me to demonstrate that, despite the distinctiveness of the experience of being born into a family of survivors, and even if it is not always possible to uncover a usable past, neither the literary corpus nor the human position are shaped by rupture, parental trauma, and truncated transmitted memory alone.