After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust
By Eva Hoffman
Public Affairs, 301 pages, $25
Several years ago, as happens a few times annually, a Northwestern University student dropped out of my course on the history of the Holocaust after receiving a disappointing grade on the midterm exam. We had reviewed her test together and talked about ways she might improve upon it, but I could not see grounds to raise her mark. A few days later, apparently feeling the urge to lash back, she sent me an angry note. Among other things, it pointed out that she was losing nothing by withdrawing from the class. To learn about the Holocaust, she needed no teachers or books, just more conversations with her grandparents, who endured it.
Eva Hoffman, while growing up, had many such conversations with her own parents and overheard many as well. In 1944, the year before she was born, Russian troops freed the couple from years of hiding in attics and forests around the tiny village of their birth near the prewar border between Poland and Soviet Ukraine. The only remnant of their families, indeed perhaps of their town’s entire Jewish population, they soon moved to Krakow, then emigrated to Vancouver in 1959, and lived on into the 1990s. Even in the early postwar period, they talked to and in front of Eva about their suffering. If she could not quite relive their fear or pain, either then or later, she knew about both, down to the details of her father’s several hair’s-breadth escapes from the Germans and their auxiliaries.
Yet her book, which is an elegant and moving “meditation” on being, as it were, related to the Holocaust, is also a gentle retort to those who think or behave as my hurt student did. For Hoffman, personal accounts are not the essence of understanding what Nazi Germany did to the Jews of Europe from 1939 to 1945, but the intellectual and psychological point of departure for doing so. “[T]he Holocaust past,” she says, “aside from being a profound personal legacy, is also a task. It demands something from us, an understanding that is larger than just ourselves.” And that understanding entails precisely what my student reflexively renounced: detachment from “a sense of the past conveyed to us through the family, or from the formulations and prejudices to which we have reduced the transferred knowledge.” Instead, Hoffman calls for viewing the Holocaust “from a perspective different from that of the participants,” for apprehending this and other genocides with the aid of an elusive quality that historians seek but popular culture abhors: the right degree of distance. As she warns, “Stand too close to horror, and you get fixation, paralysis, engulfment; stand too far, and you get voyeurism or forgetting. Distance matters.”
But distance is a lot to ask of anyone whose life and loved ones Nazism scarred, not least because achieving it seems to entail somehow betraying them. So Hoffman structures her book as a chart of the actual “trajectory” of responses to the Holocaust since 1945, including those of the “second generation” to which she belongs, and maintains that the pattern she discerns has a therapeutic rationale. Two psychological models, in effect, undergird her plea for distance. One stresses the importance of separation from parents as part of becoming an autonomous adult. The other calls to mind the familiar litany of phases humans should pass through in order to come to terms with loss. In place of denial, grieving, acceptance and the like, Hoffman’s chapters delineate “stages of understanding” in each survivor’s child’s encounter with the Holocaust–as family fable, psychic presence, piece of a personal narrative, crucible of morality, artifact of memory, object of historical study, and informer of present action–always insisting that intellectual maturity and mental health depend on advancing through the sequence and ultimately “letting go.”
Whether this arresting framework stands up as history or psychology (her stages seem both too neat and too loose, her renditions of them too uneven and digressive, to impress many specialists) is probably less important to Hoffman than what it enables her to say. The most powerful passages come in the early chapters, which affectingly mix autobiography and gleanings from writings by and about children of survivors. Here single sentences transmit worlds of pain:
“Transferred loss, more than transferred memory, is what children of survivors inherit.”
“[W]hat most troubles the imagination are scenarios of parental indignity.”
“[E]migration confuses the patterns and sequences of family life, and the basic transactions and balances between the generations.”
“[I]n our progress to adulthood, most children of survivors were caught on their private see-saws, oscillating between the demands of autonomy and attachment, self-sacrifice and self-interest.”
Above all, Hoffman’s organization allows her to raise questions in the heart of the book concerning how much memory is good for people, communities and societies, and how much should be expected of them. The problems are not only that too much memory imprisons humans in what Freud famously called “the narcissism of small differences” (see Northern Ireland or Kosovo) and provides ready-made excuses for personal failings, but also that too much memory overloads human capacities for sympathy, producing ritualization among those who want constant recall, “compassion fatigue” among everyone else.
“[H]ypermemory . . . can function as a secondary amnesia,” and not only about the real events being commemorated but also about the lapses of our own forebears and the difficulties of others’. It incubates “bad faith,” a recurrent phrase in the book, and underpins the continuing irritability of Polish-Jewish relations, a subject that preoccupies Hoffman and on which her comments are subtly explosive. Sometimes, she therefore thinks, memory should simply bow before the enormity of the past and make a grateful exit. Thus, while attending the Polish government’s ceremony in 2001 honoring the Jews murdered by Poles in the little village of Jedwabne 60 years earlier, she finds herself unable to say what action on either her or the official representatives’ part is “appropriate” or “enough” and so concludes “this is the only thing that can be done: to acknowledge, turn, bend towards the victims rather than away from them. . . . [Then] turn away, gently, to let this go.”
What is to be gained today by doing so, she seems to assert in a final chapter, is more than closure, whatever that may be. Distancing brings a kind of freedom, specifically from impulses to identify with or repudiate Israeli policies or to idealize the victimized, which has unanticipated byproducts. Among these, she cites the legitimization of anti-Semitism in large parts of the world and even, in some quarters, of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, as understandable responses to imperial power. “[C]ollective suffering cannot assure collective merit,” she points out, on the part of survivors or the Third World.
As those words suggest, Eva Hoffman’s unusual life has forged an ironic and contrary temperament. She appreciates the capacity of righteousness not just to blind, but to boomerang. Her deft, sometimes even rhythmic prose is at once modest and challenging, humane and unromantic. If these qualities do not suffice to make her invariably persuasive, they do make her unfailingly worth attending to. An evening or two spent thinking along with her in these pages is time well spent. I hope my former student will try it.
