Abstract
Substantial research in multiple disciplines on Jewish Holocaust survivors and their postwar offspring has been dominated by the discourse of trauma, focusing on the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Based on the narratives of 35 children of Holocaust survivors in the United States, my research counters and nuances this over-determined “paradigm of trauma” by illuminating their more diverse cache of family memories. Some parents transmitted their Holocaust experiences in lively and colorful ways,as an exciting adventure, as a fairy tale, or as a humorous story. The narratives suggest that for these children of survivors, the postmemories of their parents’ history and trauma are embedded in other positive family memories, including the way in which the stories were told. Thus, postmemories of trauma do not necessarily elide or dominate other more positive family memories, including memories of joy
Keywords
Introduction
Memories of the Holocaust tend to focus on trauma and terror, rather than joy. A vast literature in Psychology has focused on pathologies and emphasized that children of survivors (COS) inherit trauma due to their parents’ histories and problematic parenting practices 1 (Danieli et al., 2017; Wolf, 2016). Drawing on different theories and methods, the academic areas of Memory Studies and Trauma Studies crystallize in their focus on children of Jewish Holocaust survivors and what is now commonly referred to as the intergenerational transmission of trauma (Crownshaw, 2010). Taken together, these literatures create the overwhelming impression that trauma is the central if not dominant dynamic in the family lives and memories of COS. 2 Indeed, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Anna Ornstein (1985: 101) critically notes that the “transmission of ‘the Holocaust trauma’ is no longer questioned but is assumed to be an established fact.”
Based on the narratives of 35 children of Holocaust survivors in the United States, my research counters and nuances this overdetermined “paradigm of trauma” (Rigney, 2018) by illuminating a more diverse cache of family memories, including joy. Analyzing these narratives revealed that postmemory can only be understood as part of other family memories, many of which are very positive. To be sure, these COS carry a postmemory of their parents’ histories and traumas; however, in most cases, it does not necessarily elide or dominate other, more positive family memories.
This article will expand our understanding of post-Holocaust Jewish family life beyond the discourse of trauma and pathology by exploring a more holistic view of family memories. My research will demonstrate that first, postmemory is embedded and imbricated with other memories connected to how and when parents talked about their histories. Second, it will show that while memories of their parent-survivors’ traumas are important, they do not necessarily dominate all other memories. Postmemory of the Holocaust is but one of numerous family memories that may or may not hold a privileged and central position.
Academics from the Humanities and Social Sciences have given significant scholarly attention to both memory and trauma (Assmann, 2016; Caruth, 1996; Crownshaw, 2010; Hirsch, 2008). The concept of collective memory, first coined by sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992) in the mid-twentieth century, continues to be refined and debated among an interdisciplinary group of scholars. Humanities scholars in particular have zeroed in on the differences between individual and collective memory as well as the intricacies of the relationship between the two, particularly in terms of trauma. While the socially shared experience and practice of trauma has been theorized by many, there is little critical distance from which to examine its absence. In an attempt to bridge divergent disciplinary approaches, I apply a sociological method to concepts from Humanities scholars that can enrich our understanding of memory and trauma in post-Holocaust family life. While not without its flaws, this challenging interdisciplinary endeavor shines a unique light on postmemory, family memories, and trauma.
Memories of positivities
In an attempt to go beyond trauma, this article considers what Ann Rigney (2018) recently termed “memories of positivities” [my emphasis]. In her work on the collective memory of the Paris Commune of 1871, Rigney (2018) refers to “memories of hope” as an example of a memory of positivity. Certain social movements and revolutions may create hopeful or otherwise positive cultural memories, even if their success is short lived. While Rigney’s focus is on the more collective, societal level, I suggest that her concept of memories of positivities is easily transposed to a micro, individual level. Certainly, if parents can transmit memories of trauma or trauma itself, it seems highly plausible that they can also transmit memories of positivities.
A focus on postmemories of positivities requires the same kind of critical scrutiny that should be applied to studying trauma. To focus on positive memories of COS does not imply imposing a rose-colored lens to produce images of happy, intact, heteronormative, nuclear families living the American Dream. Rather, these are families in which the horrendous and traumatic histories of Holocaust survivor-parents are usually present in some form, but may be joined by affirming memories such as joy, affection, humor, love, or happiness. These memories of positivities do not negate memories of trauma, but in many cases, they are just as prominent if not more so.
It is important to acknowledge that some survivors were irrevocably traumatized by their Holocaust experiences and created highly dysfunctional family relationships that left severe, long-lasting emotional scars among their offspring. My approach does not downplay their suffering. But while some literatures presume a widespread intergenerational transmission of trauma among COS, other research suggests that highly damaged and traumatized individuals only constitute a minority of the second generation. Robust research using control groups in multiple countries has never found any significant difference between COS and their peers in terms of emotions connected to trauma 3 (van IJzendoorn et al., 2003).
More qualitatively oriented psychologists Aaron Hass (1990) and Natan Kellermann (1999) assert that only a small minority of COS are deeply wounded and emotionally damaged. In other words, the vast majority of COS are emotionally healthy. Since the US does not have any official count of Holocaust survivors or their children as does the Israeli state, it is impossible to draw a random sample in order to know the extent to which the Hass’ and Kellerman’s assertions are correct. Their claim, however, seems highly plausible.
Postmemory
Postmemory is the relationship that the “generation after” the Holocaust “bears to the personal, collective and cultural trauma or transformation of those who came before” (Hirsch, 2008: 106). Building on both the memory and history literature and the trauma studies literature,
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Marianne Hirsch (2001) created this concept to characterize the experience of those, who, like me, have grown up dominated by narrative that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the powerful stories of the previous generation, shaped by monumental traumatic events that resist understanding and integration. (p. 12)
Although Hirsch (1997) initially coupled postmemory with the Holocaust, she later expanded it to those offspring whose parents experienced any collective trauma, 5 since they too “inherit a horrific, unknown, and unknowable past that their parents were not meant to survive” (2012: p. 34). Those in the second generation are the guardians of this memory and have a familial sense of “ownership and protectiveness” (Hirsch, 2008: 104). 6 Hirsch (2012: 34) asserts that the “fiction, art, memoir and testimony” produced by this second generation “are shaped by the attempt to represent the long-term effects of living in close proximity to the pain, depression, and dissociation of persons who have witnessed and survived massive historical trauma.” However, as I understand Hirsch, carrying the postmemory of parents’ trauma does not automatically create trauma in the offspring themselves; these are two separate phenomena. 7
Despite the very personal connection to these memories which are inherited “vertically” through intergenerational transmission (Crownshaw, 2010: v), the term postmemory is meant to convey “its temporal and qualitative difference” from survivor memory, “its secondary or second-generation quality, its basis in displacement, its vicariousness and belatedness” (Hirsch, 2001: 9). Postmemory is very personal and, at the same time, it is memory once removed, since it is actually parents’ memories, carried by their offspring. Postmemory resonates deeply with me personally and intellectually. As the daughter and granddaughter of German-Jewish refugees who fled in the 1930s, postmemory names some deeply internal and complicated emotions; it acknowledges foundations of identity that are usually invisible.
Conceptually, postmemory specifies a particular generational perspective which otherwise would go unnoticed. Karl Mannheim (1952) elucidated the sociological importance of an individual’s generational location in terms of experiencing significant historical events along with specific sociocultural values and practices (Assmann, 2016: 14; Elder, 1999). The concept of postmemory situates individuals within a particular generation and a broader sociopolitical context. In this case, COS in the United States are part of the Baby Boomer generation who lived through the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s; this context undoubtedly affected the development of their postmemory. This broader structural environment is highly relevant for understanding how the second generation named and claimed their identity and spoke about their experiences (Stein, 2014).
Methodology and data
Using methodological tools that differ considerably from Hirsch’s, I want to ascertain if it is possible to somehow empirically encapsulate postmemory, at least partially. Testimonies and narratives reflect the most literal part of postmemory but certainly not the full scope and range. Still, I will draw on the narratives from interviews with 35 COS. These videoed interviews can reflect only what individuals are conscious of, able to articulate verbally and through body language, and willing to share. Even though Hirsch (2016: 107) claims that postmemory defies “narrative construction” and “exceeds comprehension,” it seems an important and worthwhile interdisciplinary effort to try to locate and observe it, however imperfect.
Based on Hirsch’s (2008) definition, I capture postmemory in terms of (1) how COS were told their parents’ histories or the form of telling, (2) what they were told about their parents’ experiences, or the content, and (3) when they were told, or the timing, in terms of age and life-cycle status. Finally, before delving into the narratives, it is important to acknowledge that feminist scholars as well as sociologists view individuals as social agents rather than passive victims who, depending upon the circumstances, have some agency. 8 As social agents, survivor-parents are aware of their actions to some degree, and may be involved in deliberately creating more positive family practices. This is decidedly different from the view that the intergenerational transmission of trauma and its resultant victimization are inevitable. The three facets mentioned above reflect whether parents used their agency to manage and control the timing, format, and content of their Holocaust histories when telling their children. Thus, parents’ agency is central in this analysis of postmemory.
Narratives and postmemory
The 35 interviews analyzed here were conducted in 2015 for a project focused on the second generation. 9 I was given access to the videoed interviews and analyzed them in Fall 2017. Standard questions were asked of everyone about each survivor-parent focused on their pre-war life, their experiences during the war, and their postwar lives. Everyone was asked when and how they learned about their parents’ histories. The interviews were open-ended and allowed respondents to describe their parents as well as their own upbringing. I applied a grounded theory framework to the narratives (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), seeking patterns from the data that are then analyzed and theorized. Due to space constraints, I present a limited number of individual narratives that are representative of others in the sample.
In descriptions from and about COS in the scholarly and popular literatures, we read about traumatized parents who either speak incessantly about the Holocaust or refuse to speak about it (Epstein, 1979; Kellermann, 2009; Stein, 2014). In both cases, writings suggest that these parental reactions seem to have caused distress if not trauma among their offspring. Those parents who speak incessantly about their experiences drown out their children’s needs and problems in a zero-sum context. A constant focus on their own tragedies can induce feelings of guilt or helplessness among their offspring. At the other end, the children whose survivor-parents remain silent can feel “the presence of absence,” a continuous haunting (Gordon, 2008). They understand implicitly that they are not to ask questions and are left to their own imaginations although usually they are able to pick up information from adult conversations and social gatherings. 10
Among these COS, their parents ranged from talking a great deal about their Holocaust traumas to never speaking about it, similar to what has been delineated in the literature. What is significant, however, is that there are many other kinds of parental responses in between these two poles, demonstrating more variation and nuance than the binary presented widely in the literature.
Furthermore, we ought to distinguish between the survivors’ mediated memories, on the one hand, and their performances, on the other. Drawing on their agency, they presented parts of their history according to what they wanted their children to know, how they wanted their children to understand this history, and when they wanted their children to know it. And that must be differentiated from the ways in which the second generation integrates, understands, remembers, and remediates these memories, all of which may be affected by the age, birth order, and gender of each sibling. We also must separate the second generation’s actual postmemory from the act of recounting it many decades later in an interview where memory and postmemory are remediated once again. Thus, these different strands overlap, but they are by no means the same.
Parents who spoke about the Holocaust
We will begin with one end of the continuum—parents who spoke a lot about the Holocaust. Interestingly, asked when they learned about the Holocaust, many COS could not recall a time when they didn’t know about the connection between parents and the Holocaust. “I don’t remember ever NOT knowing” several stated, or some rendition thereof. For these COS, their parents’ Holocaust history was simply part of their childhood memories in a natural manner. In some cases, these particular COS knew very early on that their parents survived something “bad” called “camp” or “the Holocaust” without really knowing what that meant. “I knew from very young that something terrible had happened to her like a Holocaust prison, that it had something to do with being Jewish. I knew it was terrible,” explained Rachel.
In only one case, there was incessant talk about the Holocaust. And, it was problematic. Peter explained that his mother and grandmother talked about the Holocaust constantly, referring to Terezenstadt “like a bad summer camp.” He feels that they used their stories to “guilt their children into appreciating what they had.” Peter’s case was more complicated because he was 10 years old when his father died. His early death constituted a major loss, but Peter was very close to his grandmother which most likely helped him through his childhood. This example has both negative and positive elements and it is unclear whether Peter feels traumatized.
For other COS, the constancy of the Shoah in their lives was not necessarily an emotional burden. Debra focused mostly on her late survivor-father during the interview. Her father and his brother survived the war hiding in the forests and stayed together throughout the war. They were the only survivors of their immediate and extended family. It seems that after the war, they continued their close connection.
Debra said that her father always talked about his experiences; it was part of growing up. I never felt like it was too much … [He] always, always, always talked about his experiences during the war. Whether he walked, we walked together or at dinnertime. It was very much part of growing up. He kept it alive through his stories. (italics, my emphasis)
Her father would tell her, “‘I feel that you’re with me.’ I was just kind of there. I couldn’t get enough of his life.” Since his death, Debra and her mother continued to talk about her father’s stories all the time.
Debra was the only COS who wept during much of the interview explaining that she gets very emotional thinking about what he went through. However, she clarified that her tears came from sadness, not because she was unhappy. Debra clearly carried some of her father’s pain and loss and although it was sad, it was a way for her to feel close to him now that he’s dead. Thus, I hesitate to categorize her feelings as negative or problematic because of the way she expresses her love of and admiration for him. But because of her sadness, perhaps this is more of a “mixed” case since there are also strong family relationships.
Like Debra’s father, Dana’s father spoke about his experiences frequently but it also does not seem to be a case of incessant talking about it or talking about it in a way that left no room for his children. Dana explains that her father was “always very open about it. He’d tell a story when something reminded him of it.” Her father spoke about the Holocaust in a matter-of-fact manner and was not emotional when he made such statements. If they were eating out, “he’d say ‘I wish I had had that in the bunker’.” Unlike Peter’s experience, Dana’s father did not intend to induce gratitude or guilt from his children. Due to the way he integrated these comments throughout daily life, the Holocaust was normalized in a way that was not belittling of or frightening for his children. “I didn’t realize that other parents weren’t like that,” she stated.
Other survivor-parents did not necessarily speak about their past in everyday discourse but answered their children’s questions openly, with age-appropriate responses. Like Dana’s father, they spoke about it sometimes, but not all the time; they also had the ability to control their emotions and to use their judgment. Heidi recounted, As kids, we’d ask a question, she’d answer it, and the discussion would move on. It was never told with a lot of emotion, just the facts … I could hear it non-emotionally, ‘ok, move on, pass the peanut butter; that discussion is over.’ It wasn’t important; it wasn’t central to who she was. It was incidental. (my emphasis)
Heidi likely conjured up the example of peanut butter to make her point about the banality of the situation. The image she paints for us is rare in this literature—a child asks a question about the Holocaust and the parent responds with an age-appropriate explanation that the child can understand and life simply continues as usual. There is no tension, no shutting down the child, and no drama. Heidi’s mother’s agency is reflected in her ability to control and manage her history. The content of Heidi’s postmemory cannot be uncoupled from the manner in which her mother provided this information about her history, and the marginal role her survivor status played in her mother’s life. Thus, even though Heidi does have postmemories, she is not heavily burdened by her mother’s trauma, it seems, because of her mother’s matter-of-fact style.
Some parents put a creative spin on their stories to make them more age-appropriate be it through humor, adventure, or some other invention. Ever since she was very young, Evelyn’s father told her bedtime stories, turning his day-to-day work in the camps into adventures. “… they did different things every day. They would dig ditches, they had very little to eat. He embellished it with fairytale-like details to make it sound more like an adventure,” adding donkeys to the stories.
“I don’t think it was so bad as a child [speaking about herself]; it was almost like an adventure that he had. He did tell me some things that were disturbing.” It is unclear how old Evelyn was when she heard about the disturbing aspects but her father seems to have been able to harness his trauma for the most part. Although he may have included some stories that were not age appropriate, Evelyn’s full narrative does not suggest that she was haunted by these stories which constitute her postmemory.
Mina’s father also told his story like it was an adventure. Her grandfather had created an escape route above the stove that went to the attic and led outdoors. Early one morning, her grandfather woke up her father and his brother so that they could escape through the attic and run to the woods where they survived for 2 years. Her father told his stories as great adventures all while they fought to survive—about bullets flying past them, spending the day hiding in a swamp, foraging for mushrooms, drinking grain alcohol, hiding in a cart, being face-to-face with a Russian Christian, and seeing a man who had been shot in the head but not killed,“play dead” in order to not be shot again.
Although two of his siblings were murdered, his stories were about “survival and triumph,” Mina stated. Certainly, her father could have cast these stories differently, as tales of desperation, hunger, cold, and misery all of which he surely experienced. Instead, he transmitted a sense of excitement and courage and described empowerment and personal victory over the enemy. He turned frightening stories into exciting adventures. He may have been deliberately protecting his children with this fantastical rendition but regardless, his stories reflect his optimism and strength.
Rachel’s mother turned macabre Holocaust experiences into humor, acting them out. Rachel recounted how, when she and her sister were 8 or 9 years old, sitting around the table,
she’d tell us stories. She made it funny—how she had to drink soup from a shoe and the shoe had a hole in it [Rachel imitates how her mother acted it out, miming holding up the shoe and drinking from it]. When you really think about it, that’s a shoe and it’s a cold climate.
Indeed, drinking watery soup through a shoe is a very disturbing image of poverty and depravity, yet she turned it into humor.
Rachel’s mother told another story about an Appell—the camp roll call. During one Appell, there were “hundreds of naked women in cold weather in the middle of the night.” Rachel’s mother must have mimicked women running around naked, with their arms crossed across their chests either out of modesty or trying to stay warm, and her daughters laughed at her imitations. Although it was entertaining when she was young, now as an adult, Rachel realizes how ghastly these stories are. She also realizes that her mother dealt with her trauma through humor. While her memories are traumatic, Rachel’s mother’s dealt with them through comedy. Rachel’s postmemory is likely mixed, with early memories of humor now tinged with more traumatic images. Her story illustrates how much a parent’s delivery of her past affects the way in which this history is transmitted to the next generation and then received and processed over time.
We would not be likely to hear about trauma from Alan, a middle-aged businessman and COS. Alan’s father and his family were saved by non-Jewish Poles who brought his family food in the forest and warned them when there was danger. Alan’s grandfather had worked with peasants in his lumber business and some of them risked their and their families’ lives to help them. His father’s “take-away” was focused on how ordinary people went to extraordinary ends to save his family in light of the laws about what happened to Poles who helped Jews. Hearing his grandparents’ stories growing up “felt like being in the middle of a movie about heroism …” As a result of his experiences, Alan’s father became a rabbi and always helped people. Alan’s postmemory then includes his family’s stories of help from and gratitude to non-Jewish farmers and his father’s lifelong reaction and life lesson that one must always help others.
Stories of heroism, triumph, happenstance or luck were threaded through the tales these and other survivor-parents told and performed for their children. This is not to say that these survivors were not traumatized by the Holocaust or that their children did not take in the horror of what occurred, but only that it did not necessarily overshadow the inspiring aspects of these memories. Although parents’ experiences included the tumult and terror of forced displacement and loss of friends, schooling, and family, some transmitted within their stories messages of resilience, strength, and fortitude and in some cases, gratitude and compassion. In other words, these COS have a postmemory of their parents’ Holocaust experiences told as stories of strength, heroism, humor, the excitement of adventure and sometimes even joy, in Mina’s case. From the kind of parent–child interactions we observe in several of the narratives, it is not difficult to imagine that some of these COS carry with them other family memories of joy, love, happiness, and warmth as well.
Parents who did not talk about the Holocaust
We now turn to those parents who did not speak about the Shoah, another common pattern seen in the literature. There are variations among this group as well, like the previous one. And just as ways of speaking about the Holocaust can be quite different, not all silences are the same. Some parents chose not to talk about their Holocaust histories and others simply could not speak about the past; it was not an option. Those in the former group were more agentic and made a deliberate decision for silence or near-silence so as to not burden their children. 11 They were protective and wanted their children to have as normal a childhood as possible.
A different kind of silence occurs when survivors are unable to speak about their past and it is not a choice. In these cases, survivors simply cannot access and open their well-locked “inner crypt” (Abraham and Torok cited in Schwab, 2010: 49) and talk about their past. These survivors usually did not explain this to their children beyond “I can’t talk about it” or giving no response at all. Of course, they too wanted the best for their children, without a doubt. These two different types of silences may not look different but it is possible that they feel different to a child and have different effects since the histories of those who cannot talk about it are simply inaccessible to the survivor, like a protective steel wall. This analytical distinction is important in terms of what occurs later, as children grow up.
Ted’s parents did not talk about the past but also did not shield or protect him from it. His parents were in the Belski resistance group in a Polish forest and Ted was proud of his father’s history as a resistance fighter. When he was growing up, his parents had reunions with 6–8 couples from the group several times a year and they’d sit around, eating herring and drink their booze and smoke their cigarettes. The more booze, the more songs came out and the more songs that came out, more tears. There were lots of stories, most of them very disturbing. And I soaked it up … my parents went through unspeakable horrors.
His father’s job in the ghetto before his parents escaped was to haul dead bodies. One of the bodies he had to haul was a cousin’s infant who the Nazis had smashed against the wall. “How do you process that?” Ted asked. Still, his parents did not try and shelter him in any way.
Ted’s father did not talk much in general. “My dad was not a man of many words. He didn’t give us advice, he lived by example.” He was hard on his sons. His mother also did not share her Holocaust past with her children. But interestingly, they did not keep their sons from being present at these reunions where they seem to have heard too much for their ages. His narrative suggests that these stories affected him deeply.
There was little communication in his family about the Holocaust or much else and it does not appear to have been a warm family. His parents separated when he was 18 years and he recounts that his parents’ marriage was not based on love. His postmemory is likely to include some trauma based on the stories he overheard and his parents’ non-communicative styles. Interestingly, his children have close relationships with his parents. Despite the difficulties he described, he is very sympathetic toward them: “they were flawed human beings. But I understand more now.” In their study of Israeli COS, Wiseman and Barber (2008) found that many in their sample also changed their views of their parents after having children and were able to forgive them for some of their behaviors. This belated forgiveness and understanding can certainly modify some of the more traumatic aspects of postmemory.
Marsha’s father is one of the survivor-parents who also chose silence. He claimed that he could not remember his life before the war. However, she and her sister were able to figure out what happened from their parents’ conversations in Yiddish. Her parents cried whenever speaking about the Holocaust. Parental silence combined with survivors speaking about the Shoah only in Yiddish seems to have been a pattern among many families. Observing parents’ emotional distress such as crying can be very disturbing to children. Yet Marsha also stated that “they focused more on being proud to be Jewish rather than the Holocaust.” This suggests that although Marsha and her siblings could see and feel some of their parents’ pain, their parents actively encouraged them to feel positive about the identity and tradition they inherited. Still, this suggests a painful postmemory that includes the upset of seeing parents cry.
Later in life, Marsha’s father had gall bladder surgery, which must have deeply affected him, in terms of his sense of mortality. After that, “he couldn’t stop talking! He was like a fire hydrant!” From the father who had claimed he could not recall his pre-war life, as an adult, Marsha found out that before the war, he had been married, had had a child, and saw his child being killed. Marsha’s father had a traumatic history but only shared it with his second set of children when they were adults after he experienced a health scare. He chose not to share these horrific stories with them when they were young by “forgetting,” but later in life, he told them everything. Thus, Marsha’s postmemory expanded later in life and now includes a very traumatic story.
Dave’s father Leon was hidden in a monastery during the war. One of the monks, a jovial man, would go into town regularly and drink with the Germans in order to get information about upcoming raids. That way, he could move Leon elsewhere temporarily, to keep him safe. Dave’s father deliberately did not tell his children much about his history when they were growing up and it is not clear whether they asked him much. “I had very limited knowledge of what he had gone through.” According to Dave, his father “knew that we needed to be allowed to be kids and not having this hanging over us. That’s an amazing gift that he gave me.” When reading Helen Epstein’s (1979) book, Dave could not relate to the complaints and problems expressed by COS and restated, “it is a gift they gave me.”
It does not appear that Dave felt anything was wrong when he was young which is a little unusual in this cohort. Similar to Marsha’s experience, the silence was time-limited in Dave’s family and shifted due to life-cycle change. Dave’s father eventually told his entire story to his children who accompanied him on a trip back to his childhood home. Dave could be categorized in the first group of families where parents talked in age-appropriate ways; however, besides the very basic outline of the story, Dave’s father Leon was silent about his past when his children were growing up.
Dave describes growing up in a “very happy house” in which his father “refused to be defined by his Holocaust experiences.” Dave claimed that his father was a very funny person who could find humor in anything. What Leon taught his children is that “you celebrate the person, not what eventually happened to them out of their realm of control.” This kind of attitude is rare in the literature although we see a similar viewpoint in Heidi’s mother in the last section. Dave’s descriptions of his upbringing and home sound very positive. He was the most forthright COS about how grateful he is to his father for his attitude toward the Shoah and how little it affected his upbringing.
Joseph’s parents did not talk about the Holocaust with him but his father “talked about nothing BUT the Holocaust to my children.” They felt their survival was a “badge of honor” but did not speak to their children about it in order to protect them and to focus all their attention on becoming American. Many researchers, myself included, have found that survivors are more open about their past with their grandchildren, whether it is due to a sense of mortality, not being as busy with working and raising a family, seeing “Schindler’s List,” or other reasons. It is striking that while some parents wanted to protect their children from the horrors of their pasts, they were less worried about its effects on their grandchildren.
Joseph’s parents were Greek Jews and very proud of their Sephardic background. They sent Joseph to friends in Salonika every summer since he was twelve. He describes a family in which there was great joy and celebration of their heritage. Joseph’s father used to say that “life is about sharing the good from generation to generation” which may explain why there were 350 people at his bar mitzvah!
Besides parents who wanted to protect their children from the Holocaust by not talking about it, some COS wanted to protect their parents by not asking about it, what has been termed “mutual overprotection” (Wiseman et al., 2006). And then, there are COS we rarely hear about—those who do not ask their parents questions because they are not interested. Estelle admits that at an age when she could have asked her father, she was self-absorbed. Indeed, it is rare to read about a child of survivors who is not interested in his parent’s past because of all US studies of COS are based on self-selected samples. Many COS in this study refer to siblings who are uninterested in their family history and uninvolved. But since we only hear from those who are interested enough to volunteer for a study, we know little about the tens of thousands of the COS who do not. To conclude this section, a few parents in the entire sample did not tell their stories to their children but almost everyone eventually told their entire story, either to their children, their grandchildren or to Spielberg’s Shoah Visual History project.
Discussion and conclusion
What can we learn about postmemory from these narratives of COS? First, it is clear that their postmemory cannot be separated from other family memories, particularly the way in which parents told their histories and when and how they told them. Postmemory is embedded in other family memories, including laughter, happiness, love, and joy, among others that exist alongside it. There are also other more “negative” family memories—of sadness, tension, and coldness—but far fewer than there were memories of positivities. And there are COS with a mixture of both affirming and more negative family memories. Most interviewees did not sugarcoat their pasts. Unless this was an especially odd assortment of COS which I do not believe it was, what was presented here is only a portion of all the possible affirming family memories that they carry. For most of these COS, their postmemory exists alongside other positive memories under the larger rubric of family memories.
One colleague suggested to me that these narratives reflect nostalgia, seeming to dismiss the relevance of these affirming family memories. Of course, it is very likely that with aging and the experience of parenting, middle-aged people in general—COS included—may feel more appreciation for their parents and nostalgia for and about the past. However, life-cycle stage is apparent in all of the research on COS. Indeed, the early research that initiated this field reflects their problems as young adults “such as identity crises, dependency-independency issues, sexual problems …” and the like (Ornstein, 1985: 101). 12 However, we cannot reject more affirming family memories because of middle-aged nostalgia without setting aside earlier accounts due to their young adulthood. We cannot disregard some family memories as nostalgic, but then readily accept all memories and postmemories of trauma. In some sense, dismissing these narratives as nostalgia denies or at least questions the agency and understanding of survivors and COS while privileging the views of academics.
Second, an analysis of how their postmemory was created demonstrates the importance of focusing on agency. The vast majority of these survivor-parents exerted their agency when they told their children parts, all, or none of their Holocaust stories. Most (but not all) parents managed and controlled what and how they transmitted their histories to their children. They also controlled when they told their children, creating strategies such as imparting age-appropriate information, skipping over the wartime period in their stories, or using their creativity to turn their histories into adventure or humor. Psychologist George Bonanno (2004: 24) points out that those who have experienced trauma may cope by exhibiting resilience through positive emotions, such as humor, but such reactions have been “either ignored or dismissed as a form of unhealthy denial.” The use of humor among some of these parents reflects their strength and their ability to cope by not letting their past overwhelm their life or that of their families.
Third, the ways in which survivor-parents spoke or did not speak to their children about their histories reveals a much more interesting and differentiated set of strategies, adding new categories to the binary presented in the literature. The proto-typical groupings of either speaking about the Holocaust all the time or refusing to speak about it did not reflect the vast majority of these parent-survivors’ actions. There is much more dynamism in the ways that parents transmitted their past (or not) than is portrayed in the literature because parents often changed their strategy over time, usually telling their children more as they became teenagers or young adults, or eventually telling their grandchildren. This suggests that we should think about how parents transmitted their stories more dynamically and longitudinally; not as a one-time static event.
We might consider a typology of how survivors imparted their stories under the two broader categories of Telling and Not Telling, with attention to strategies that draw on parents’ agency, such as imparting age-appropriate information. It would also be useful to add another layer of analysis that reflects the effects of these actions on their children, for example, whether they were able to process it or felt traumatized. As we saw with Debra and to some extent Dana, survivor-parents who spoke about their past a great deal do not necessarily overwhelm or psychically damage their children. In their cases, the narratives and stories were deeply appreciated or simply woven into the texture of daily life. Similarly, Heidi’s mother used her agency to make her Holocaust history as matter-of-fact and as banal as peanut butter, a household item that is not usually associated with trauma.
It seems very likely that any intergenerational transmission of trauma may have been interrupted or lessened by parents’ agency and communication styles. Parents who were mindful of being age-appropriate with their children as well as those who transformed their stories into adventures or comedy may have actively intervened in the transmission of trauma. According to Israeli psychologist Natan Kellermann (2009: 86), a positive and more open parental communication style can mitigate and disrupt the transmission of trauma. But what also stands out in the interviews is that many survivor-parents bequeathed positive life lessons to their children through their telling of their histories of trauma, such as helping others, generosity, resilience, persistence, humor, compassion, and pride. All of these traits might be termed “resilience,” but it is important to deconstruct and differentiate all the various traits that seem to get packed into this one concept. The specific and creative ways many individual parents conveyed their histories—and contributed to their children’s postmemories—disrupts the trope of the inevitability of the transmission of trauma.
To conclude, affirming family memories are linked to the postmemory of some children of Jewish Holocaust survivors. Postmemory exists in relation to other family memories all of which are dynamic and may change in their level of importance and place of prominence at different times. Affirming family memories may recalibrate and downsize the central role trauma is thought to play according to much of the literature on COS. These memories of positivities portray a more holistic view of postwar families while disrupting notions of trauma and victimization as inevitable. Although these narratives cannot be generalized beyond this sample of COS, they provide the groundwork for imagining alternative, more affirming relationships and practices in other survivor families where trauma did not reign supreme. In addition, these findings also suggest that trauma and victimization need not constitute the only basis of their identity as children of Holocaust survivors. Finally, these family memories of positivities suggest that we need a new conceptual language for non-traumatic memories. Perhaps postmemories of joy are the place to start.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Jessica Ortner and Tea Sindbaeck Andersen for their support and helpful feedback. Thanks to Judith Gerson, Irit Dekel, Jeffrey Peck and two anonymous reviewers for their comments. I also benefited from comments at a seminar I presented at the University of Lund as well as the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung at the Technical University in Berlin where I spent my sabbatical; special thanks to Prof. Barbara Törnquist-Plewa and especially to Prof. Dr Stefanie Schüler-Springorum. My gratitude to Tanaya Dutta Gupta for her tremendous asssistance with this project, always coupled with cheerfulness.
