Ever After: Postmemory, Fairy Tales and the Body in Second-Generation Memoirs by Jewish Women

Abstract

This article focuses on four recent texts that raise questions about the relationship between memory and, in Marianne Hirsch’s term, ‘postmemory’, for the children of Jewish Holocaust survivors, the so called ‘second generation’. Readings of Anne Karpf’s The War After (1996), Lisa Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead (1999), Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation (1998) and Hoffman’s recent meditation on Holocaust memory, After Such Knowledge (2005) form the basis of this discussion. Each text addresses how the past shapes a sense of self but they also all problematise the idea that memory constitutes a secure way of understanding one’s own story. They thereby create narratives of the self that recognise the often provisional, unstable nature of both memory and subjectivity. This article reflects on these themes by exploring two, interwoven, strands that recur throughout these texts: the use of fairy tales as a structuring motif and the way in which postmemory is experienced as a story that is written on the body.