Generational Shifts in Post-Holocaust Australian Jewish Autobiography

Abstract

This essay considers post-Holocaust Australian Jewish autobiography with respect to six broad issues: authorial motivation and the contexts in which the narratives are written; shifts in narrative practice as between first- and second-generation works (included in the latter are child survivor memoirs); attitudes to Australia and the extent to which various authors write the adoptive culture in their autobiographies; theoretical and methodological issues that arise in reading such narratives; questions of form and aesthetic value; and questions of genre. I argue for a referential approach to texts such as these — an approach that contrasts with the postmodern one advocated by Sneja Gunew in her account of ethnic minority writing in Framing Marginality. The essay concludes with a reading of the work of three autobiographers who are Australian child survivors of Hungarian origin: Paul Kraus, Andrew Riemer and Susan Varga. The prefatory quotation from Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation is intended to indicate, among other things, certain commonalities between Australian texts and those written by Jews elsewhere.