Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory by Victoria Aarons, Alan L. Berger

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 215 transcendence in sacramental theology, questions that might give some readers pause. Nevertheless, despite this tension, Potts achieves his aim of emphasizing the profound significance of moral decisions and ethical acts, the things we do and say in the here and now, as theological realities. In doing so, he further adds to the conversation about McCarthy’s achievements as a writer, and also calls upon Christianity to rethink its understanding of suffering and salvation, its posture toward others, and ultimately, its identity as the body of Christ. Todd Edmondson Milligan College Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger Northwestern University Press, 2017. ix + 263 pp. $99.95 cloth, $34.95 paperback. Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger’s Third-Generation Holocaust Representation : Trauma, History, and Memory joins a growing body of studies that critically engages with third-generation Holocaust writing, a field that is becoming an increasingly important area of inquiry, not only due to the number of literary accounts published by this generation but also with the disappearance of the last Holocaust witnesses. While the main focus of this book is on writers who are the grandchildren of either Holocaust survivors or refugees from the Holocaust, the authors also offer a carefully historicized situation of these writers in relation to the literature of the first and second generations. One of the key challenges of third generation writers, such as Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Julie Orringer, is to “attempt to capture memory and fill the ever-widening gap between those who directly suffered the events of the Holocaust and lived to recount their experiences and those for whom the particular history can only be imaginatively reconstructed from an approximation of that time and place” (4). In trying to bridge the gap between the past and the present, Marianne Hirsch’s well-known distinction between postmemory as familial and affiliative is crucial for the third generation, and as Aarons and Berger show, they exemplify both of these aspects of postmemory in their writing as they engage with a memory that Religion & Literature 216 has been passed down from previous generations at the same time that they share it with their own generation. Although the Holocaust remains hard to understand for the third generation , it nevertheless plays a significant role in the ways in which they define their identity. This tension between historical distance and cultural proximity also manifests itself in the literary productions of these writers, as they have to become “literary detectives,” who “must go in active search of the stories from the past and the challenges to personal agency that they present” (15). Storytelling is important in this process, not only in imaginatively reconstructing a distant past, but also due to its centrality in Jewish religious and literary traditions. Midrash and lamentation often provided the first generation with narrative tropes to “enact rupture, disjunction, incoherence, confusion, ellipsis, and disintegration as a means of filling in the gaps in perception” (48). For third-generation novelists, however, theological concerns, including the Holocaust as a challenge for “traditional Jewish theological responses to catastrophe, such as the promise of a World to Come and the belief that God intervenes in history” (111), have increasingly been transformed into ethical concerns. This also raises important questions about appropriate ways of representing the Holocaust and its horrors and mediating this experience for increasingly distant audiences. The third generation is not only invested in considering the past in their literary accounts but often engaged in the present as well, demonstrating, as Aarons and Berger put it, “an almost obsessive pattern of contemporizing the Holocaust, of negotiating the Holocaust as a parallel event to other, more contemporary tragedies” (35). The authors examine the reasons underlying the creation of these comparative contexts and conclude that this “is less to match or to join recent historical events with the brutalities and atrocities of the Holocaust but rather to create fitting conditions to return to the moral baseline, both the point of departure and the final measure of suffering” (36). This constitutes a significant rhetorical move as it suggests that rather than the Holocaust serving as a comparison...