Children Of Holocaust Survivors Research Articles

Transposition, generationality, and trauma: From psychoanalytic Holocaust studies to post-mnemonic cultures

The concept of transposition, initially linked to the study of affective transmission of trauma across generations, has not progressed far beyond psychoanalytic Holocaust studies, and its broader cultural implications remain underexplored. Through its presentation and appraisal, I make an argument for the critical and epistemic potential of transposition, both recognizing and moving beyond the specific framework of its original articulation, namely the clinical psychoanalytic work with children of Holocaust survivors in the 1970s and 1980s. First, I outline the trajectories of the emergence of the concept, focussing on the work of Judith Kestenberg. I contextualize transposition in relation to the psychoanalytic nexus of trauma and mourning, particularly regarding the effects of what Alexander Mitscherlich and Marguerite Mitscherlich called “the inability to mourn”. I then discuss how, while contemporary trauma discourses have paid little attention to transposition, this concept has been revived in studies of postmemory. Through a close reading of the novel The White Book by contemporary South Korean writer Han Kang, I conclude that the shift of transposition from a clinical notion to a cultural and literary idiom of cross-generational mnemonic legacies marks a significant discursive change, and it paves the way for a broader interrogation of the psychosocial costs of traumatic remembrance.

INVESTIGATING HISTORICAL TRAUMA PREVALENCE AND TRANSMISSION PATHWAYS AMONG AFRICAN AMERICANS: CENTERING COMMUNITY WELLNESS PRACTICES

Existing historical trauma studies have advanced important theoretical frameworks for understanding biopsychosocial effects observed among children of Holocaust survivors and contemporary Indigenous Peoples. This study used an existing application of historical trauma conceptualized as historical perceived loss and associated symptoms of that perceived loss such as grief, anger, sadness and depression to determine prevalence and correlates of historical loss among 129 African Americans aged 18 to over 65 from Illinois and Florida in the United States. The respondents also completed a survey to identify potential historical trauma transmission pathways. The results indicated respondents reported they thought about historical losses such as land, language, and spiritual ways at least yearly or at special times and sometimes or more had feelings or associated symptoms of historical loss such as sadness or depression or being uncomfortable around White people. Bivariate and multivariate correlational analyses showed significantly statistical differences between age and historical loss and associated symptoms where younger respondents had more frequent thoughts about historical loss and experienced more associated emotions, which was unexpected. A correlation was also found between occasionally hearing family stories of enslavement and discrimination and thoughts of historical loss

Children of Holocaust Survivors: The Experience of Engaging with a Traumatic Family History

This study explored the motivation and the experiences of children of Holocaust survivors who were actively engaged with the traumatic histories of their parents. Our findings are consistent with contemporary views of the intergenerational transmission of the effects of trauma to descendants of Holocaust survivors and reflect a mixture of resilience and vulnerabilities. We interviewed 24 siblings from 11 families who were adult children of Holocaust survivors, alongside the experience of the first author (IK), also a child of Holocaust survivors. An interpretative phenomenological analysis of those interviews identified two overarching themes related to the motivation to gather information about their parents’ stories and their experience of seeking this knowledge. Two themes relate to motivation. The first captured a sense of immersion without choice in the family story emanating from extreme loss and grief and a deep awareness of the communal nature of Jewish history. The second theme encompassed a compulsion and desire to leave a meaningful legacy of their parents’ experiences for future generations. These themes were linked to themes capturing the experience of engaging with their parents’ traumatic stories and describing intense ambivalence. One theme reflected a reluctance to gather information detailing the parents’ trauma. Yet, the other theme emphasised positive outcomes derived from knowledge, including appreciation of their parents’ resilience and opportunities to bear witness to and support their ageing parents. Overall, the data reveal the close links between family histories and adjustment to a traumatic past.

The Enigma of Memory: Trauma, the Cycle of Unassimilated Experiences, and the Work of Transference

ABSTRACT A 20-year treatment of a child of Holocaust survivors is examined considering Laplanche’s concepts of implantation and intromission, Laub’s concept of the empty circle, attachment theory, and reflective parenting, as well as the live third of therapy as witness to dark and unbearable traumas. Laplanche viewed intromissions as a violent form of implantation of the parent’s unconscious that prevents the individual child from translating and repressing in a way that would be expected and normal. In the process of intromission, the ability to metabolize messages is blocked. From Laplanche’s work the article asks: What if the “brute fact” has influenced the unconscious sexual with the dark destruction, annihilation, and the loss of the societal third? What happens when the “implantations” from those earlier significations are accompanied by intromissions, violent messages that may block the process of translation and retranslation? What would the movement and temporality of translation–detranslation look like? If the ability to signify has been lost through this devastating trauma, what is there for the child to translate?

On The Im/Possibility of Mourning the Holocaust

This meditation on the nature of transgenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma and the possibility/impossibility of mourning the Holocaust was triggered, like the residue of a waking dream, by the author’s chance encounter with a private, intimate moment. This paper examines four evoked experiential listening positions that the author places in relation to her own responses as a child of Holocaust survivors. As with dreams, her meditation aims at healing; reveals personal infantile and neurotic defenses, conflicts, and memories; and bears on current social and cultural ways to relate to trauma.

Inherited Traumatic Threads: Postmemory and the Dis/function of Hand-Me-Downs in Bernice Eisenstein’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors

Bernice Eisenstein’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors demonstrates how hand-me-downs function as physical links that Eisenstein uses when attempting to bridge the gaps between herself, her late father, and his Holocaust past in order to address her postmemory; however, as much as these hand-me-downs allow her to address her postmemories, they reinscribe inherited traumas that stem from her father’s Holocaust past. Eisenstein’s work serves as a generative example of how the second generation’s relationships to such clothing often reflect how they inherit and are “dressed in” their postmemories.L’ouvrage de Bernice Eisenstein, I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, montre comment les vêtements usés fonctionnent comme des liens physiques qu’Eisenstein utilise pour tenter de combler le fossé entre elle-même, son défunt père et le passé de l’Holocauste de ce dernier, afin d’aborder sa post-mémoire ; cependant, autant ces vêtements lui permettent d’aborder sa post-mémoire, autant ils réinscrivent les traumatismes hérités du passé de l’Holocauste de son père. Le travail d’Eisenstein sert d’exemple génératif de la façon dont les relations de la deuxième génération avec ces vêtements reflètent souvent la façon dont ils héritent et sont « habillés » de leurs post-mémoires.

“To Extract from It Some Sort of Beautiful Thing”: The Holocaust in the Families and Fiction of Nava Semel and Etgar Keret

In literary narratives by Nava Semel (1954–2017) and Etgar Keret (b. 1967), both Israeli children of Holocaust survivors, readers encounter the kinds of searching questions about inheriting the burden of traumatic inheritance, witnessing, and postmemory frequently intrinsic to second-generation literature in other national contexts. However, their works are further distinguished by acute examinations that probe the moral fabric of Israeli society itself, including dehumanization of the enemy through slogans and other debased forms of language and misuses of historical memory. In addition, their fiction measures the distance between the suffering and pain of intimate family memory (what Semel once dubbed their “private Shoah”) and ceremonial, nationalistic forms of Holocaust memory, and the apartness felt by the children of survivors who sense themselves somehow at odds with their society’s heroic values. Semel’s numerous articles, and fiction as well as nonfiction books, frequently address second and third-generation trauma, arguably most impressively in her harrowing five-part novel And the Rat Laughed (2001) that spans 150 years but most crucially juxtaposes the experiences of a “hidden child” in a remote wartime Polish village repeatedly raped with that of her grandchild writing a dutiful report for her class in contemporary Israel. Elsewhere, in a distant future, a bewildered but determined anthropologist is set on assembling a scientific report with coherent meaning from the fragmented “myths” inherited from the barbaric past. Over the years, Keret (generally known more for whimsical and surreal tales) has often spoken in interviews as well as his memoir about being raised by survivors. “Siren”, set in a Tel Aviv high school, is one of the most acclaimed of Keret’s realist stories (and required reading in Israeli high schools), raises troubling questions about Israeli society’s official forms of Holocaust mourning and remembrance and individual conscience. It is through their portrayals of the cognitive and moral struggles of children and adolescents, the destruction of their innocence, and gradual awakening into compassionate awareness that Semel and Keret most shine, each unwavering in preserving the Shoah’s legacy as a form of vigilance against society’s abuses, whether toward “internal” or “external” others.

“Sometimes Your Memories Are Not Your Own”: The Graphic Turn and the Future of Holocaust Representation

“The legacy of the Shoah” writes Eva Hoffman, a child of Holocaust survivors, “is being passed on to … the post-generation … The inheritance … is being placed in our hands, perhaps in our trust.” We are entering an era that will witness the end of direct survivor testimony. As we move farther and farther from the events of the Shoah, subsequent generations, who see their own lives shaped by the defining rupture of the past, continue to respond to the call of memory. The current era has seen a burgeoning of Holocaust literary representation in the evolving genre of graphic novels, narratives that reanimate and materialize the past through the juxtapositions and intersections of text and image. Calling upon the Deuteronomic imperative to “teach your children,” second and third-generation Holocaust writers, through the hybrid form of the graphic novel, attempt to give shape to the traumatic imprint of the Shoah and its haunting aftermath for generations extending beyond that history.

Specters of the Past: Transgenerational Memory in Miriam Katin’s Graphic Memoirs We Are On Our Own and Letting It Go

This paper thematizes the topic of the eyewitness report based on Miriam Katin’s transgenerational point of view on the Holocaust, which has a cathartic impact on the author through self-reflexivity. In We Are On Our Own, Miriam Katin draws on her own cultural and transgenerational memory, which is heavily influenced by her mother. The author unveils her parents’ story and elaborates on how she, as the child of Holocaust survivors, has dealt with the atrocities of the Holocaust throughout her life. In her second memoir, Letting It Go, Katin expands this point of view and not only addresses the Holocaust from the view of the second generation, but adds another layer to dealing with the Nazi past, namely the point of view of the third generation. Accordingly, it is through Katin’s son, Ilan, that Miriam learns not to encounter Berlin stereotypically and embittered anymore. Modern day Berlin welcomes Katin and her family with open arms and is not comparable with the former capital of National Socialism anymore. Therefore, both graphic memoirs can be regarded as a process of coming to terms with the trauma of the Holocaust through the technique of self-reflexivity.

Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory by Victoria Aarons

Reviewed by: Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory by Victoria Aarons Alan L. Berger (bio) Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory By Victoria Aarons. Rutgers University Press, 2020. 241 pp. Prophesizing in the wake of a devastating locust plague, the prophet Joel admonishes his listeners, a group of aged men: "Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your fathers? Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation" (Joel 2:3). A locust plague then, the Shoah now. What does the biblical injunction have to do with the twentieth-century catastrophe? And what is its message for second- and third-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors? Several crucial links emerge: Each trauma is hideous. What is the nature of Jewish life after a physical and psychic devastation? Both the locust plague and the Shoah become part of the fabric of Jewish existence, prompting self-reflection on crucial psychological and theological issues concerned with Jewish identity. The imperative to bear witness to the intergenerational transmission of trauma engendered by these disasters is of utmost importance. The transmission of trauma endures, but its artistic manifestation will inevitably assume new forms depending on shifting cultural norms. Victoria Aarons's breathtaking study, Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory, is a masterpiece of interpretation that calls to mind Joel's prophecy. Casting her keen interpretive net widely, she focuses primarily on the second and third generations, the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. The trope of memory looms large in her intelligent and insightful study. But this in turn begs the central question, what does memory mean in the context of those who are generationally and experientially removed from the Holocaust? Further, how do the images help reveal the central points made in graphic novels? Aarons, a gifted literary critic, responds to these questions in her engaging and lucid discussion of the hybrid nature of contemporary graphic novels. [End Page 336] At the outset it is important to recognize that Aarons has chosen graphic narratives as her subject and not comic books. In the author's words, graphic novels perform a variety of tasks: "They evoke the passage of time and memories both personal and collective and thus produce a material extension of trauma" (15). Moreover, "As the stories open up to history and to generations, we find a widening of the lens of perspective, a multidirectional, polyphonic chorus of voice and position from which the past is unfastened, retrieved, and negotiated" (15). Aarons analyzes five graphic novels, which illuminate her main thesis concerning the retrieval and negotiation of the past. Her book includes two second-generation works, Martin Lemelman's Mendel's Daughter (2006) and Bernice Eisenstein's I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006); a child survivor's (auto)biographical memoir, Miriam Katin's We Are on Our Own; and two graphic novels by the third generation, Amy Kurzweil's Flying Couch (2016) and the late Joe Kubert's Yossel: April 19, 1943 (2003)—a counternarrative imagining the fate of a Jewish youth fighting in the Warsaw ghetto. Aarons ends her discussion with Al Feldstein and Bernie Krigstein's Master Race (1955), an eight-page short story that is "in many ways a precursor to the genre of Holocaust graphic narratives" (178). Since Art Spiegelman's breakthrough Maus volumes over three decades ago, the concept of comics as a representational genre for the Holocaust has been widely discussed. But what does Spiegelman mean by using comics? For him, the word comics should be read as co-mix, that is, text and image together telling a story that is—in his case, but not always—both biographical and autobiographical. Graphic narratives employ facial expression, perspective, and shadows to help convey feelings, moods, and engagement with, or withdrawal from, the obligation to remember. Moreover, co-mix has significant genre implications, as Aarons's crisp discussions reveal. She notes correctly that over the past two decades the genre of the graphic narrative "has moved from underground to mainstream," and that the graphic novel typically combines the "authentically personal and the complexly political" (2). Consequently, graphic novels have emerged as...

The Intergenerational Transmission of Holocaust Trauma: A Psychoanalytic Theory Revisited

In this paper, I revisit the theory of an intergenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma. The theory argues that psychological symptoms and ego impairments observed in Holocaust survivors’ children are unique: a consequence of a vicarious exposure to their parents’ traumatic experiences. Using qualitative and quantitative research methods, I reviewed fifty-five case descriptions of children of Holocaust survivors. Though many decades have passed since the inception of this theory, the psychoanalytic literature continues to discuss the ongoing psychological difficulties of survivors and their offspring. I posit that the discourse of trauma that emerged in the wake of the analyses of the children of Holocaust survivors also reflects external factors and unconscious vicissitudes related to the sharing of a “chosen trauma.” I liken the creation of the theory about the Holocaust survivors’ children to the construction of a monument. Within that monument the anxieties, projections, and theoretical and political ideologies, as well as the unconscious experiences, of theorists are contained.

The Search for Politanky

As the child of Holocaust survivors, I had thought that after more than seventy-five years little else could be learnt. But I was wrong. After my second journey to Ukraine and Transnistria in order to discover how my family had survived when hundreds of thousands of Jews had perished, I realized just how much so. Bukovina’s Jews from Romania, Ukraine and Bessarabia had faced horrific pogroms, forced evacuations and death marches, and had then crossed the Dniester River into Transnistria. These are lesser known topics in Holocaust history. Of the 450,000 Jews sent there, approximately 250,000 died, not by guns, gas or ovens but through thirst, starvation, disease and bullet-free mass murders carried out by the Nazis and their Romanian allies. Transnistria’s Holocaust history must be visited and revised. We owe it to the survivors, ourselves, our children and to history itself, before altering what has been written, or not, becomes impossible.

Postmemories of joy? Children of Holocaust survivors and alternative family memories

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

Stanley Nattel.

Stanley Nattel.

Transgenerational Transmission of Holocaust Trauma and Its Expressions in Literature

Trauma is a central concept in the historiography of the Holocaust. In both the historiographical and the psychoanalytical research on the subject, the Holocaust is perceived not as a finite event that took place in the past, but as one that continues to exist and to affect the families of survivors and the Jewish people. In the 1950s–1960s, evidence began emerging that Holocaust trauma was not limited to the survivors themselves, but was passed on to the next generation born after the Holocaust and raised in its shadow. It is possible to see the effects of growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust and transgenerational transmission of trauma in many aspects of the second-generation children’s lives. In this article, I examine the representations of these symptoms in David Grossman’s novel See Under: Love, which deals with the subject of the Holocaust through the perspective of Momik, a child of Holocaust survivors. Grossman teaches us that writing itself has the potential to heal. He also shows us that every one of us contains both victim and aggressor, and that, under certain circumstances, the “Nazi beast” may awaken within each of us.

‘And Yet, What Would We Be Without Memory?’ Visualizing Memory in Two Canadian Graphic Texts

Abstract Since “we live in a culture of confession” (Gilmore 2001: 2; Rak 2005: 2) a rapidly growing popularity of various forms of life writing seems understandable. The question of memory is usually an important part of the majority of autobiographical texts. Taking into account both the popularity of life writing genres and their recent proliferation, it is interesting to see how the question “what would we be without memory?” (Sebald 1998 [1995]: 255) resonates within more experimental auto/biographical texts such as a graphic memoir/novel I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006) by Bernice Eisenstein and a volume of illustrated poetry and a biographical elegy published together as Correspondences (2013) by Anne Michaels and Bernice Eisenstein. These two experimental works, though representing disparate forms of writing, offer new stances on visualization of memory and correspondences between text and visual image. The aim of this paper is to analyze the ways in which the two authors discuss memory as a fluid concept yet, at the same time, one having its strong, ghostly presence. The discussion will also focus on the interplay between memory and postmemory as well as correspondences between the texts and the equally important visual forms accompanying them such as drawings, portraits, sketches, and the bookbinding itself.

Symptoms of Psychological Problems among Children of Holocaust Survivors: Faye Sholiton's The Interview

Symptoms of Psychological Problems among Children of Holocaust Survivors: Faye Sholiton's The Interview

Performing grief: the music of three children of Holocaust survivors – Geddy Lee, Yehuda Poliker, and Mike Brant

ABSTRACT“I always have music in my heart and no one can take that away from me.” These words from the oldest Holocaust survivor, Alice Herz-Sommer, have a particular resonance for this paper, in which I explore the work of three popular musicians – Geddy Lee, Yehuda Poliker, and Mike Brant – who also happen to be children of Holocaust survivors. Using theories from scholars who have studied the psychology of the “second-generation,” I shed light on the diverse ways in which these musicians have confronted their trauma and the trauma of their parents. For Lee and Poliker, this has taken the form of developing personal identities on and off stage as Jewish musicians with a cause, either for social justice or for preserving Holocaust memory; for Mike Brant, who committed suicide in 1975, his career and body of work involved a toxic mix of superstardom and depression, which many in his family, even his mother who survived the Holocaust, linked to his inability to address childhood anxieties about his parents’ suffering. The study is a revealing window into two worlds that rarely intersect – that of pop (and especially rock) music and Holocaust trauma. Far from trivializing the study of the latter, this essay enriches our understanding on a number of fronts, especially with regard to how ordinary people who suffered in extraordinary ways sought healing through the power of song.

The witness of the unspoken experience: Postmemory in Bernice Eisenstein’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors

The witness of the unspoken experience: Postmemory in Bernice Eisenstein’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors

Interrupting Intergenerational Trauma: Children of Holocaust Survivors and the Third Reich

This qualitative study used descriptive phenomenology to examine experiences of healing and reconciliation, for children of Holocaust survivors, through dialogue with children of the Third Reich. Descriptive phenomenological interviews with 5 participants yielded several common essential elements. The findings indicated that participants experienced a sense of healing of intergenerational trauma, a reduction in prejudice, and increase in motivation for pro-social behaviors. The degree to which these findings may reflect a shift in sense of identity, as well as the implications of the findings for conflict resolution, intergroup conflict reduction and peace psychology are discussed.