Living in the Presence of an Absence. The Puzzling Holocaust Legacy of the American Post-Holocaust Generation
Abstract
This article deals with second-generation Holocaust literature, i.e. writings belonging to the generation born after the Holocaust and grown up in its aftermath. Specifically I dwell on two considerably different Jewish-American novels, which reflect two different natures of Holocaust inheritance and, hence, two distinct paths, featuring second-generation Holocaust literature: Thane Rosenbaum’s Second-Hand Smoke (1999) and Irene Dische’s Pious Secrets (1991). My understanding of these narratives is grounded in the cultural distinction between particularist and universalist second-generation Holocaust writers outlined by Alan Berger in Children of Job, American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (1997). The argument that I present interprets Rosenbaum’s novel as a particularist depiction of the Holocaust legacy, whereas Dische’s book is associated to a universalist perspective towards this event and its inheritance.References
Berger, Alan. 1997. Children of Job. American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust. Albany: State University of New York Press
Berger, Alan, and Gloria Cronin, edit. 2004. Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Representation in the Post-Modern World. New York: State University of New York Press
Cohen, Beth. 2007. Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Post-war America. Rutgers University Press
Crownshaw, Richard. 2010. The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Basingstoke; UK: Palgrave Macmillan
Dische, Irene. 1991. Pious Secrets. New York City: Bloomsbury
Epstein, Helen. 1988. Children of the Holocaust. Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors. New York: Penguin USA
Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. 1982. By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Fackenheim, Emil. 1982. To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought. New York: Schocken Books
Fackenheim, Emil. 2000 a. “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust. A Fragment” in A Holocaust Reader. Responses to the Nazi Extermination, edited by Michael L. Morgan, 115- 122. New York: Oxford University Press USA
Fackenheim, Emil. 2000 b. “Holocaust” in A Holocaust Reader. Responses to the Nazi Extermination, edited by Michael L. Morgan, 122- 130. New York: Oxford University Press USA
Hass, Aaron. 1995. The Aftermath. Living with the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Hass, Aaron. 1996. In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Huyssen, Andreas. 2000. “Monuments and Holocaust, Memory in a Media Age” in A Holocaust Reader. Responses to the Nazi Extermination, edited by Michael L. Morgan, 359- 363. New York: Oxford University Press USA
Kremer, S. Lillian. 1989. Witness through Imagination: Jewish-American Holocaust Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University Press
Morgan, Michael, edit. 2000. A Holocaust Reader: Responses to the Nazi Extermination. New York: Oxford University Press USA
Novick, Peter. 2000. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin
Rosenbaum, Thane. 1999. Second-Hand Smoke. New York: St. Martin’s Press
Rosenbaum, Thane. 2004. “Art and Atrocity in a Post-9/11 World” in Jewish-American and Holocaust Literature. Representation in the Post-Modern World, edited by Alan L. Berger and Gloria L. Cronin, 125- 136. New York: State University of New York Press
Rosenfeld, Alvin Hirsh. 1988. A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Royal, Derek. 2007. “An Interview with Thane Rosenbaum.” Contemporary Literature 48-1: vi- 28. Available at: muse.jhu.edu
Wiesel, Elie. 1995. All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs Vol. I 1928-1969. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New York: Knopf (Schocken Books,1996)
Wiesel, Elie. 1999. And the Sea is Never Full: Memoirs. Vol. II 1969-. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New York: Knopf (Schocken Books, 2000 b)
RiCognizioni is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
With the licence CC-BY, authors retain the copyright, allowing anyone to download, reuse, re-print, modify, distribute and/or copy their contribution. The work must be properly attributed to its author.
It is not necessary to ask further permissions both to author or journal board.
