Eva Hoffman’s Speculative Fiction of Intergenerational Holocaust Memory

• In Event: “Forging an Intergenerational Holocaust Testimony”

Abstract

Eva Hoffman’s acclaimed memoir, Lost in Translation, charted her experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors who left Poland during the Communist era to find both displacement and stability in Vancouver. Her successes as editor, essayist, psychologist, and novelist have been grounded in the idea of a psychological and expressive migration that never ends for the second generation. Informing her every move, from Canada to the US, to the UK and punctuated by returns to Poland, the Holocaust and her parents’ experiences in hiding persist as the foundation for her personal and documented history of the Holocaust and its aftermath. In such books of historical investigation as Exit into History (1993), Shtetl (1997) and After Such Knowledge (2004), Hoffman returns to Eastern Europe to try to understand the tense and sometimes explosive social, economic, and cultural forces that shaped her identity as a second generation survivor. I argue that the impossibility of filling in the gaps between her parents’ Holocaust memory and narratives, documented history, and her own East European odyssey became her inspiration for writing speculative fiction. Informed by Hoffman’s non-fiction, this paper will examine Hoffman’s 2001 The Secret as encapsulating the shaping forces of the Holocaust past, present, and future on a mother-daughter relationship that represents intergenerational tensions between first and second generation survivors. I will explore how The Secret uses the characterization of a cloned daughter to ponder the evolution of Holocaust memory from its disquieting fragmentation and lapses into the formation of indissoluble intergeneration bonds and ruptures.

Author

• Phyllis Lassner, Northwestern University