The Third Generation and the Intergenerational Extension of Holocaust Memory

• In Event: “Forging an Intergenerational Holocaust Testimony”

Abstract

Our current age will see the inevitable end of direct survivor testimony. What, then, comes “after” direct testimony and the indirect testimony of the second generation? The narratives of third-generation writers reveal anxiously motivated patterns of attachment and pursuit, narrative journeys, both imagined and real – both physical and psychic – back through the second generation to the point of the traumatic origin of the Shoah. These contemporary writers, the generation of the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, through their writing, create the uneasy condition that exists, as Amy Kurzweil’s autobiographical narrator puts it, “between all we’ve lost…and what we can’t get rid of” (Flying Couch 49). The more temporally distanced from the events of the Holocaust and the first and second generations, the more tenuous the stories become – stories of stories told. Mirroring their intergenerational position, these grandchildren of the Shoah offer second and third-hand versions of names, places, and the unfolding of events. In such instances, as the late Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On suggests, there are, to be sure, “historical” truths – “what happened” – but there are also “narrative truths” – “how someone tells what happened” (“Transgenerational Aftereffects of the Holocaust in Israel: Three Generations”10). It is through such intergenerational transmission that the memory of the Holocaust comes to shape the future for subsequent generations. Through an examination of the Guatemalan Jewish writer Eduardo Halfon’s autobiographical stories, my paper will explore the shape of third-generation narratives and their testimonial extension of Holocaust memory at an important time in history.

Author

• Victoria Aarons, Trinity University