Études on Loss

For many first- and second-generation American Jews the Holocaust stands as the defining event in their lives. Like the litany recited at Yom Kippur, “Who shall live and who shall die, who shall die by fire and who by water, who shall be secure and who shall be driven?” it sobers one. Who escaped and who didn't, who went to Palestine and who to South America, who was hidden and who revealed, haunts us. The list could go on and on, but what defines it ultimately is: who lived and who died? For me, the story has taken a somewhat different form: what was sacrificed in order to live, and what was lost as a result? This story started thirty years before, during the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe, while the seeds of the Shoah were growing. This era brought thousands of Jewish immigrants to America while the doors still remained open. I always felt I was one of the fortunate ones, my grandparents having left long before Hitler and the Final Solution. I have only begun to comprehend that their good fortune was mixed with great separations, hardships, and loss.

Marianne Hirsch (1997) has coined the term “postmemories” to convey an important finding about the experiences of children of survivors of the Holocaust and other traumas. She defines postmemories as the deferred effects on persons or even communities who are at least one generation removed from the actual trauma. As she elaborates in an essay published in American Imago, “Children of refugees inherit their parents' knowledge of the fragility of place, their suspicion of the notion of home” (2002, 274). She begins her essay with a quotation from Aharon Appelfeld: “Czernovitz expelled its Jews, and so did Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Lemberg. Now these cities live without Jews, and their few descendants,