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Situated in the vast literature of the last two decades on the intergenerational transmission of trauma, Roger Frie's Not in My Family stands out
as both a courageous, moral act and an important contribution to our understanding of the process of such transmission. Rich in insight, the book is the result of a painful and honest exploration of his family legacy of his maternal grandfather's having been an active Nazi. The book has deservedly received the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for History (the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards recognize the finest books with Jewish themes and subjects by Canadian authors in a variety of genres). Frie recounts a difficult and long psychological journey. Growing up in Canada the son of German emigrés, he had learned about the Holocaust from his parents, but, as he writes, “to safeguard my identification with my grandparents I dissociated threatening images and thoughts about them. I avoided the difficult questions in an environment in which questions were not generally asked” (p. 55). “My knowledge about my grandfather was … linked to what was talked about and what was cloaked in silence, to the questions that were asked and not asked… . I maintained a stance of ‘not knowing’ by dissociating threatening images of who my grandfather may have been. But this dissociative stance was only possible because I already ‘knew’ in some sense that my grandfather could have been involved in the Nazi past. My stance of simultaneous knowing and not knowing was hardly unique. In fact, it is a good illustration of the collective German struggle with memory in the wake of the Holocaust” (p. 179). Such was Frie's psychological situation at the beginning of his journey. He was able to perceive affects surrounding topics he accurately sensed were things he should not ask about or know, though from his general knowledge he had some idea of what those things were.
One of the virtues of this book is the clarity with which Frie elucidates the means by w