At Home with the Holocaust

LUCAS F. W. WILSON is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He is the editor of Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors' Stories of Conversion Therapy, as well as the coeditor of Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature.

• PrefaceIntroduction1          Postmemorial Structures: The "Space" and "Stuff" of Survivor-Family Homes  2          "Remember, my house it's also your house too": Postmemorial Structures in Art Spiegelman's Maus3          Domestic(ated) (Un)fashioning: Sonia Pilcer's The Holocaust Kid 4          A Tale of Two Storeys: Upper and Lower Space and Postmemorial Divergences in Elizabeth Rosner's The Speed of Light                      5          Pre/Occupied Longing: Toward a Definition of Postnostalgia in Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated         6          ConclusionAppendixAcknowledgmentsBibliography  Index Preface ixIntroduction 11 Postmemorial Structures: The "Space" and "Stuff" of Survivor-Family Homes 152 "Remember, my house it's also your house too": Postmemorial Structures in Art Spiegelman's Maus 323 Domestic(ated) (Un)fashioning: Sonia Pilcer'sThe Holocaust Kid 514 A Tale of Two Storeys: Upper and Lower Space and Postmemorial Divergences in Elizabeth Rosner's The Speed of Light 765 Pre/Occupied Longing: Toward a Definition of Postnostalgia in Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated 101Conclusion 124Appendix 133Acknowledgments 135Notes 139Bibliography 161Index 000

"In his astute and deftly written study of American second-generation Holocaust literature, Wilson brings to bear theories of space and affect to illuminate the ways in which the concept of the family home is represented in these texts as a charged site of memory, trauma, and familial legacy."— Erin McGlothlin, author of The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction"At Home with the Holocaust is an exceptional volume which breaks new ground in understanding the Shoah's legacy as experienced by the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. This important study examines both literary texts and oral traditions with great insight in revealing how the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust endured in and through survivor homes. Successive generations of survivor families find their lives touched by the Shoah even as they seek to move ahead with their own quest for Jewish meaning after Auschwitz. This work is a finely nuanced examination which can be read with great profit by those seeking greater insight into the dynamics at work in trauma and memory studies. Additionally, and to the author's great credit, this book sheds new light on the evolving contours of post-Auschwitz religion and Jewish identity. Franz Kafka observed that a book should be like an axe breaking up the frozen sea within. Wilson's meticulously researched study is the instrument we need to break traditional boundaries while acknowledging the past's hold on the present and the future."— Alan L. Berger, Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair in Holocaust Studies at Florida Atlantic University"At Home with the Holocaust makes a vital contribution to the research on second and third-generation Holocaust descendants and the complex ways in which traumatic memory is passed along intergenerationally. By perceptively focusing on the domestic spaces that Holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren inhabit—both materially and psychically—Wilson raises crucial questions concerning the legacy of the Holocaust and its imprint on future generations."— Victoria Aarons, author of Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory (Rutgers University Press, 20