Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives

Victoria Aarons is O.R. & Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature in the English Department at Trinity University.

• 1. A Special Kind of Kinship: On Being a ‘3G’ Writer, Erika Dreifus2. Memory’s Afterimage: Post-Holocaust Writing and the Third Generation, Victoria Aarons 3. A Visible Bridge: Contemporary Jewish Fiction and the Return to the Shoah, Avinoam Patt4. Story-telling, Photography, and Mourning in Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, Paule Lévy5. Life After Death: A Third Generation Journey in Jérémie Dres’ We Won't See Auschwitz, Alan Berger6. The “generation without grandparents”: Witnesses and Companions to an Unfinished Search, Malena Chinski7. Avatars of Third-Generation Holocaust Narrative in French and Spanish, Alan Astro8. Measure for Measure: Narrative and Numbers in Holocaust Textual Memorials, Jessica Lang9. Against Generational Thinking in Holocaust Studies, Gary Weissman10. Simon and Mania, Henri Raczymow, translated by Alan AstroPreface: Henri Raczymow, Writer of the Second-and-a-Half Generation in France, Alan Astro

This collection considers works written by grandchildren, great nieces and nephews, and other relatives about family members who lived during the Hitler years. The term third generation raises some issues. In speaking about the literature of the Holocaust, “the literature of the first generation” meant the testimony of those who lived through the horrors of the Third Reich, those who either survived the death camps (Primo Levi, Ellie Wiesel, Imre Kertesz, et al.) or lived in hiding in the ghettos or as partisan fighters. It did not include those who lived safely through the Nazi years in protected areas or foreign countries. When critics and scholars begin to use terms such as 3G literature and introduce expressions such as 1.5G, 2G, 2.5G, and 3G, one senses that 3.5G and 4G loom in the future; lost is the emphasis on the quality of the story, novel, memoir, biography, film, or research being produced. Generational criticism privileges familial relationships. At its worse, it exploits the experiences of others. Important in this regard is critique of how writers far removed from the Holocaust preserve memory and provide witness to a past they never experienced. The best of these essays do that well, and this book is valuable for doing that service. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.