ABSTRACT
The author follows Elana's lead and deal with issues that involve the same guidelines of life, death, familial tragedy, academia, language, and literacy. He explicates a research project into the meaning of the Holocaust and an analysis of the Gestapo file of his grandparents, Alfred and Helene Hanauer, who were murdered during the Holocaust in 1941. The French psychoanalyst Nadine Fresco describes interviews she conducted with eight adult children of Holocaust survivors. Fresco speaks of three intertwined aspects of the phenomenology and sociology of being a child of a Holocaust survivor: silence, inherited fear, and a sense of distance. Shohamy, rightly pointed out that language is not in itself either 'good' or 'bad'; literacy, in the case analyzed here, was used for the purposes of gross human rights violations, but this is not a damning criticism of literacy in all its aspects. The atrocities of the Holocaust were facilitated through a decontextualized, literal, unfeeling acceptance of textual authority.
