ABSTRACT

Holocaust Narratives: Trauma, Memory and Identity Across Generations analyzes individual multi-generational frameworks of Holocaust trauma to answer one essential question: How do these narratives change to not only transmit the trauma of the Holocaust – and in the process add meaning to what is inherently an event that annihilates meaning – but also construct the trauma as a connector to a past that needs to be continued in the present? Meaningless or not, unspeakable or not, unknowable or not, the trauma, in all its impossibilities and intractabilities, spawns literary and scholarly engagement on a large scale. Narrative is the key connector that structures trauma for both individual and collective.

chapter |23 pages

Introduction

Holocaust Traumata and Their Generational Legacies and Emanations

chapter 1|25 pages

Narrating the Inexpressible

Wiesel’s Night as a Testimonial Model

chapter 3|26 pages

Rescuing One’s Memory from Past Traumata

Cheryl Pearl Sucher’s The Rescue of Memory

chapter 4|25 pages

Encaustic Memories

Second-Generation Assertions in Rosenbaum’s Second Hand Smoke

chapter 5|24 pages

Connecting Worlds

Narrative Networks in Horn’s The World to Come

chapter 6|24 pages

When Memory Fails

Fiction as History in Everything Is Illuminated

chapter |9 pages

Conclusion

The Future of Trauma