ABSTRACT
This chapter examines writings by Jewish women of the second generation, in the widest possible sense of that term. It discusses the transgenerational transmission of Jewish memory and its legacy of often indelible trauma. The chapter considers the lesser but hardly negligible trauma experienced by the second generation in a Liberation France which, despite its numerous purges of collaborators, was certainly not purged of anti-Semitism. The two traumata are still cognate: the Shoah was the hypostatization of anti-Semitism, and it is to the recrudescence of anti-Semitism some thirty-six years after WWII that Rabinovitch's narrative later turns. The intergenerational transmission of survivors' syndrome is patent here; what is less so is its exact signification — identification with their murdered forebears, or a sense of guilt about their own life in the knowledge of that murder? The chapter examines textual inroads into that mainstream model of solemnity.
