ABSTRACT
Geoff rey Hartman suggests that life is marked by “a contradictory eff ort: to remember and to forget, to respect the past and to acknowledge that the present is open to the future.”1 Anne Roiphe adds, “We want to forget [the Holocaust], to ignore, to go on, and yet we remain preoccupied.”2 My father and uncle could never forget the horror and suff ering that they and their family endured, but they refused to live their lives dwelling on the past and were appreciative of the opportunities they had in the United States to build successful work and family lives. However, in order to more fully understand and evaluate the postwar implications of their experience, we need to situate their memories in broader mnemonic context. Life course theory, as noted earlier, sensitizes us to two general types of causal precursors of human life outcomes: distal and proximal events (see Chapter 2). In turn, the outcomes themselves-in our case, the Holocaust-become causal precursors to subsequent proximal and distal outcomes.3 As we have seen, the genocide that occurred on European soil had proximal implications for individual survivors and their families wherever they settled in the postwar period. But the Holocaust, as a collective trauma, also had profound distal implications for postwar collective memories of the past, which have infused disparate individual memories across multiple cohorts with collective symbolic meaning.
