ABSTRACT
Transgenerational trauma and silence are familiar if unhappy bedfellows. They can be experienced as inaudible screams, deafening whispers, or psychic retreats into inchoate nothingness. They are phenomena heavy in their opaqueness, leaving a legacy of indefinable otherness, a separateness from others irrespective of shared genes or deep friendship. Reva Klein explores the otherness that, as the first-born child of a refugee from the holocaust, she carried with her from the first moment of consciousness. The desperation of her father to repopulate a lost world led to an impossibly idealised status being conferred on her. Her consequent struggle for individuation within the family on the one hand and the wish for conformity in the wider world on the other led to a painfully protracted phase of rebellion. In a sense, her fight for psychic survival took the form of an extended period of adolescence.
