ABSTRACT
The Israeli author Nava Semel, one of the first to write about the influence of the Holocaust’s trauma on the members of the second generation, asserted that the narrative, integrative, and coherent memory does not have the power to carry the burden of the memory of trauma, which is often a silent memory. Semel points to an alternative –Emotional Memory – “which is beyond the facts and the events themselves”. In her book And the Rat Laughed (2001), she indicates the main realm through which the silent memory permeates the second and third generations and is transformed into emotional Postmemory: the work of art. The intense emotional-physical impressions that are at the heart of the trauma, transcend the bounds of imagination and understanding and therefore cannot be condensed into the recognized language and accepted representation. In the aesthetic-fictional realm, the traumatic memory translates into Semiotic-Poetic language that dismantles the organized, arranged, and disciplinary structure of the symbolic language, revealing the emotional-physical core of the trauma, and giving the silent memory a resounding voice that is engraved in future generations.
