ABSTRACT
After the fall of the Soviet Union, survivors of the Shoah and their descendants seized the opportunity to travel to those sites of former belonging and destruction “behind” the so-called Iron Curtain. This chapter discusses the depiction of such return journeys, the creation of postmemory, and notions of complicity in Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room (2001), Lisa Appignanesi's The Memory Man (2004), and Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2003). All three novels position the places of their respective returns as geographically remote “hinterlands” of an obscure and unknowable past. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory and Michael Rothberg's multidirectional memory, this chapter investigates how these three novels present and fill the “nothing” of their various hinterlands through the collaborative sharing of memories.
