ABSTRACT
This essay examines the 2016 film Past Life directed by Avi Nesher as dramatizing the search for the Holocaust diary of survivor Baruch Milch by his two daughters. As material evidence of his innocence in a tragic accident, the diary is crucial to repairing his self-incriminating guilt and the family’s frayed bond. The film narrates this search as a mosaic of different genres, including melodrama, the Gothic, a quest adventure, and a lamentation for those lost in the Holocaust. The film also employs music, as a soundtrack and as a choral concert of past and present voices. This hybrid genre connects the film’s quest story to an inquiry into the nature of Holocaust memory, its translation into a coherent narrative, its transmission to the second generation and its aftereffects.
