Holocaust Narratives: Trauma, Memory and Identity Across Generations

✍ Scribed by Thorsten Wilhelm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 203
• Edition: 1°
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Holocaust Narratives: Trauma, Memory and Identity Across Generations analyzes individual multi-generational frameworks of Holocaust trauma to answer one essential question: How do these narratives change to not only transmit the trauma of the Holocaust – and in the process add meaning to what is inherently an event that annihilates meaning – but also construct the trauma as a connector to a past that needs to be continued in the present? Meaningless or not, unspeakable or not, unknowable or not, the trauma, in all its impossibilities and intractabilities, spawns literary and scholarly engagement on a large scale. Narrative is the key connector that structures trauma for both individual and collective.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Foreword
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Holocaust Traumata and Their Generational Legacies and Emanations
Generations: Structural Frameworks
The Dialogical Nature of (Collective) Trauma
Trauma Theory: Concepts, Implications, Outlooks
Moving Trauma Theory into the Generation of Postmemory
Living in the Aftermath: Forms of Trauma
Insterstices between Individual and Cultural Trauma
Trauma as Connective Force
Structure of the Book
1 Narrating the Inexpressible: Wiesel’s Night as a Testimonial Model
God on the Gallows: Doublings of Faith
Trauma in the Mirror: Identities in the Face of Trauma
Paradigmatic Accuser: Connecting Audiences
Witness in Search of Meaning and Silence
Surviving and Remembering: Representing Trauma in the Present
2 The Truth of Fiction in Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies
Narrated Identities: Fictionalization of the Self and Its Actual Facts
Negotiating Fact and Fiction in Meaningful Representations for an Audience
The Creation of Meaning and Its Passing Ownership
(R/De-)Construction of Narrative and Real Identity
Asserting Control by Narrative Means
3 Rescuing One’s Memory from Past Traumata: Cheryl Pearl Sucher’s the Rescue of Memory
Past and Present: Making a Stance of One’s Own
Photographs and Other Stories: Past Negatives and Healing Trauma
Generational Connections: Approaching First- and Second-Generation Trauma
First-Hand Trauma in Second-Generation Writing
Emancipation through Embedding: Establishing a Meaningful Presence of the Past
Meaningful Incorporation of Past Trauma into Present Narratives
4 Encaustic Memories: Second-Generation Assertions in Rosenbaum’s Second Hand Smoke
Traumatic Impositions: Connecting First- and Second- Generation Trauma
Encountering the Ghosts: Generational Connections to the Past
Close Contact: Breaking Down Past and Present Distinctions
Imposing Trauma: Between Filial Rage and Generational Forgiveness
Individual and Cultural Authorship over Trauma Stories
Damaged Goods: Navigating Parental Trauma and One’s Own
Exclusion from and Inclusion into Parental Narratives
Remembering, Letting Go, and Incorporating the Past into the Present
Progressive and Tragic Narrative Outlook in Overcoming Trauma
5 Connecting Worlds: Narrative Networks in Horn’s The World to Come
Generational Temporal Connections
Choosing Narrative, Choosing Life
Linguistic Connections to Translated Pasts
Storied Bridges: Connecting Present, Past, and Future Worlds
Meaningful Narratives: Paper Bridges between (Past) Trauma and (Present) Meanings
Connecting Worlds: People as Stories
Creating a Future from the Past
Stories as Narrative Intersections between Generations
6 When Memory Fails: Fiction as History in Everything is Illuminated
Narrative Trajectories: Limitations of Fictional Meaning Creation
Generational Positions: Midrashic Engagements and Circular Historicity
(Re)constructing the Past: Interrelations between the Place and Its Stories
Language and Silence: Connective Phantasmagorias of Meaning
Workable Terminologies: Integrating Past-Tensed Facts
Fictional Records: Tracking Meanings between the Past and the Present
Narrative Realities: Permeating Events and Stories
Imaginative Representation: Memory’s Narrative Dependencies
Generational Catharsis in Dyadic, Generational Encounters
Conclusion: The Future of Trauma
Index