After Such Knowledge A Meditation on the Aftermath of the Holocaust
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Biographical note
Eva Hoffman was born in Cracow, Poland, and emigrated to America at the age of thirteen. The recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, she currently lives in London.Eloquent book, which struggles heroically to show that reason and scholarship still have value in the face of genocide and mass suffering
Times
Graceful and honorific
Observer
Hoffman draws upon disparate disciplines and forms of literature to probe the issues that haunt her generation
- Frances Spalding, Independent
She is a sensitive but unsentimental writer, scrupulously fair-minded, keenly aware of the conflicts and dilemmas involved
Sunday Telegraph
Hoffman asks many questions, bringing a voice of reason to the irrational, reaching out for reconciliation
Sunday Times
As the Holocaust recedes from us in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the generation after. How should we, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors, and the second generation's responsibilities to its received memories?
Eva Hoffman probes these questions through personal reflections and through broader explorations of the historical, psychological and moral implications of the second-generation experience. She examines the subterranean processes through which private memories of suffering are transmitted, and the more wilful stratagems of collective memory. As she guides us through the poignant juncture at which living memory must be relinquished, she asks what insights can be carried from the past, and urges the need to transform potent family stories into a fully-informed understanding of a forbidding history.