FROM THE CRITICS Times Literary Supplement - July 23, 2004: Hoffman's account of her own personal experience and that of... the second generation... is generally shrewd, interesting and valuable. The New York Times With After Such Knowledge, Hoffman returns to her own lived experience, not of exile this time, but of her parents' memory of the Holocaust, and how this memory has been passed down to her. Not only has she found again a psychologically attuned, intellectually compelling voice, but she has given this voice to the tangled and conflicted inner lives of a generation of children of Holocaust survivors. - James E. Young New York Times Book Review An extraordinarily cleareyed and unsentimental meditation... Hoffman has a psychologically attuned, intellectually compelling voice... Harper's Magazine A ferocious meditation... masterly essays on ethics and political science... Hoffman has smart things to say... Publishers Weekly "Sixty years after the Holocaust took place... [and] this immense catastrophe recedes from us in time, our preoccupation with it seems only to increase," writes Hoffman in this beautifully wrought, deftly argued examination of how we might attempt to understand the Holocaust. In seven short essays, Hoffman (Lost in Translation, etc.) focuses on the consciousness and experience of the Holocaust's second generation-the children of survivors-as theirs is a "strong case-study in the deep and long-lasting impact of atrocity." Synthesizing personal history (born in Cracow, Poland, in 1945, Hoffman left at the age of 13 with her parents) with astute gleanings from the fields of psychoanalysis, sociology and literary criticism, the book considers such diverse concepts as how the "trauma" of the Holocaust is constructed, the role of emigration and national identity in shaping the second generation's narratives of their lives and how works as diverse as Marguerite Duras's The War: A Memoir and Bernhard Schlink's The Reader helped shape a series of conflicting ideas about victimhood and responsibility.

 Perseus Publishing 1-58648-046-4 / 9781586480462
Hardcover As New Condition New York 

Price: 22.05 USD