The Second Generation's Task

Writer Eva Hoffman discusses the role of children of Holocaust survivors in preserving memory.

BY: Interview by Rebecca Phillips

Eva Hoffman was born in Cracow, Poland in 1945 to Holocaust survivor parents. She emigrated to North America at the age of thirteen. Hoffman has written about the Holocaust in her highly-acclaimed books "Lost in Translation," "Exit into History," and "Shtetl." In her newest book, "After Such Knowledge," she addresses what the Holocaust means to the second generation, children of survivors. Hoffman recently spoke with Beliefnet about the book and the role of the second generation in preserving Holocaust memory.

Have you written about being part of the second generation before?
Not really. This was the first time I handled it head on. Indirectly, I had written about it in "Lost in Translation." I think it's an important issue, but I didn't always think of myself in these categories.

When did you begin to think of yourself as a member of the second generation?
I still don't think of myself as second generation. But particularly in the last 15 years, as the broader phenomenon of Holocaust preoccupation started to be so evident, I had my own views on this. Some of the manifestations made me a little uneasy. I realized I had my own particular perspective. And then when my parents died, I felt that my conduit to the past was being lost, to me and to others, and I wanted to reckon with the influence of all of this.

How is your perspective on the Holocaust unusual?
I think the second generation's perspective is different from the broader culture's perspective. We were much closer to it, so the human realities of those events are more evident. The tendency to view the Holocaust as sacred is not as strong.

When you say there's a tendency in the larger culture to consider these issues as sacred, how does the second generation tend to treat them instead?
I think there's more a sense of the complex realities. First of all, we have a much more complex relationship to survivors themselves. When you grow up with people, you know they're not quintessentially survivors or victims--they cannot be reducible to this category. At the same time, you know that they're often not saints, that the experience of great persecution is not a kind of character-improving project. It does not guarantee a special virtue--people have often been disturbed in ways that are then disturbing to others. So one has a sense of the ambiguities and the complexities of it.

In my own case, I certainly had a sense of the complexities of Polish-Jewish relations and Ukrainian-Jewish relations. There are stories of the others behaving very badly, of the others behaving very wonderfully, of Jews behaving very badly, of Jews behaving very heroically. There is a much larger gamut of human realities than we typically see.

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