After Such Knowledge: Where Memory of the Holocaust Ends and History Begins

Rating:
Summary: deep thoughts written in polished, gem-like prose
Review: Eva Hoffman's book-length meditation on the Holocaust, written from her perspective as a daughter of survivors, is beautifully written. Her well crafted sentences reveal the careful thinking she has done as she ponders how her generation, born into sunny safety after the horrors their parents had known, has viewed those events that cast a shadow over their parents' lives.

Hoffman is highly intelligent, well educated, with broadbased understanding of the atrocities, the loss and the uprooting, the courage to begin anew, of those who emerged from the camps. She perceives the ambiguous borders between victimhood and dangerous resistance, the fateful choices her parents faced on a daily basis.

Her book is a highly valuable contribution to a world where conditions of genocide still exist.

Rating:
Summary: Remembering beyond the survivors.
Review: As the Holocaust passes further into history so are the survivors. The direct memories are being replaced by stores, books, museums. The author is a child of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust with the help of neighbors, but whose entire families perished. She investigates the historical, psychological and moral implications of the second generation experience. How do you maintain an authentic version of its events.

It would be nice to say that the Holocaust was a unique experience in world history. And in some ways, its magnitude, and its mechanistic operation. Perahaps even more so with its publicity and the presence in our society. Unfortunately with Pol Pot's followers in Cambodia and the horribly named ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and several countries in Africa it isn't unique.

Rating:
Summary: The motion of knowing
Review: In addition to a being a powerful memoir that asks probing questions about the legacy of the Holocaust, this book creates an image of the living nature of knowledge: its origins, its protection, its growth and advance from the private mind into the public domain and beyond- from a private lived experience into public art. I think her vision of knowledge spills beyond the borders of the Holocaust, if such an event can be said to have "borders." This is really a great book.