Holocaust Representation in ThirdGeneration Literary Nonfiction: Postmemory in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and Edmund De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte

Ayla De Greve

Holocaust Representation
in Third-Generation Literary Non-fiction:
Postmemory in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A
Search for Six of Six Million and Edmund De Waal‘s
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

Paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde
Nederlands – Engels
2013

Supervisor: Dr. Stijn Vervaet
Department Literature


Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Stijn Vervaet, my research supervisor, for his
guidance, encouragements and constructive critiques of this work. I would also like to thank
him for recommending the two beautiful novels that are discussed in this paper.
Furthermore, I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Philippe Codde, for arousing my interest in the subject
of third-generation Holocaust literature during his course ‗Contemporary American
Literature‘.
Finally, special thanks are extended to my parents for their support and encouragement
throughout my study.

Abstract
This paper deals with Marianne Hirsch‘s concept of postmemory in the context of the

Holocaust. Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after bears to the
traumatic experiences that preceded their births, but which were transmitted to them deeply
and affectively. This essay focuses on this relationship in the third generation, where
postmemory can be seen as an obsession with the inaccessible past of the ancestors. Focusing
on non-fictional literature, this paper elucidates how postmemory has influenced the
representation of the Holocaust in The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel
Mendelsohn and The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund De Waal. The
novels by these third-generation writers both examine the family history of the authors in the
context of the Holocaust. By means of a close reading, this paper examines several aspects
related to postmemory in both novels.


Table of contents

1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1

2. Postmemory .......................................................................................................................... 3
2.1 What is postmemory? ............................................................................................. 3
2.2 The generation after ................................................................................................ 4
2.3 The first generation ................................................................................................. 6
2.4 The second generation ............................................................................................ 8
2.5 The third generation .............................................................................................. 12

3. Postmemory in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and Edmund
De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance ……………………………….... 15
3.1 About the novels ……………………………………………………………….... 15
3.1.1 Daniel Mendelsohn – The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million ……… 15
3.1.2 Edmund De Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance 17
3.2 Quest …………………………………………………………………………….. 19
3.2.1 Daniel Mendelsohn – The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million ……… 19

3.2.2 Edmund De Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance 24
3.3 Communicative and cultural memory …………………………………………... 25
3.4 The influence of postmemory on identity ………………………………………. 28
3.4.1 Daniel Mendelsohn – The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million ……… 28
3.4.2 Edmund De Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance 32


3.5 Representation of postmemorial aspects ………..……………………………… 34
3.5.1 Mediation ……………………………………………………………… 34
3.5.2 Received history ………………………………………………………. 37
3.5.3 Storytelling ……………………………………………………………. 42
3.6 Perpetrators and victims ………………………………………………………… 45
3.6.1 Survivor‘s guilt ……………………………………………………….. 45
3.6.2 Identity of the perpetrator ……………………………………………. 47
3.6.3 The grey zone ………………………………………………………… 50
3.7 The role of photographs in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six
Million ………………………………………………………………………………. 52
3.7.1 The effects of photographs on Daniel Mendelsohn …………………… 52
3.7.2 The effects of photographs on the survivors ……..…………………… 55
3.7.3 The effects of photographs on the readers ……………………………. 57
3.8 References to myth in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six
Million ................................................................................…………………………. 58
3.9 Testimonial objects in De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden
Inheritance ………………………………………………………………………….. 62

4. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………….. 66


1. Introduction
[T]he Holocaust wasn‘t something that simply happened,

but is an event that‘s still happening.
– Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

The Holocaust took place over sixty years ago, yet in a way it is still happening. Marianne
Hirsch states that ―[t]hese events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the
present‖ (2012: 5). The more this tragedy recedes from us in time, the more our preoccupation
with it increases, it seems (Hoffman 2004: ix). Not only is the Holocaust still an important
topic in literature and scholarly work, but also in daily life, the effects of the Shoah can still
be palpable. This is the case especially for those who have a ―sense of living connection‖ to
the event (xv). Hence, not only the survivors, but also their descendants, who have a living
connection to the Holocaust through their parents and grandparents, can be affected by the
Holocaust. Indeed, many scholars like Sicher, Hoffman, Schwab and Hirsch have established
that ―[a]long with stories, behaviors, and symptoms, parents do transmit to their children
aspects of their relationship to places and objects from the past‖ (Hirsch 2012: 213). Thus, as
Schwab points out, ―[t]he legacies of violence not only haunt the actual victims but also are
passed on through the generations‖ (2010: 1). In this paper, we will focus particularly on
members of the third generation, whose grandparents lived during the Holocaust and whose
lives and work seem to be affected by this.

Since the generation of survivors is starting to pass away, the third generation is highly
concerned with preserving their stories. As De Waal points out, ―I am the wrong generation to
let it go‖ (2010: 348). Descendants of survivors tend to want to preserve their relatives‘
stories not only to ensure that the Holocaust will not be forgotten, but also to discover and
safeguard their own family story, to which they are closely connected. Hirsch describes this
close connection to the trauma of their grandparents as ‗postmemory‘. Through stories,
behaviours or images, the experiences of the Holocaust were transmitted to them so
affectively, ―as to seem to constitute memories in their own right‖ (Hirsch 2012: 5). Writers of
the generations after are thus not only concerned with representing their ancestors‘ stories to
preserve them, but also with their personal involvement, the way in which the stories were
transmitted to them and the way they represent the stories towards the next generations. While

Hirsch applied the concept of postmemory on the second generation, Codde and others argue
1


that it is also suitable for the third generation. Codde states that ―[p]ostmemory is an
obsession with the opaque and inaccessible past of one‘s parents or grandparents‖ (2009: 64).
For third-generation writers Daniel Mendelsohn and Edmund De Waal, this ‗obsession‘ has
resulted in a non-fictional novel about their family history. In this paper we will discuss how
the issue of postmemory has influenced respectively The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
and The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance.
In the first chapter on postmemory, we will define and discuss Marianne Hirsch‘s influential
concept of postmemory thoroughly. Afterwards, we will briefly discuss how ‗the generation
after‘ became important in scholarly work and we will consider some typical characteristics of
the first, second and third generation of Holocaust survivors. In the next chapter, we indulge
in a close reading of Mendelsohn‘s The Lost and De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes. We
will analyse how postmemory plays an important role in these non-fictional novels. Firstly,
we describe the content of the novels and illuminate why they are considered works of
postmemory and thus the subject of this paper. Next, we will argue that both novels are
quests, which has an influence on their structure and we will briefly discuss which difficulties
the authors came across during the quests. Further on, we examine the difference between
cultural and communicative memory and how this is relevant for the novels. After that, the
influence of postmemory on the identities of the authors is explored. Subsequently, we deal
with the representation of three significant aspects of third-generation writing, which are the
issues of mediation and received history, and the way of storytelling. Afterwards, the
connection between perpetrator and victim is investigated, by focussing on survivor‘s guilt,
the identity of the perpetrator and the grey zone in both books. This is followed by a
discussion of the role of photographs in Mendelsohn‘s novel. Their impact on the author
himself, on the survivors he interviews and the possible effects on the reader will be central.
Next, we will discuss how and why Mendelsohn often refers to myths throughout his story.
Finally, we will discuss what testimonial objects are and how they are relevant in De Waal‘s

story.

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2. Postmemory
2.1 What is postmemory?
Survivors who lived through massive traumatic events can transmit their memories to the
following generations, even if these descendants were not there to witness the events. The
descendants can connect so intensely to the previous generation that they deem that
connection as a form of memory (Hirsch 2012: 3). Marianne Hirsch named this phenomenon
‗postmemory‘ and defines it as follows:
―Postmemory‖ describes the relationship that the ―generation after‖ bears to the
personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences
they ―remember‖ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which
they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and
affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right (5)
Thus, for descendants of survivors, the powerful distressing experiences of the parental
generation can be identified as memories of their own, even though these events preceded
their births. By growing up with the stories of atrocity lived by their parents, children can
adopt this trauma as their own. Dominick LaCapra‘s notion of ‗empathic unsettlement‘ can
clarify this further. According to LaCapra, a desirable response to traumatic stories is to be
empathically unsettled. Hereby, the hearer identifies with the victim enough to reach an
affective response but at the same time realises that these events happened to the speaker and
not to oneself. Thus, one‘s response to this victim‘s traumatic experience is empathic and
unsettling in its own right but it does not lead to a vicarious experience (LaCapra 2001: 102104). LaCapra remarks that empathic unsettlement may take different forms, ―it may at times
result in secondary or muted trauma as well as objectionable self-dramatization in someone
responding to the experience of victims‖ (102). An example of what LaCapra calls a
‗vicarious‘ experience, whereby the distinction between the victim and the self is completely
blurred due to a total pathological identification is the well-known Wilkomirski case

(LaCapra 2004: 125). Benjamin Wilkomirski identified with the Holocaust victims so deeply,
that it led to a vicarious experience whereby he believed to be a Holocaust survivor himself.
These vicarious experiences are rather exceptional, the majority of the descendants of
survivors realise that they did not literally experience the Holocaust themselves. They tend to
experience what LaCapra calls a virtual experience.

3


Logically, the virtual experience of trauma, captured by the term ‗empathic unsettlement‘, is
greater when the traumatic events happened to someone in the family, especially the parents.
When the protagonist is someone close and familiar like a parent, the empathy the hearer feels
is expected to be much deeper. Transmission of memory and even trauma thus occurs more
likely within a family rather than between strangers.

Empathic unsettlement can only happen when a testimony is given. As Gabriele Schwab
points out, that is not the only way that transmission of trauma can occur. Precisely the
absence of testimony, the silence that surrounds the traumatic experiences can express and
transmit trauma (Schwab 2010: 4).
Traumatic silences and gaps in language are […] ambivalent attempts to conceal. But
indirectly, they express trauma otherwise shrouded in secrecy or relegated to the
unconscious. […] It is the children or descendants, Abraham insists, who will be
haunted by what is buried in this tomb, even if they do not know of its existence or
contents and even if the history that produced the ghost is shrouded in silence. (4)
As with empathic unsettlement, the transmission is more likely to happen within a family. The
secrecy is more palpable to members of the family than to outsiders and ―[o]ften the tomb is a
familial one, organized around family secrets shared by parents and grandparents but fearfully
guarded from the children. It is through the unconscious transmission of disavowed familial
dynamics that one generation affects another generation‘s unconscious‖ (4).

2.2 The generation after
The ‗generation after‘ acquired scholarly attention with the founding texts of Helen Epstein
and Nadine Fresco (Van Alphen 2006: 476). In respectively Children of the Holocaust:
Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors and ‗Remembering the Unknown‘, ―the
parents/children relationship is not qualified in terms of continuity‖ (476). On the contrary,
―these two ―founding‖ texts by Epstein and Fresco assess the dynamics between survivors of
the Holocaust and their children as one which utterly fails to establish continuity between
generations‖ (478). Epstein compares the so-called transmitted trauma of the descendants
with a phantom pain of a hand they never had; they feel the pain of something that was not

4


there in the first place. Amnesia takes the place of memory, according to Epstein, ―the only
memory there is is that one remembers nothing‖ (478).

Epstein‘s metaphor of the phantom pain reminds us of the notion of ‗transferred loss‘
introduced by Eva Hoffman (2004: 73). Members of the second generation can experience an
absence in their life, the absence of people they never knew because they died before they had
the chance to know them. This feeling of absence can be transferred into a feeling of loss. The
image of phantom pain that Epstein introduced is linked to this; they experience the pain of
losing someone they have never even known. While this notion is very adequate, the idea that
the only memory of the generation after is ―that one remembers nothing‖ seems inaccurate.
Hirsch explains that postmemory is a form of memory:
Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its
connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an
imaginative investment and creation. […] Postmemory—often obsessive and
relentless—need not be absent or evacuated: it is as full and as empty, certainly as
constructed, as memory itself. (2002: 22)
This is why Nadine Fresco‘s terms ―absent memory‖ and ―hole of memory‖ seem unsuitable

to Hirsch. The term ‗postmemory‘ seems more apt in this account.
‗Postmemory‘ contains an inherent paradox however: how can an experience of a traumatic
event be stored in the memory of someone who was born ‗post‘ or after the event itself? The
prefix ‗post‘ could indicate that we are beyond memory and thus purely in history. Hirsch
explains it as follows:
Postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history
by deep personal connection. […] Postmemory characterizes the experience of those
who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated
stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic
events that can be neither understood nor recreated. (22)
Abiding by Hirsch, we will continue using the term ‗postmemory‘. The concept describes the
relationship that the ‗generation after‘ bears to the trauma of the first generation (Hirsch 2012:
5). Therefore, we will discuss some characteristics of the first generation of survivors.

5


2.3 The first generation
Generally speaking, the first generation encompasses the actual survivors of the Holocaust,
those who literally lived through the event. However, it is difficult to define these survivors in
one category since there are many different ways to have lived through the Holocaust. It is
remarkable that in the standard four-volume Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, published by The
Holocaust Remembrance Authority Yad Vashem, no definition of ‗a survivor‘ is given (BarOn 1998: 100). Dan Bar-On proposes the following definition:
From a legal-historical point of view, a Holocaust survivor can be defined as anyone
who lived under Nazi occupation during World War II and who was threatened by the
policy of the ―Final Solution‖ but managed to stay alive. (100)
Dan Bar-On acknowledges that there are many problems with this definition. The definition is
easily applicable on survivors of the concentration camps and ghettos, Bar-On states; indeed
their lives were clearly threatened by the policy of the ‗Final Solution‘. The definition stays
valid when talking about the Jews and other targets who managed to stay hidden from the

Nazis and lived through the Holocaust underground. However, they undoubtedly experienced
the Holocaust in a completely different way than the camp survivors did. The value of the
definition dwindles somewhat when we discuss those who escaped from territory subjugated
by the Nazis in time to safer places. By leaving their homes and dear ones behind they
suffered enormously but in a completely different way than those who survived a
concentration camp or had to hide for their lives for years. By studying interviews with these
emigrants, Bar-On noticed that many of them felt like their trauma was illegitimate because
they had not suffered like the ―real‖ survivors (100). Furthermore, Bar-On also wonders
whether we should distinguish adults from children in this definition. Important to consider as
well is that many people felt that their being labelled as a Holocaust survivor stigmatised them
(100). ―Who decides who is a Holocaust survivor? Is it a socially imposed or a selfdetermined process? Is it a historical fact or a psychological reconstruction?‖ (100). Thus, it is
difficult to find an all-embracing definition of the first generation.

Although the ‗first generation‘ encompasses all these different kinds of survivors, we may
treat them as one group based on the similarities they share as well. Firstly, Dan Bar-On and
his students discovered that emigrants who left Europe between 1935 and 1937 who lost
family members in the Holocaust, show similar long-term psychological effects from those
6


who survived the Holocaust in Europe (100). One of the most significant symptoms they are
presented with is ‗survivor guilt‘. Many members of the first generation feel guilty simply for
having survived the Holocaust while around six million others did not. This sense of guilt is
even greater for survivors who belong to the so-called ‗grey zone‘, ―where the two camps of
masters and servants both diverge and converge‖ (Levi 1988: 42). Primo Levi appoints
different groups of people to this grey zone. Firstly, the extra sense of guilt was minimal for
prisoners who carried out tertiary functions which were innocuous, useful and rarely violent
(44). The question of guilt and judgement becomes more tentative then for those who
occupied commanding positions like Kapos, the often Jewish helpers of the Nazis who were
partially in command (45). Finally, an extreme case in the grey zone is represented by the

Sonderkommandos, ―the group of prisoners entrusted with running the crematoria‖, the
survivor‘s guilt tends to be immense with the few who managed to survive this (50). Primo
Levi was himself a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp and he has reflected a lot
on his own survivor‘s guilt in his book I sommersi e i salvati (1986), translated as The
Drowned and the Saved. His death in 1987 was presumably an act of suicide, possibly
induced by the consequences of his traumatic experiences, such as his survivor‘s guilt. A
fictional example is presented in Jonathan Safran Foer‘s novel Everything is Illuminated.
Alex‘s grandfather appointed his best friend Herschel as a Jew in order to save himself and
his family. Because of his involvement and subsequent survivor‘s guilt, he does not manage
to talk about this for years and eventually commits suicide. The involvement in these horrible
acts and vice versa the attempts of helping people respectively increases or decreases the
survivor‘s guilt. We will illustrate this further in the discussion of perpetrators and victims in
the novels by De Waal and Mendelsohn.

A second similarity between Holocaust survivors of the first generation is that they tend to
have difficulties in testifying about their experiences. Scholars agree that testifying is an
important part of the healing-process. Verbalising the event is a big step in ‗working-through‘,
the overcoming of the post-traumatic effects, according to LaCapra (2004: 121-122).
Similarly, ―[p]sychodynamic psychiatry has always attached crucial importance to the
capacity to reproduce [traumatic] memories in words and to integrate them in the totality of
experience, i.e., to narrative memory‖ (Van der Kolk & Van der Hart 1995: 167). In other
words, ―survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their stories; they also
needed to tell their stories in order to survive‖, as Dori Laub said (1995: 63). Laub claims that
7


the Holocaust is ―an event without a witness‖ since the psychological structure of the event is
inherently incomprehensible and deceptive (65). ―The testimony is […] the process by which
the narrator (the survivor) reclaims his position as a witness‖ (70). Important as testifying is to
complete the process of survival after liberation, it tends to be a challenging act for survivors.

[Janet determined that] existing meaning schemes may be entirely unable to
accommodate frightening experiences, which causes the memory of these experiences
to be stored differently and not be available for retrieval under ordinary conditions: it
becomes dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control. […]
[F]ragments of these unintegrated experiences may later manifest recollections […].
(Van der Kolk & Van der Hart 1995: 160)
This means that traumatic memories often present themselves as very literal fragments which
come back to the survivor without being consciously recalled. Thus, for the survivor, it is
difficult to create a coherent story out of this. Furthermore it is hard to know whether these
memories are accurate. For example, Dori Laub tells the story of an eyewitness of the
Auschwitz uprising, where prisoners managed to blow up one of the crematoria. The woman
told a vibrant story about four chimneys suddenly going up in flames. She misinterpreted the
number of chimneys because it was an unimaginable occurrence which had made a huge
impact on her (Laub 1992: 59). Even if the survivor manages to create a coherent story out of
the experiences, there is another reason why testifying is anything but self-evident. Survivors
often experience the feeling of belonging to some kind of ‗secret order‘ that is sworn to
silence (Laub 1995: 67). They still feel like they have no right to protest or talk about the
events because unconsciously they have accepted their role as ―subhumans‖ that the Nazi
regime impelled on them (67). Thus, these reasons potentially combined with surivor‘s guilt,
make it very complicated to testify about the Holocaust for members of the first generation.

2.4 The second generation
Similar to the first generation, there is no univocal definition of ‗the second generation‘. Selfevidently, the second generation is the one that comes after the first generation but this is a
rather meaningless definition. Firstly, it is unmanageable to install temporal and local borders
or set limits between the different circumstances that should position these different
generations, as we have already encountered when discussing ‗the first generation‘. Should
we incorporate the children of refugees or only the offspring of camp survivors? These
8

unclear boundaries between the first and second generation or between the ages, the locations
or situations of the survivors have led to the creation of complicated structures like the ―1.5
generation‖ introduced by Susan Suleiman. By the 1.5 generation, she means ―child survivors
of the Holocaust, too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to
them, but old enough to have been there during the Nazi persecution of Jews‖ (Suleiman
2002: 277). Thus, there are no clear criteria to decide who belongs to the second generation.

Secondly, it is hard to designate the children of survivors—who have grown up under very
different circumstances, in different countries and cultures—as one coherent group (Hoffman
2004: 28). Hoffman sees the second generation as an ―imagined community‖, which, rather
than being based on geography or circumstance, is based on ―sets of meanings, symbols and
even literary fictions‖ that they have in common (28). Hoffman argues that the second
generation is united by their location to the Holocaust, by their parents‘ past and the deep
impact it had on them (28-29). They are equally united by the obligations they feel towards
the past and the conclusions that could be drawn for the future (29). Therefore, she calls the
second generation a ―hinge generation‖ between experience and memory of the Holocaust, ―in
which received, transferred knowledge of events is transmuted into history, or into myth‖
(xv). This hinge generation can discuss the Shoah with ―a sense of a living connection‖ (xv).

Efraim Sicher argues that the generation contemporaneous with the children of survivors can
―share many of [the] psychological, ideological, and theological concerns‖ with those people
whose parents actually lived through the Holocaust (1998: 7). Sicher defines ‗the second
generation‘ in this broadest view: he starts out from George Steiner‘s self-definition as ―a
kind of survivor‖ and incorporates
[…] all who write ―after‖ in order to survey a wide—but not exhaustive—range of
themes and issues in the context of both the particular problems of the generation of
the children of survivors and the broader issue of writing identity after Auschwitz. (7)
With ‗the second generation‘, Sicher thus refers to the members of the generation which was
born around the same time as the survivors‘ children, who are concerned with the aftereffects
of the Holocaust.

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Without absolving the interests and concerns that many members of the second generation
according to Sicher might have in the Holocaust, some particular symptoms of distress tend to
be shared solely by actual children of Holocaust survivors.1 These symptoms can be generated
by either the compulsive talking of the parents or precisely by their extreme silence about the
Shoah.

Firstly, because of their parents‘ (unresolved) trauma, children of Holocaust survivors risk
growing up in a rather dysfunctional family. Parents are supposed to provide a safe and loving
environment for their children, but since Holocaust survivors tend to have little stability
themselves, they could have a hard time conveying a sense of security. This can proceed into
two possible directions, the parents are either overprotective towards the children or they are
unable to love them profoundly, in fear of losing them.2 The second-generation painter Mindy
Weisel for example has noted that she struggled for recognition from her parents, ―who
seemed to have established a real and psychic distance from her during her childhood because
of their inability to cope with survival and loss‖ (Feinstein 1998: 240). Parents who survived
the Holocaust also risk suffering from ‗Chronic Complaint Disorder‘.3 In this case, the parent
overly complains about what seem to be trivial matters to the child. For example in the
characteristic second-generation story Maus, Art Spiegelman describes how his father Vladek
used to serve him the same food again and again until Art would finally eat it or starve
(Spiegelman 2003: 45). Because of the deprivation they suffered, the parents can have
unreasonably strong reactions to wasting anything. Furthermore, survivors are inclined to see
everything from a Holocaust perspective. The problems of the child are always belittled
because they are nothing compared to the Holocaust. The beginning of Spiegelman‘s Maus
illustrates this. Art was being bullied by his friends and instead of comforting his son, Vladek
compares this little incident to the Holocaust, which is always worse than anything that could
happen to Art (5-6). Accordingly, what Art says to his therapist in the story is equally true: no

matter what the child achieves, surviving the Holocaust is always considered to be superior
(204).

1

―Not all children of survivors are psychically damaged, and some second-generation biographies of survivor
parents represent the triumph of hope over despair, while revealing a warm and healthy parent-child relationship.
But all of them have been touched deeply by the Holocaust‖ (Berger, 1998: 270).
2
This information originates from Philippe Codde‘s course ‗Contemporary American Literature‘, Ghent
University, 19 October 2012.
3
This information originates from Philippe Codde‘s course ‗Contemporary American Literature‘, Ghent
University, 19 October 2012.

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A second symptom of distress is that children tend to over-identify with their parents and risk
incorporating their trauma in their own lives. LaCapra states that people are often
empathically unsettled by listening to a Holocaust testimony, as we have already discussed
(2001: 102-104). A child, who grows up listening to traumatic experiences that happened to a
parent, tends to become greatly affected by this. The child is inclined to identify with the
parent, which leads to a virtual experience or it may even lead to a vicarious experience. In
this case, one unconsciously identifies so deeply with the victim that it may lead to confusion
about one‘s own participation in the event (LaCapra 2004: 125). In this case, the trauma is in
a way transferred from parent to child.

In addition, parents who survived the Shoah can treat their child as a memorial candle. This
concept of Dina Wardi describes ―children of survivors who are designated to continue the

name of a dead relative—an ancient Judaic tradition—and who function as the family‘s
scapegoat, on whom the parents unload their needs and conflicts‖ (quoted in Sicher 1998: 24).
These children who fulfil the role of memorial candles are seen as a way to commemorate
relatives who did not survive the Holocaust. This puts an enormous burden on the children;
they are inclined to feel like they have to be successful since they still have the chance to do
so, unlike their namesake. Furthermore, their identity seems never fully their own, their
relatives always associate them with the one who passed away.

Finally, children of Holocaust survivors can become obsessed with their family history
because their parents refused or were unable to tell them anything. ―These [are] the sons and
daughters of silence, who were denied knowledge and therefore memory of their family‖ (24).
Their own personal history gets suppressed by this. All they have are the well-known generic
images of the Holocaust, but they do not know which images belong to their families
specifically. They can imagine their parents going through horrendous events but they never
know any specifics. Bar-On states that ―untold stories often pass more powerfully from
generation to generation than stories that are discussible‖ (1998: 99). The second generation
needs these stories to become discussible in order to live with the past. Also, as we have seen
before, the second generation is the generation ―in which received, transferred knowledge of
events is transmuted into history, or into myth‖ (Hoffman 2004: xv). Therefore, the

11


communication gap between the survivors and their children needs to be bridged so that the
stories can be transmitted to future generations.

2.5 The third generation
The third generation is different from the first and second generation since it becomes
increasingly problematic to use the terms ‗trauma‘ or ‗transmitted trauma‘.4
[Bar-On notes that] the survivor‘s fears of being unable to build a normal life for their

children after what they had been through diminished when the third generation grew
up. Now the survivors had enough evidence that they, their children and their
children‘s children were ―normal‖. (1998: 99)
Since we can no longer speak of transmission of trauma for the third generation, Codde
suggests that Marianne Hirsch‘s concept of postmemory is more productive in this respect
(2009: 64). The term was originally introduced to describe the traumatic memory of the
second generation but is actually equally or even more suitable to discuss the situation of the
third generation. ―Postmemory is an obsession with the opaque and inaccessible past of one‘s
parents or grandparents‖, which is exactly what we notice in many third-generation
descendants

(64).

In

the third

generation, the psychopathological

condition

of

transgenerational trauma is transmogrified into a creative interest in the traumatic histories of
the previous generation (64). Thus, many third-generation writers are fanatically interested in
knowing and writing about the Holocaust.

There seems to be an interdependent relationship between the first and the third generation.
On the one hand, the third generation is deeply influenced by the first. Because the parents
and grandparents (especially the emigrants) have more or less managed to complete a

working-through process, this is the first generation to be liberated from the need to become
―normal‖ (Bar-On 1998: 109). The liberation from the trauma of their ancestors, allows the
third generation to ask questions and talk about the Holocaust in an openly manner. On the
other hand, the first generation is highly affected by the third generation as well. With the
appearance of a hopeful and interested generation, ―the need to talk, to give evidence that
4

As with the first and second generation, it is difficult to define who belongs to the third generation. As a broad
guideline, we will include the grandchildren of every survivor, whether they survived in the camps, ghettos, due
to hiding or by emigrating right before or during the war.

12


would be passed on to future generations, became greater than the need to maintain the
silence‖ (99). Their grandchildren can bring a sense of hope back into the family of survivors,
which stimulates the grandparents to communicate about their experiences (109).

The realisation that the generation of eyewitnesses is gradually disappearing impels the third
generation to preserve their grandparents‘ stories. However, by the time the third generation
started studying the Holocaust, the event had been over for approximately fifty years. This
engenders some difficulties to study the event accurately. Firstly, the eyewitnesses are elderly
by now and they have never discussed their experiences ever since they occurred half a
century ago. This could easily thwart their memories of the events. Secondly, the third
generation is always confronted with the issues of mediation and received history. When
studying the Holocaust, there is always a mediating distance between the researchers and the
actual event. The historical documents they use always offer a version of reality as construed
by another, they ―provide only narrative interpretations of the past‖ (Codde 2009: 64). The
description of the Holocaust of third-generation writers is thus always based on an
interpretation of the event. Accordingly, writers and readers should be aware that they can

never give an objective account. A literal representation of the Holocaust is also hindered by
the idea of ‗received history‘. This is a concept of James Young that describes that the
writer‘s relationship to the story always has an influence on the representation of the story
(1997: 21). Consequently, a third-generation story about the Holocaust is always also a story
about telling a story about the Holocaust. We will see this clearly in Mendelsohn, who shows
to be very self-aware that his story is an example of ‗received history‘.

In order to represent the Holocaust in spite of these difficulties, third-generation writers use
some creative techniques. Firstly, they often use intertextual references to myths, fairy tales or
other well-known stories to imaginatively approach and represent an otherwise unknowable
and/or irrepresentable past (Codde 2009: 73). When the testimonies prove to be inadequate to
provide all the information, several third-generation writers use their imagination to fill in the
gaps. They refer to well-known stories that can help to convey the message the writer wants to
give. Judy Budnitz for example frequently refers to fairy tales in her novel If I Told You Once.
Similarly, Mendelsohn uses intertextual references to the Torah, we will discuss this later.
Secondly, the third generation often tries to bypass the mediating instance that prevents them
13


from knowing the past as much as possible. As a result, a popular form of representation is the
structure of the quest, in which the authors tell a story of detection, a story of how they try to
attain as much information as possible.5 Although the time and the extent of the event prevent
them from ever completely knowing the past, they show that they do everything they can to
know what can still be discovered. Both Mendelsohn‘s and De Waal‘s novels can be
considered as quests.

5

Recent examples of non-fictional quests are the novels by De Waal and Mendelsohn, and Nancy Miller‘s What
They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past. The structure of the quest is also popular in fictional novels, for example

Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Everything is Illuminated or Nicole Krauss‘ The History of Love.

14


3. Postmemory in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and Edmund
De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

3.1 About the novels
3.1.1 Daniel Mendelsohn - The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Daniel Mendelsohn is an award-winning writer, critic and translator who was born on Long
Island and educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton.6 His international
bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, first published by HarperCollins in 2006,
won many honours including the National Books Critics Circle Award, the National Jewish
Book Award in the United States and the Prix Médicis in France. So far, it has been published
in over fifteen languages. The novel is a remarkably original epic; part memoir, part
reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work.

The Lost: a Search for Six of Six Million tells the story of a man, Daniel Mendelsohn, who
grew up in the United States of America with his three brothers and sister. His grandfather,
Abraham Jäger, immigrated to the United States from the small town of Bolechow in Eastern
Europe, not long before the Second World War. Daniel occasionally found himself
surrounded by elderly relatives he barely knew and who spoke in the same accent as his
grandfather did. They spoke English but when Daniel and his peers were not allowed to
understand a punch line of a joke for example, they switched to Yiddish, a language the
youngsters did not understand. These relatives did not only have this language of ‗the Old
Country‘ in common, they also shared the pain of an unmentionable subject in the family.
They were haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust; Abraham‘s
brother Shmiel Jäger, his wife Ester and their four children. All that Daniel knew about them
growing up is that they were ―killed by the Nazis‖. Decades later, Daniel Mendelsohn

discovers several desperate letters from Shmiel to his brother Abraham written right before
and during the Holocaust. Spurred by this discovery and tantalised by the fragmentary tales of
their betrayal, Mendelsohn sets out to uncover what happened to these lost relatives. He
embarks on a journey searching every remaining eyewitness to his relatives‘ fates. This quest
leads him to dozens of countries on four different continents. Together with his brother
6

All the biographical and professional information about Daniel Mendelsohn was found on his website
www.danielmendelsohn.com

15


Matthew, he tracks down a lot of ex-Bolechowers who all have their own stories to tell.
Gradually, he finds out more information about his own relatives as well. But combining all
these rather vague or even contradictory memories about his family into a coherent story turns
out to be a challenging job. While describing this quest, the novel also focuses on the
difficulties of knowing the past, the relationships between brothers and it connects the story
with passages from the Torah.

Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million can be considered a work of
postmemory. Mendelsohn ‗remembers‘ the experiences of his ancestors by means of the
stories, images and behaviour among which he grew up, as in Hirsch‘s definition of
postmemory (2012: 5). His grandfather Abraham Jäger used to tell a lot of stories, which
triggered Mendelsohn‘s interest in the family history. Especially because his grandfather was
such a storyteller, it is remarkable that the story of how Shmiel and his family passed away is
incessantly kept under wraps. As we have discussed, ―untold stories often pass more
powerfully from generation to generation than stories that are discussible‖ (Bar-On 1998: 99).
This seems to be the case in Mendelsohn‘s story. Adding to Mendelsohn‘s personal
involvement is the fact that he seems to have been perceived as a memorial candle for Shmiel

by his elderly relatives. The opening sentence of the novel hints at this: ―Some time ago,
when I was six or seven or eight years old, it would occasionally happen that I‘d walk into a
room and certain people would begin to cry‖ (Mendelsohn 2008: 3). Further on in the novel, it
is explained why they cry.
Oh, he looks so much like Shmiel! And then they would start crying, or exclaiming
softly and rocking back and forth with their pink sweaters or windbreakers shaking
around their loose shoulders, and there would then begin a good deal of rapid-fire
Yiddish from which I was, then, excluded. (6)
Daniel Mendelsohn is not named after this lost relative, which is part of Dina Wardi‘s
definition of a ‗memorial candle‘, but he very much reminds his elder relatives of Shmiel
Jäger (Sicher 1998: 24). Therefore, he can be considered to be a memorial candle. This
passage clearly shows how Mendelsohn was personally involved in the traumatic memories
but at the same time excluded from the actual trauma. Regrettably, Abraham Jäger committed
suicide before his grandson could ask him the right questions and many of his contemporaries
passed away before this quest started as well. This is the start of what could be called an
16


―obsession with the opaque and inaccessible past‖ of his family‘s connection to the
Holocaust, which is how Codde describes postmemory (2009: 64).

3.1.2 Edmund De Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance
Edmund de Waal is one of the world‘s leading artists working in ceramics today, who lives
and works in London.7 His large-scale installations of porcelain vessels are what he is best
known for in ceramics. De Waal has exhibited his work in many different venues, including
the Waddesdon Manor, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Britain and MIMA. Evidently,
Edmund De Waal is also known as an author. His novel The Hare with Amber Eyes: A
Hidden Inheritance was published in 2010 by Chatto & Windus and has become an
international bestseller ever since. It has won many literary prizes, including the Costa
Biography Award, the Galaxy New Writer of the Year Book Award and the Royal Society of

Literature Ondaatje Prize. The novel has been translated in over twenty languages so far.

Edmund De Waal has inherited a collection of 264 netsuke. Netsuke are small, portable
objects designed by Japanese craftsmen to be used as toggles for kimono, which became
collector‘s items. De Waal‘s netsuke provide the framework of The Hare with Amber Eyes.
This particular collection was purchased by Charles Ephrussi, De Waal‘s great-greatgrandfather during the wave of japonisme in fin-de-siècle Paris. Triggered by these small
objects and interested in his family history, De Waal traces back to whom in his family these
netsuke used to belong. Thus, the ascent and decline of the Jewish dynasty of the Ephrussi
family forms the background of this rich story. This biography of his family leads De Waal to
a journey through twentieth-century history. As said, Charles Ephrussi bought the netsuke at
the end of the nineteenth century. The first of the rooms that the netsuke were displayed in
was Charles‘ study. As the third son of bank-owner Leon Ephrussi, Charles had time and
money to collect art. Accordingly, the netsuke were accompanied by impressionist paintings
of Renoir and Degas. These painters and other close acquaintances of Charles Ephrussi like
Marcel Proust visited this study regularly. The narrative then moves from Paris to Vienna,
when Charles sends the netsuke as a wedding present to his cousin Viktor von Ephrussi. They
are placed in the dressing-room of his wife Emmy, De Waal‘s great-grandmother. The
7

All biographical and professional information about Edmund De Waal was found on his website
www.edmunddewaal.com.

17


children grow up playing with the netsuke on the carpet of their mother‘s dressing-room.
Their father Viktor von Ephrussi, the new bank-owner of the Ephrussi bank, lives with his
family in a vast palace on the Ringstrasse in Vienna. This is the setting of the horrors of the
Anschluss for the Ephrussi family and other Jews living in Vienna. The Second World War
forces them move away, leaving them scattered all over the world. Nothing remained of their

once legendary wealth, except for some paintings, books and photographs. Thanks to Anna,
Emmy‘s maid, also the netsuke were saved and given back to the Ephrussi family. Forced to
work for the Nazis in the Palais Ephrussi, she managed to smuggle them little by little out of
the dressing-room and hid them under her mattress. Thus, they eventually wound up with
Edmund De Waal‘s great-uncle Iggie—Ignace von Ephrussi—in Tokyo in the 1970s. They
were proudly displayed in their original home-country until Iggie passed away and the
netsuke finally ended up in London with Edmund De Waal.

Edmund De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes contains clear aspects of postmemory. His
grandmother moved to the United Kingdom before the Second World War and his greatgrandparents left Vienna during the Holocaust. De Waal can be considered third or even
fourth generation, in any case a generation of postmemory. His sense of obligation to write his
family history is very characteristic of the third generation.
Owning the netsuke—inheriting them all—means I have been handed a responsibility
to them and to the people who have owned them. I am unclear and discomfited of
where the parameters of this responsibility might lie. (De Waal 2010: 13)
De Waal knew the netsuke had participated in his family‘s stories of which he only knew the
outlines. He feels the obligation to tell the story of the owners of the netsuke, whose voices
are lost by now.
I was anxious because what I'd been given with these netsuke was far, far more
interesting than a generic set of anecdotes. I'd been given objects with memories. I'd
been given part of a story, a few echoes, a sense of untold narratives. And this
challenge: anecdotalise this odd collection for the rest of your life. Or work it out. (De
Waal 2010)
De Waal decided to work it out. His thirst for knowing sends him on a quest to discover what
the netsuke have witnessed in his family. In the novel, De Waal focuses more on the story he
18


discovered than on the way he gained access to this story. However, the novel offers us some
reasons to state that De Waal‘s quest has turned into a healthy obsession. For example, he

mentions how he spent late nights looking through Elisabeth‘s literature or how he read AntiSemite books for months to learn more about the period. We also know he must have
travelled quite often to visit the family houses in order to find more information. This is one
of the reasons why The Hare with Amber Eyes can be considered a work of postmemory.
Another reason is that Edmund De Waal is personally involved in the story as well. Especially
when he describes his great-uncle Iggie, De Waal gets emotionally involved. Unlike with
Charles Ephrussi, who he never knew, the author cannot distance himself from the apartment
of his close family. He cannot inventory it objectively, since the room reminds him of his
beloved great-uncle (De Waal 2010: 334). This personal involvement is an important aspect
of postmemory as well.

3.2 Quest
3.2.1 Daniel Mendelsohn - The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
In The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, Daniel Mendelsohn describes his quest to
discover what happened to his great-uncle Shmiel, his wife Ester and their four children. His
quest starts out right after his bar mitzvah as a profound interest in his family history but it
soon evolves into an obsession about what happened to these six deceased family members.
Naturally, I‘d always been curious: How could I not, I whose face reminded certain
people of someone long dead? But the fervent interest in Jewish genealogy, which
became a hobby and, much later, almost an obsession, began on that April day. […] I
thereafter devoted hours and weeks and years to researching my family tree […]. The
only gap, the only irritating lacuna, was Shmiel and his family, the lost ones about
whom there were no facts […], no dates […], no anecdotes or stories to tell.
(Mendelsohn 2008: 38; 39; 42)
This quest determines the structure of the novel. Firstly, Mendelsohn starts to write letters to
his family members with questions about the past:
I would write to these old relatives […] and sometimes the replies frustrated and
confused me. […] But more often, these elderly people were gratified […] and they
answered me eagerly and told me whatever they knew in reply to my questions. (39)
19

The next step of the quest was writing to many institutions to gain very precise information.
Later on, this information could be found by internet searches on genealogy websites. Finally,
his quest led him to travel, ―over the course of a year, to a dozen cities from Sydney to
Copenhagen to Beer Sheva, to embark on airplanes and ferries and trains […]; to go, in the
end, to Bolechow itself‖ (41). The reader is included in every step of the way. Every
expectation, discovery or disappointment and the corresponding emotions are shared with the
reader. The structure of the novel includes the reader in the quest, as if the reader is
discovering the past together with the author.

Discovering the past in this quest is hindered by many difficulties. Firstly, although
Mendelsohn‘s grandfather told a lot of stories, he never revealed what he knew about the fate
of Shmiel and his family. This seems contradictory; the story of what happened to Shmiel and
his family is the most powerful of all, yet it is covered in silence. Untold stories, as Bar-On
states, pass more powerfully from one generation to the next (1998: 99). The paradox is that
there is no actual story to pass on; Shmiel and his family are lost, even in the stories.
My grandfather told me all these stories, all these things, but he never talked about his
brother and sister-in-law and the four girls who, to me, seemed not so much dead as
lost, vanished not only from the world but—even more terrible to me—from my
grandfather‘s stories. Which is why, out of all this history, all these people, the ones I
knew the least about were the six who were murdered, who had, it seemed to me then,
the most stunning story of all, the one most worthy to be told. But on this subject, my
loquacious grandpa remained silent, and his silence, unusual and tense, irradiated the
subject of Shmiel and his family, making them unmentionable and therefore,
unknowable. (Mendelsohn 2008: 15)
By leaving their story untold, Shmiel and his family are not just dead but also lost, as
Mendelsohn puts it. This is comparable to Art Spiegelman‘s reaction in Maus when he
discovers his father burned his mother‘s notebooks. By burning the notebooks out of grief,
Vladek unintentionally made sure Anja‘s story remained untold. Art blames him of murdering
his mother, since now she is not only dead but also completely lost (Spiegelman 2003: 161).

Keeping silent about a story is not the same as burning someone‘s diaries, so Mendelsohn
does not blame his grandfather as Art blames his father, but he intends to make the story
mentionable and therefore knowable. His quest for the truth could be seen as a way to bring
20


the lost ones back, to give them a second chance, not in life but in his narrative. The idea that
the author wants to save the six lost ones through narrative is implicated in the novel, for
example:
My fantasy is that the sudden warming of this serious-looking girl makes an
impression on Mrs. Begley of 1938—she is herself a serious and deeply shrewd
woman—and because of that impression, Mrs. Begley will remember her, remember
the murdered girl Lorka Jäger, remember her so many years later and in that way will
help me rescue her. (Mendelsohn 2008: 46)
Mendelsohn says that he wants to rescue Lorka. Of course he cannot revive her literally, but
he can tell her story, thus preventing that she completely vanishes. By telling the stories of the
Holocaust victims, one can ensure that the Nazis‘ goal to exterminate the Jews completely
will never be reached. Their memory will be passed on to the next generation through their
stories.

A second difficulty is the temporal distance between the Holocaust and the time Mendelsohn
begins his quest. When Mendelsohn started searching for information, many years had passed
since the Holocaust. Unfortunately, many eyewitnesses had passed away since then. Even
starting just a decade earlier could have made a difference, as Mendelsohn puts it: ―These
questions led me, at first, to write letters to the relatives who were, in 1973, still alive—a
number that was already far smaller than it had been six or seven or eight years earlier, when
I‘d go with my family to Miami Beach‖ (39). This is a frustrating aspect of the quest. Much
more information could have been known but is lost in time. Mendelsohn describes this as
follows:
I‘m pleased with what I know, but now I think much more about everything I could

have known, which was so much more than anything I can learn now and which is
gone forever. […] [Y]ou need the information that people you once knew always had
to give to you, if only you‘d asked. But by the time you think to ask, it‘s too late. (73)
Time is not only a problem because it makes people pass away, it also corrodes the memories
of the still-living survivors. The account of an event that happened roughly sixty years ago is
bound to contain some gaps. A lot of specific details get lost because time has erased them
from the memory.
21