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book: At Home with the Holocaust
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At Home with the Holocaust

Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2025

About this book

At Home with the Holocaust examines the relationship between intergenerational trauma and domestic space, focusing on how Holocaust survivors’ homes became extensions of their traumatized psyches that their children “inhabited.” Analyzing second- and third-generation Holocaust literature—such as Art Spiegelman's Maus, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, Sonia Pilcer's The Holocaust Kid, and Elizabeth Rosner's The Speed of Light—as well as oral histories of children of survivors, Lucas F. W. Wilson's study reveals how the material conditions of survivor-family homes, along with household practices and belongings, rendered these homes as spaces of traumatic transference. As survivors’ traumas became imbued in the very space of the domestic, their homes functioned as material archives of their Holocaust pasts, creating environments that, not uncommonly, second-handedly wounded their children. As survivor-family homes were imaginatively transformed by survivors’ children into the sites of their parents’ traumas, like concentration camps and ghettos, their homes catalyzed the transmission of these traumas.

Author / Editor information

LUCAS F. W. WILSON is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He is the editor of Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors’ Stories of Conversion Therapy, as well as the coeditor of Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature.

Reviews

"At Home with the Holocaust makes a vital contribution to the research on second and third-generation Holocaust descendants and the complex ways in which traumatic memory is passed along intergenerationally. By perceptively focusing on the domestic spaces that Holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren inhabit—both materially and psychically—Wilson raises crucial questions concerning the legacy of the Holocaust and its imprint on future generations."— Victoria Aarons, author of Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory (Rutgers University Press, 20

"In his astute and deftly written study of American second-generation Holocaust literature, Wilson brings to bear theories of space and affect to illuminate the ways in which the concept of the family home is represented in these texts as a charged site of memory, trauma, and familial legacy."— Erin McGlothlin, author of The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction

"At Home with the Holocaust is an exceptional volume which breaks new ground in understanding the Shoah’s legacy as experienced by the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. This important study examines both literary texts and oral traditions with great insight in revealing how the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust endured in and through survivor homes. Successive generations of survivor families find their lives touched by the Shoah even as they seek to move ahead with their own quest for Jewish meaning after Auschwitz. This work is a finely nuanced examination which can be read with great profit by those seeking greater insight into the dynamics at work in trauma and memory studies. Additionally, and to the author’s great credit, this book sheds new light on the evolving contours of post-Auschwitz religion and Jewish identity. Franz Kafka observed that a book should be like an axe breaking up the frozen sea within. Wilson’s meticulously researched study is the instrument we need to break traditional boundaries while acknowledging the past’s hold on the present and the future.”

— Alan L. Berger, Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair in Holocaust Studies at Florida Atlantic University

"Wilson is able to provide an account of postmemory that moves beyond analysis of the rote physical traces of family history such as the presence and/or absence of family photographs and the other usual trappings of domestic spaces, and instead focus on the complex ways in which survivors and their families inhabit and even imagine home"

— Journal of Jewish Studies

Topics

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    Contents

    vii
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    Preface

    ix
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    Introduction

    1
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    1 Postmemorial Structures

    15
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    2 “Remember, my house it’s also your house too”

    32
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    3 Domestic(ated) (Un)fashioning

    51
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    4 A Tale of Two Storeys

    76
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    5 Pre/Occupied Longing

    101
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    Conclusion

    124
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    Appendix

    133
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    Acknowledgments

    135
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    Notes

    139
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    Bibliography

    161
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    Index

    169
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    About the Author

    175
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
February 18, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781978839847
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.36019/9781978839847
eBook ISBN: 9781978839847
Keywords for this book
Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”; Sonia Pilcer’s “The Holocaust Kid”; Elizabeth Rosner’s “The Speed of Light”; Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything Is Illuminated”; Art Spiegelman; Sonia Pilcer; Elizabeth Rosner; Jonathan Safran Foer; “Maus”; “The Holocaust Kid”; “The Speed of Light”; “Everything Is Illuminated”; holocaust; genocide; jewish studies; trauma; generational trauma; oral history; family; concentration camps; ghettos
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
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