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

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 thirdgeneration Holocaust literature during his course ‗Contemporary American Literature‘. Finally, special thanks are extended to my parents for their support and encouragement throughout my study

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

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

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: 102-104) 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

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

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

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

(Bar-On 1998: 100) Dan Bar-(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 self-determined 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

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

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‘ evidently, 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

Self-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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

―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 grandfather 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

great-great-a journey through twentieth-century history As sgreat-great-aid, Chgreat-great-arles Ephrussi bought the netsuke great-great-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

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 grandparents 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

great-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

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 Anti-Semite 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)

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

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

Thirdly, the quest to collect information about the lost relatives is toughened because of a spatial distance between Mendelsohn and the interviewees Mendelsohn wants to interview the remaining surviving Jews from Bolechow who might have known Shmiel and his family Many of these survivors survived precisely because they moved away from Bolechow From the few Jews who survived while staying in Bolechow, many moved away during or after the war as well As a result, the people whom Mendelsohn wants to talk to are scattered throughout Europe and America Since their stories are too personal to discuss over the phone and they are conveyed much more powerfully in person, Mendelsohn had to travel around the globe to execute this quest This evolves into a labyrinth course, in which he travels ―to Australia and Prague and Vienna and Tel Aviv and Kfar Saba and Beer Sheva and Vilnius and Riga, and then Tel Aviv again and Kfar Saba again and Beer Sheva again, to Haifa and Jerusalem and Stockholm and, finally, those two days in Copenhagen‖ (72) On a practical note, this travelling costs a lot of time and money Additionally, it is tiring on an emotional level as well Often when Daniel Mendelsohn sets out on a journey to meet a surviving Bolechower, he seems both excited and nervous, both hopeful and stressed In the following excerpt, we see how tense the journeys could be for Mendelsohn

I was extremely tense Once again, […], the idea of proximity to someone from the place and time I was interested in was almost too tantalizing, too powerful, to bear: my leg was shaking as I sat in Susannah‘s car and watched Manhattan drop behind us […] I was, once again, prey to fantasies so intense, […] [that] I didn‘t trust myself to speak […] But in the end there wasn‘t that much talking to be done (67)

The long journeys are travelled in uncertainty: will he discover something useful about his family? Or will this long travel teach us nothing more and keep Mendelsohn at the same distance from his relatives? This uncertainty is frustrating and discouraging when the outcome

Jack told us about the cross that was cut into the rabbi‘s chest, a thing he cannot have witnessed (I had asked him, during that conversation, how he knew for sure that Ruchele had perished in this particular Aktion Had he seen her being taken? I stupidly

questioned He laughed grimly If I would have seen her, I would have been dead too!

So how did he know? Because afterwards, he said, a little impatiently, she was

no one present, who knew Ruchele, survived this event

It is possible […] that the sixteen-year old Ruchele was killed there, as we know some people were It is, indeed, possible that she was the naked girl on the stage, with whom the rabbi, his eyes running blood, was forced to dance, or forced to lie on top of […] Then again, if she survived those thirty-six hours, as some did not […] she was taken

to Taniawa –whether she walked the few kilometers or was put in a truck, it is impossible to know […] (Mendelsohn 2008: 210)

This passage goes on for a while, there are many more terrible options that could have happened to her As Mendelsohn correctly repeats several times: ―it is impossible to know‖ (210) The same speculation is going on when Mendelsohn describes what happened to Bronia, the youngest daughter She perished in the second Aktion, in which 2500 people were gathered, ―weeping, screaming, terrified‖, to wait for the cattle car (234)

For instance, maybe Bronia was one of the ninety-six Jews whom the boastful Ukranian single-handedly killed during that time, most of whom, as we know, were children Maybe this girl was thrown from an upper story onto the pavement below; maybe she was spun round and round by a Ukranian […] But maybe not Maybe,

somehow, [she] survived the gathering process In which case, we know, they would have been marched […] to get up into the cattle car (234-235)

Again, every Jew in the street at that time would have been killed Those who did survive, perpetrators or bystander, probably do not know the details of the event because of its enormous, chaotic and terrifying nature As with Ruchele, the details of Bronia‘s death remain unknown

3.2.2 Edmund De Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

Edmund De Waal embarked on a quest to learn more about the history of his collection of netsuke He researched to whom in his family they used to belong, what the role of these netsuke was and moreover, what his ancestors were like and what they experienced The

result of this quest is his novel, The Hare with the Amber Eyes, which answers these questions It is not as obvious to determine The Hare with Amber Eyes as a quest as it is for Mendelsohn‘s novel Whereas The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million is a description of a

quest which includes the readers, De Waal‘s story is a result of a quest It tells the story as De Waal has individually discovered it, without including the readers in the process of detection However, De Waal does often refer to his own quest throughout the novel For example, he mentions where he found his grandmother‘s wedding notice: ―I find their wedding notice in the archives of the Adler Society in Vienna‖ (De Waal 2010: 223) De Waal also mentions the travels he made to find information, we get descriptions of his ancestors‘ cities and houses as they were at the moment De Waal visited them He also lets us in about where and when he found certain bits of information For example:

I spent my last morning of this visit in the records of the Vienna Jewish community next to the synagogue off Judengasse There are police nearby In the latest elections the far right has just won a third of the popular vote, and no one knows if the synagogue is a target There have been so many threats that I must pass through a complex security system Finally inside, I watch as the archivist pulls out the folio records, one striped volume after another, and lays them on the lectern Each birth and marriage and death, each conversion, the whole of Jewish Vienna faithfully recorded (153)

De Waal often explains where and when he discovered something Accordingly, he describes travels he made in order to find information about his ancestors But unlike Mendelsohn, he only refers to his quest in the context of a discovery; hardly ever does he refer to a journey or

an effort made in vain Assuming that De Waal came across some disappointments during the quest, the reader is completely left out of this We are presented with a coherent story with only references to how this story was discovered

3.3 Communicative and cultural memory

Maurice Halbwachs introduced the influential concept of ‗a mémoire collective‘ or ‗collective

memory‘ in La mémoire collective, amongst other works Halbwachs stated that ―[t]here is no

possible memory outside those frames of reference which human beings, living in society, employ in order to secure their recollections and revert to them‖ (quoted in Assmann 2003: 163) This means that although an individual is the only one to have the recollections, they are always collectively shaped (163) Only through communication and interaction within the scope of a social group can recollections be formed (155) Without discussing this concept in depth, we abide by Halbwachs and Assmann that memory is collectively shaped Still, there are different types of remembrance within this collective memory

Jan Assmann distinguishes ‗communicative memory‘ from ‗cultural memory‘ (1995: 126) Firstly, communicative memory ―includes those varieties of collective memory that are based exclusively on everyday communication‖ (126) Marianne Hirsch explains the concept further:

Communicative memory is ―biographical‖ and ―factual‖ and is located within a generation of contemporaries who witness an event as adults and who can pass on their bodily and affective connection to that event to their descendants (2012: 32)

In the context of the Holocaust, this means that survivors tell their stories (or fragments of the stories) to the next generations In the normal succession of generations, this communicative memory can be transmitted across three or four generations (32) The second type of memory

is cultural memory Communicative memory is characterised by its proximity to the everyday, whereas cultural memory is categorised precisely by its distance to the everyday (Assmann 1995: 128-129) As the bearers of the communicative memory enter old age, they increasingly wish to institutionalise their memory to preserve their stories and make them available to a

wider audience, for example in archives or books (Hirsch 2012: 32) Cultural memory describes thus these institutionalised and archival relics and stories that a society has left as reminders of the past after the eyewitnesses and other participants of the event have passed away (Rigney 2005: 14) It is ―maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance)‖ (Assmann 1995: 129)

The distinction between communicative and cultural memory is not always clear in Mendelsohn‘s and De Waal‘s novels Both authors embark on their quests triggered by the communicative memories they heard from their relatives In Mendelsohn‘s novel, we know that most of the information he discovers about his relatives, he acquires through the stories of the survivors, hence, through the transmission of communicative memory He also relies on cultural memory as he uses the archives to find information about Bolechow or about exact dates of events He relies on and reinvestigates the cultural memory of the Torah as well, as

he discusses several myths out of the Hebrew Bible Accordingly, De Waal relies on both communicative and cultural memories in his novel He is less open about where he attains the information about his family than Mendelsohn is, but we know that his Uncle Iggie has told him many stories and that he owns some diaries of his grandmother Thus, communicative memories were transmitted to them He also relies on cultural memory, as we know he spent a lot of time in archives and reading published works about Anti-Semitism Remarkable in his story is that cultural memories about his relatives are transmitted not only through archival accounts but also through the mediums of fictional prose and art For example, Charles Ephrussi served as model for one of Proust‘s characters and he was depicted in Renoir‘s

painting Luncheon of the Boating Party Likewise, Ignace Ephrussi is portrayed as a rich jeweller in in Joseph Roth‘s novel Das Spinnennetz, translated as The Spider’s Web

Everyone had an easy life, says Theodor, the young and bitter Gentile protagonist, employed by the family as a tutor, ‗the Efrussis the easiest of all… Pictures in gold frames hung in the hall and a footman in green and gold livery bowed as he escorted you in.‘ (De Waal 2010: 151)

De Waal also reinvestigates cultural memory as he often discusses the general political and social situation of the regions and times he is examining Both novels are thus written

accounts of a combination of communicative and cultural memories, in which the communicative memories seem to predominate

By writing and publishing these novels, these communicative memories were made available for a wide audience, so now they are being read and discussed, and they circulate in the media culture This means that the novels can be viewed as media of cultural memory (Erll 2010: 395) The relevance of this can be explained with an example of Mendelsohn‘s novel Meg Grossbard did not want Mendelsohn to write about her stories, because ―[s]he knew that the minute she allowed [him] to start telling her stories, they would become [his] stories‖ (Mendelsohn 2010: 252) Meg Grossbard prohibited that her stories would be published in the novel, thus preventing her communicative memories from turning into cultural memories Consequently, her stories will not be remembered after she and the ones she told them to have passed away By publishing their novels, Mendelsohn and De Waal prevent this from happening to their stories They allow their stories to be read, appropriated and discussed by their readers As a result, they have brought their communicative memories into cultural memory through the medium of literary non-fiction, thus saving them from oblivion Thus,

we can argue that the novels are in the transit zone between communicative and cultural memory

By bringing these personal works into cultural memory, the authors not only preserve their stories but also contribute to how the Holocaust will be remembered when all participants will have disappeared By enabling their personal stories to become cultural memories, Mendelsohn and De Waal create an opportunity for people without communicative memories about the Holocaust, who have to rely on cultural memories, to become more engaged in the remembrance of this traumatic event As Hirsch puts it:

Postmemorial work […] strives to reactivate and re-embody more distant political and

cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression (2012: 33)

Their novels make the cultural memory of the Holocaust more personal by reinvesting it with communicative memories Their works thus make a small contribution to the Holocaust being

remembered in a personal way For example, the title The Lost: A Search for Six of Six

Million illustrates that the story is indeed about six relatives, but that these can also be seen as

a pars pro toto for all the people who lost their life in the Holocaust When relating the personal story of six Jews, it is implied that all six million Holocaust victims have a personal story like this Accordingly, De Waal represents the downfall of the Jewish population in the twentieth century in a personal way While recounting the story of the Ephrussi‘s, De Waal is also telling the Jewish history from the fin-de-siècle until the end of the twentieth century By telling the rise and fall of one Jewish dynasty, he metaphorically recounts the rise and fall of the Jewish population in western-Europe in general in a way the readers can relate to it

3.4 The influence of postmemory on identity

3.4.1 Daniel Mendelsohn – The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

We have already established that Daniel Mendelsohn was perceived by his relatives as a memorial candle for Shmiel Dina Wardi claims that ―[t]he emotional need of the ‗memorial candles‘ to compensate their parents for what they lost comes at the cost of the development

of an independent self‖ (1992: 156) Dina Wardi refers to memorial candles of the second generation who were specifically named after a lost relative Since Daniel Mendelsohn is a member of the third generation and only a memorial candle to elderly relatives whom he barely saw, claiming that he has no independent self would be overstated However, his identity could undoubtedly have been influenced by this, since his identity was never fully his own with these relatives His peculiar relationship to the generation before and his postmemorial work seems to have influenced his identity in at least two different ways

Firstly, Mendelsohn‘s identity is influenced by his lost relatives Obviously, his quest to find out what happened to them, which lasted for years, must have affected him The devoted searching, the anxiety, the disappointments and the discoveries most likely influenced his identity We see the impact that the quest had on Mendelsohn clearly in his breakdown when

he finds someone who can actually tell him what happened to Shmiel and Frydka His strong reaction shows that his identity is strongly affected by his lost relatives and his quest to find them

[…] she describes me, at the moment when Prokopiv uttered the name Szedlakowa, as having melted And it‘s true that something snapped in me at that moment I simply

sank down and squatted there in the dust of the street and started to cry (Mendelsohn 2008: 477)

Also, the narrator seems to identify with Shmiel Jäger to a certain extent He shows he feels a lot of empathy for his great-uncle and what he went through His fixation on and his empathy for Shmiel, makes Mendelsohn somewhat identify with him This is most obvious when Mendelsohn discovers the small basement that Shmiel was hiding in

As I‘ve mentioned, I have a deathly fear of enclosed places, but couldn‘t and wouldn‘t bring myself to mention it now, under these circumstances I thought of the cattle car

at the Holocaust Museum Maybe Shmiel had been claustrophobic as I, I thought (482)

Marianne Hirsch says that ―embodied journeys of return, corporeal encounters with place, do have the capacity to create sparks of connection that activate remembrance and thus reactivate the trauma of loss‖ (2012: 212) Likewise, Mendelsohn‘s encounter with the place where Shmiel and Frydka were hidden creates a moment of close connection In this moment, memory seems to be transmitted from generation to generation

However, Mendelsohn is only virtually experiencing what Shmiel went through, he is aware that the identification is not real It is clear that Mendelsohn is a member of the third generation As Bar-On states, ―[t]he third generation of immigrants is known to be the first one relatively liberated from the experience of migration (of the first generation) and from the reaction to it (of the second generation)‖ (1998: 109) Less than being affected by the trauma

of their ancestors, the third generation seems to be affected by their compulsive interest in their trauma This seems to be the case with Mendelsohn and he clearly understands that Shmiel‘s trauma is not his

[…] their experience was specific to them and not me, as I stood in this most specific

of places I knew that I was standing in the place where they had died, where the life that I would never know had gone out of the bodies I had never seen, and precisely because I had never known or seen them I was reminded the more forcefully that they had been specific people with specific deaths, and those lives and deaths belonged to

them, not me, no matter how gripping the story that may be told about them (Mendelsohn 2008: 502)

As much as Mendelsohn wants to know his lost relatives and know how they were killed, he realises that he can never achieve this He explains beautifully that his identity is his own, and that he can never adopt someone else‘s, even though he might wish so at times

[…] time passes, things change, a grandson cannot be his grandfather, for all that he may try; because we can never be other than ourselves, imprisoned by our time and place and circumstances However much we want to learn, to know, we can only ever see things with our own eyes and hear with our own ears […] (482)

Hirsch‘s statement that ―[t]he impossibility of return is intensified is descendants who were never there earlier return to the sites of trauma‖ is relevant here (2012: 213) At the exact moment that Mendelsohn discovers what he has been searching for years, during his ―attempt

to reclaim some form of memory or connection‖ to his relatives, the ―irreparability of the breach‖ becomes evident (213)

Secondly, Mendelsohn‘s relationship to Judaism and to the life and traditions of the ‗Old Country‘ seems to have affected his identity as well Mendelsohn‘s grandfather emigrated to the United States of America right before the Second World War According to Bar-On his generation is still very much affected by this emigration (1998: 109) The separation of the home country, the missing of the people who are left behind, the language barrier, the new customs and traditions make assimilation difficult for them The generation of Daniel Mendelsohn‘s mother is still influenced by this (109) The third generation, to which Mendelsohn himself belongs, is the first to be liberated from the effects of this emigration (109) His generation has become completely assimilated to the new country Mendelsohn as well, he seems distanced from the customs of the Old Country For example, he does no longer speak the native tongue of his grandfather

[…] Jews of the sort who were likely to lapse, when sharing prized bits of gossip or coming to the long-delayed endings of stories or to the punch lines of jokes, into Yiddish; which of course had the effect of rendering climaxes, the points, of these stories and jokes incomprehensible to those of us who were young (Mendelsohn 2008: 3)

Likewise, his assimilation into the new country resulted in the fact that Mendelsohn is also distanced from the Orthodox Judaism of his grandfather

Sometimes, when he was finished, he‘d say to us, I put in a good word for you, since

you’re only Reform My grandfather was an Orthodox Jew of the old school, and it

was for his sake, more than anything else, that we had any religion at all […] (11) This illustrates that Mendelsohn does not have the strong connection that his grandfather used

to have with Judaism

Bar-On states that the third generation is the first one to be relatively liberated from the experience of migration and the reaction to it (1998: 109) However, Mendelsohn seems not

to be completely liberated He seems to be attracted by the customs of the Old Country when these are presented to him For example, he is interested in the food of the Bolechow, as his grandfather must have eaten it:

I grinned and nodded OK, I said, let‘s cook Malcia took me into the kitchen so I could watch […] Still, I‘d been raised in a certain kind of home, and I knew what to

do I sat down at the table and ate It was delicious Malcia beamed It’s a real

Bolechower dish! she said (Mendelsohn 2008: 333)

Just like the third generation tends to be extremely interested in the Holocaust in a theoretical manner, Mendelsohn seems to be attracted by Judaism and the Torah in an academic way His connection to Judaism is no longer self-evident and obedient as it was for his grandfather, but Mendelsohn‘s approach is analytical and theoretical In his novel, Mendelsohn discusses several passages of the Torah He analyses passages with a retrospective view on the Holocaust The focus is often on the ideological messages in the Torah and Mendelsohn even implicitly associates some excerpts with the ideology of Nazism and Anti-Semitism This profound interest shows the impact of the Old Country of Bolechow and the influence of Judaism on Mendelsohn‘s identity We will this discuss these passages from the Torah further

when discussing the references to myths in The Lost

3.4.2 Edmund De Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

Firstly, De Waal‘s identity is influenced by inheriting the netsuke He feels responsible to tell the story of his family, a quest which must have affected his life a great deal He tells the story

of his ancestors who were all wealthy and well-known If the Second World War and the Holocaust would not have happened, Edmund De Waal‘s life would probably be completely different The narrator does not show the reader how he feels about this However, the impact

of discovering the story of the netsuke during the Second World War does show us how it has affected him

I knew the story I didn‘t feel the story until my third visit to Vienna, when I was

standing in the courtyard of the Palais with a man from the offices of Casino Austria who asked me if I wanted to see the secret floor (De Waal 2010: 280)

Edmund De Waal reveals that his novel about his netsuke and family can partly be about himself as well Thus he confirms that his ancestors had an influence on his identity

I tell Sasha why we‘ve come, that I‘m writing a book about—I stumble to a halt I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is still a book about small Japanese things (342)

Secondly, several of the relatives whom Edmund De Waal talks about seem to have struggled with their Jewish identity At least outwardly, they adjusted their identity to the changing climate For example, Anti-Semitism started to rise in the 1880s and the Jews and even the Ephrussi family in particular became a target For example, Drumont, the editor of a daily Anti-Semitic newspaper, claimed that Jews were not truly French but Jewish and accused them of speculating with real French money ―Drumont‘s ridicule […] became vicious and anger when he thought of his patrimony soiled by the Ephrussi and their friends‖ (92) As a result, Charles Ephrussi changed his identity from outwardly Jewish to essentially French

And I began to realise that Charles‘s new taste for Empire paintings and furniture as he approached his mid-forties was more than just a way of creating an ensemble in which

to live It was also a claim on an essential Frenchness, on belonging somewhere

properly […] Empire is not le gout Rothschild, not Jewish It is French (99)

In contrast, Ignace Ephrussi‘s outward identity is Jewish In spite of Anti-Semitism in Vienna,

he shows his Gentile neighbours that he is a Jew:

It is beautifully done It is a long-lasting, covert way of staking a claim for who you are The ballroom is the only place in a Jewish household—however grand, and however rich you might be—that your Gentile neighbours would ever see socially This is the only Jewish painting on the whole of the Ringstrasse Here on Zionstrasse

is a little bit of Zion (125)

Ignace Ephrussi‘s son Victor and his family had assimilated to Vienna completely according

to De Waal:

I realise that I do not understand what it means to be part of an assimilated, acculturated Jewish family I simply don‘t understand I know what they didn‘t do: they never went to synagogue, but their births and marriages are recorded here by the Rabbinate […] [and Viktor] gave money to Jewish charities (151-152)

They are Jewish but they are just as much Austrian Viktor Ephrussi is even patriotic and supports the Austrian government financially:

He is generous and patriotic in his financial support He buys lots of government War Bonds Then he buys some more Though he is advised by Gutmann and other friends

at the Wiener Club to move his money to Switzerland, as they are doing, he will not do

so It would be unpatriotic (192-193)

Edmund De Waal is not a Jew, he was raised in the Anglican Church Thus, he is not interested in Judaism as a religion We see this in the novel as well, as his focus is never on religious aspects However, his identity seems affected by Judaism He is not interested in the religion itself, but he is affected by his Jewish background and the knowledge of what has been done to his relatives because of their religion His relatives were assimilated, were even supporting the Austrian regime, but still they were considered Jews and had no rights because

of this His month-long reading about Anti-Semitism and the knowledge of the consequences for his relatives, and indirectly for him, seems to have had an impact on him