Jody # 7- Fass

Title:

Fass, Paula S. Inhereting the Holocaust: A Second-Generation Memoir (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009)

Question:

How does the Holocaust affect the second generation? What understanding and/or memories are brought about by returning to the homeland of parents? What role does the past play in the lives of those not directly affected by traumatic events of the past?

Method:

Justification comes through the claim of "preserving those remnants and shreds of memory from the dwindling reservoir of the human experiences of those people and times" (4). [Supposedly] Fass approaches the subject of memory through historical training, which in turn she uses to state that she is less biased than others [a bit self-righteous too].

Summary of Argument: 

Claiming not to speak for all children of Holocaust survivors, Fass feels her experiences resonate with those who feel that they are part of a historical generation that had to engage in creating a new postwar world. Focused on her own immediate family, Fass begins with a return to Poland in 2000 "to try to coax memory forward so that the link between my mother's memories and my daughter's history could be made" (11). The bulk of chapters outline her family history through a genealogical web of past and present detailing their Holocaust experiences [not hers per se]. She explores her own past [naively and under-prepared/researched] as the daughter of Holocaust survivors to reflect on the nature of history and memory. Through her parents' experiences and the stories they recounted, Fass defined her engagement as a historian and used these skills to better understand her parents lives. She travels to Poland to locate birth certificates of murdered siblings and any remnants left behind. That journey to recover her family's story provides her with more evidence for the perplexing reliability of memory and its winding path toward historical reconstruction. In the end, Fass does recover remnants of family history only to ponder and question how Poland continues to rapidly re-imagine the role Jews played in their past.

Comment:

What is the importance of this book? Who is the audience? Why is she writing this? [I wrote these comments several times in my notes while reading] While I must state my own bias: I wanted this work to divulge "her" experience and not her family's [then again maybe her family is the only thing in her life!], it does however [when focused on the author] provide a profound journey, at times very naively, which presents a contemporary view through a second-generation individual removed from this entity called the Holocaust [experience].

The greatest contribution to scholarly knowledge of memory/history is the 'Afterword' where Fass [finally] steps back and contemplates how these dialectic entities [of history/memory] play out. Her revelation is revealed when she returned once again to Poland in 2007 [While I must counteract the misgivings of this work - her realization fits beautifully into my dissertation!!!!]: "Part of the Lodz and Poland I had found seven years earlier was surely the romantic haze I brought to the experience, and that haze was gone with familiarity. It was familiar to me now, not as the source of my mother's stories, but as a site I had explored as a tourist. There were no more wonderful discoveries in turning the corner of a street or looking into a dark courtyard. That sense of experience and memories merging into a dreamlike reality was gone" (183). 

It also provides views/perceptions of those who assume knowledge of this history and tout their expertise - though being completely removed - while clinging to judgments that blanket contemporary life, and in turn adds to the shadow of the past. Additionally, while I am happy that Ms. Fass was able to connect her genealogical dots, this work should have gone deeper to provide a systematic dissection of how memory/history play off one another through her second-generational experience. If I was editor/advisor I would have scrapped the whole middle section: chapters 2-7. Her discussion of the 're-emerging' Poland, or how Poland is dealing with its past, could have - if she had done her research - been found in numerous volumes on the subject. Instead Fass seems to believe that she is 'discovering' newly found territory. This author should have stuck with 'her' experience and left out all the Bull Shit - especially those comments about taking taxis all over Poland (depicting her as a very well-off snob who does not take time to get-in-touch with culture or surroundings), which actually pushes the argument that this "return to the past" is one that seeks to find connection while being utterly disengaged and distant!

Argument (Chapter Outlines):

Introduction: Inheriting Memory

I. Going to Poland: May 2000

II. I Never Had Grandparents

III. One Uncle

IV. The Complexity of Aunts

V. First Families

VI. My Parents

VII. My Mother/Myself

Afterword: Poland, Again

Notes:

• "memories are so profound, so much part of the bone and marrow that they are inheritable (2)".
• Father hated Poland and vowed never to return (7)
• Fass finds no "active A/S" participation today, instead she witnesses reflection (14)
• Resentment is inherited (93)
• Physical effects (99)
• Aunt's delusion of Nazis in mid-50s (104)
• Survivor guilt (120)
• Parents married in Hannover, Germany 1946 (121)
• German, Jews, and Allies collaborate [see Grossman] (136)
• What! Indulgent! Childhood suicide attempt??? (139)
• Father stops her from going to Germany to study [Prejudice is learned and passed on] (158)
• Father controls and dominates her mother (160)
• Ashamed of her Yiddish (175)
• Not trusting Polish archives - especially for Jews [!?!?!?!?!] (180) WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? Poles see "Jews" and then decide that they won't open archives??? IS THIS ANTI-POLISHISM????
• Re-absorption of past in Poland (185)
• Poles are not 'missing' Jews but looking forward to the future (188)
• Looking for generational past in present (189)
• Family's past has no place in Poland's future (190)