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Family and kinship carry special significance to Holocaust survivors and their descendants. In autobiographies and family memoirs, writers of what Marianne Hirsch terms the postmemory generation employ different narrative strategies for coming to terms with the ways in which the Holocaust has marked their identities and family ties. This article focuses on women’s writing of the postmemory generation, examining three works in English by daughters of survivors in the UK, the US, and Canada, written during the 1990s. It investigates the narrative strategies used by Anne Karpf, Helen Fremont, and Lisa Appignanesi to represent maternal sexual agency and vulnerability in a survival context. It suggests that these representations are strongly influenced by matrophobia and matrophilia, defined as the conflicting dread of becoming and desire to be one’s mother, which are themselves strongly conditioned by Holocaust history, particularly the gendered history of vulnerability among women in open hiding during the war1.

This article examines the affective terrain of Poland, Canada, and the US in Eva Hoffman’s autobiographical account of her migration and exile in Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), the text that launched Hoffman’s reputation as a writer and intellectual. Hoffman’s Jewish family left Poland for Vancouver in 1959, when restrictions on emigration were lifted. Hoffman was 13 when she emigrated to Canada, where she lived until she went to college in the US and began her career. Lost in Translation represents her trajectory in terms of “Paradise,” “Exile,” and “The New World,” and the narrative explicitly thematizes nostalgia. While Hoffman’s nostalgia for post-war Poland has sometimes earned censure from critics who draw attention to Polish anti-Semitism and the failings of Communism, this article stresses how Hoffman’s nostalgia for her Polish childhood is saturated with self-consciousness and an awareness of the politics of remembering and forgetting. Thus, Hoffman’s work helps nuance the literary and critical discourse on nostalgia. Drawing on theories of nostalgia and affect developed by Svetlana Boym and Sara Ahmed, and on Adriana Margareta Dancus’s notion of “affective displacement,” this article examines Hoffman’s complex understanding of nostalgia. It argues that nostalgia in Lost in Translation is conceived as an emotion which offers the means to critique cultural practices and resist cultural assimilation. Moreover, the lyricism of Hoffman’s autobiography becomes a mode for performing the ambivalence of nostalgia and diasporic feeling.

In the last decade, critical interest in the effects of institutional and technical protocols on recorded Holocaust testimony has grown. The role of professional or volunteer adult interviewers has been re-examined, particularly in relation to taped, archival testimony, and studies demonstrate that survivor testimony is shaped by the interview situation and listening practices. However, the role of the child listener in a domestic setting in relation to postmemory autobiography and memoir has received less attention. In the analysis that follows, I focus on Irene Oore's 2019 memoir, The Listener: In the Shadow of the Holocaust, because, as the title suggests, Oore thematizes the question of listening, asking what it means to listen to a survivor parent. My analysis considers domestic listening in relation to Holocaust testimony as well as to listening as emotion work. Oore's text posits life writing as the most desirable outcome of domestic listening, for it can be an act of care which elicits the retelling of witness accounts. In publishing her mother's stories, as well as her own experiences of listening to them, Oore's postmemory writing functions as deferred and mediated testimony which her mother never publicly gave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eva Hoffman, known primarily for her autobiography of exile, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), is also the author of a work of Gothic science fiction, set in the future. The Secret: A Fable for our Time (2001) is narrated by a human clone, whose discovery that she is the "monstrous" cloned offspring of a single mother emerges with growing discomfort at the uncanny similarities and tight bonds between her and her mother. This article places Hoffman's use of the uncanny in relation to her understanding of Holocaust history and the condition of the postmemory generation. Relying on Freud's definition of the uncanny as being "both very alien and deeply familiar," she insists that "the second generation has grown up with the uncanny." In The Secret, growing up with the uncanny leads to matrophobia, a strong dread of becoming one's mother. This article draws on theoretical work by Adrienne Rich and Deborah D. Rogers to argue that the novel brings to "the matrophobic Gothic" specific insights into the uncanniness of second-generation experiences of kinship, particularly kinship between survivor mothers and their daughters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]