Perseus Academic: After Such Knowledge by Eva Hoffman

As the Holocaust recedes from us in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the next generation. How should they, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors, and the second-generation’s responsibilities to its received memories? In this meditation on the long aftermath of atrocity, Eva Hoffman—a child of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust with the help of neighbors, but whose entire families perished—probes these questions through personal reflections, and through broader explorations of the historical, psychological, and moral implication of the second-generation experience. As she guides us through the poignant juncture at which living memory must be relinquished, she asks what insights can be carried from the past to the newly problematic present, and urges us to transform potent family narratives into a fully informed understanding of a forbidding history.

A New York Times Notable Book 2003

Eva Hoffman was born in Cracow, Poland, and emigrated to the United States at the age of thirteen. She is the author of Lost in Translation, Exit into History, Shtetl, and The Secret. She lives in London.

Eva Hoffman was born in Cracow, Poland, and emigrated to Canada at the age of thirteen. She is the author of three highly acclaimed works of nonfiction, Lost in Translation, Exit into History, and Shtetl, and one novel, The Secret. She divides her time between London and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a visiting professor at MIT.