postmemory

Marianne Hirsch writes of something she calls projected memory: the power of public history to crowd out personal story. She uses the term postmemory to describe the relationship of children to the traumatic cultural experiences of their parents – experiences they “remember” only as stories and images they grew up with, but that are so powerful as to constitute memories in their own right. (This is basically a quote, but I’ve rearranged it enough so that it is not a quote – the academic insistence on citation is never far away from me.) She is referring specifically to the children of holocaust survivors, which I am not.

I am, however, the child of World War II survivors, depression survivors, and immigrant grandparents. The trauma of the holocaust was seen by these people at a distance; I’m sure there is a word for their once removed experience and memory of that cultural trauma. They were connected to the events in that they were Jews, but Jews who had already begun the journey toward American secularism, not denial of their Jewishness, but an adaptation of Jewishness as a political identification. Their secular Jewishness did not deny their connection to the Holocaust; their sense of horror was mediated by their distance and their assimilation into the cultural Jewishness of New York City.

History shows, as James Carroll points out in his new film, that to be a Jew is to be never very far away from the hatred of others. So the images of the holocaust permeate every Jew’s life, but particularly those who lived through it. Whether they were in Auschwitz or on the Upper East Side determined their own safety and relationship with the event, but their children inherit equally their memories of what happened. How do we incorporate traumatic memories that preceded our own birth, but that nevertheless define our own life narratives?

It’s a matter of memory, intertwined with all those deep questions of identification. My father, my mother, even my grandparents were all secular Jews. When I was born my grandmother, who’d lost her husband a year earlier, told my father she didn’t believe in this, but she’d give him a small bounty if he’d name me with an “S” – non-religious at her core, but her own cultural memories impossible to jettison. I never identified as a Jew, never practiced, never even knew really what it meant until I turned 12 and friends started being bar mitzvahed. Then, even though I didn’t choose to adopt it, it was thrust upon me when we lived for a time in a community where there were no Jews. I detested being forced to identify as a Jew because it felt like a lie: I didn’t have the right knowledge, memories, relationships. But I did have postmemory: the displaced memories of my grandparents. My postmemory of the Holocaust involves involves being a member of the most reviled group in history and the shock of surviving.

The cultural identification as a Jews felt by my grandparents and parents became my political identification. I can feel this identification without the guilt of not having been there, without survivor’s guilt. I’m still struggling with what my own postmemory of the Holocaust is, but I know my reaction to Holocaust books and movies is more than just as a removed observer.

About ten years ago my entire immediate family was having a lovely evening in Maine. We sat on the back deck of the house where we stayed listening to crickets and watching darkness fall. My father talked about his own grandmother. He’d only met her a couple of times. She’d come to America to visit her son, his father, but she didn’t like it here and so she returned…to Germany. Wistfully, he said “I don’t know what happened to her. She probably died in the Holocaust. My memory felt brightly illuminated by this newly revealed connection. I felt it: the inconsolable sadness, its incomprehensibility, its pervasiveness.

Hirsch points out that postmemory is powerful precisely because its connection to the event is mediated “not through recollection but through projection, investment and creation.” That it is not a direct connection to the past makes it almost more powerful because as we travel through time the story can be further colored in. James Carroll’s documentary of his personal journey trying to figure out what went wrong between Catholics and Jews shows vividly history as an ever-repeating pattern. Can postmemory and history teach us?