At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives

by Lucas F. W. Wilson

Overview

At Home with the Holocaust examines the relationship between intergenerational trauma and domestic space, focusing on how Holocaust survivors’ homes became extensions of their traumatized psyches that their children “inhabited.” Analyzing second- and third-generation Holocaust literature—such as Art Spiegelman's Maus, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, Sonia Pilcer's The Holocaust Kid, and Elizabeth Rosner's The Speed of Light—as well as oral histories of children of survivors, Lucas F. W. Wilson's study reveals how the material conditions of survivor-family homes, along with household practices and belongings, rendered these homes as spaces of traumatic transference. As survivors’ traumas became imbued in the very space of the domestic, their homes functioned as material archives of their Holocaust pasts, creating environments that, not uncommonly, second-handedly wounded their children. As survivor-family homes were imaginatively transformed by survivors’ children into the sites of their parents’ traumas, like concentration camps and ghettos, their homes catalyzed the transmission of these traumas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781978839830
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	03/11/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	188
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

LUCAS F. W. WILSON is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He is the editor of Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors’ Stories of Conversion Therapy, as well as the coeditor of Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
1          Postmemorial Structures: The “Space” and “Stuff” of Survivor-Family Homes  
2          “Remember, my house it’s also your house too”: Postmemorial Structures in Art Spiegelman’s Maus
3          Domestic(ated) (Un)fashioning: Sonia Pilcer’s The Holocaust Kid 
4          A Tale of Two Storeys: Upper and Lower Space and Postmemorial Divergences in Elizabeth Rosner’s The Speed of Light                      
5          Pre/Occupied Longing: Toward a Definition of Postnostalgia in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated         
6          Conclusion
Appendix
Acknowledgments
Bibliography  
Index

Preface ix
Introduction 1
1 Postmemorial Structures: The “Space” and “Stuff” of Survivor-Family Homes 15
2 “Remember, my house it’s also your house too”: Postmemorial Structures in Art Spiegelman’s Maus 32
3 Domestic(ated) (Un)fashioning: Sonia Pilcer’s
The Holocaust Kid 51
4 A Tale of Two Storeys: Upper and Lower Space and Postmemorial Divergences in Elizabeth Rosner’s The Speed of Light 76
5 Pre/Occupied Longing: Toward a Definition of Postnostalgia in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated 101
Conclusion 124
Appendix 133
Acknowledgments 135
Notes 139
Bibliography 161
Index 000

Editorial Reviews

"At Home with the Holocaust makes a vital contribution to the research on second and third-generation Holocaust descendants and the complex ways in which traumatic memory is passed along intergenerationally. By perceptively focusing on the domestic spaces that Holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren inhabit—both materially and psychically—Wilson raises crucial questions concerning the legacy of the Holocaust and its imprint on future generations."

author of Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory (Rutgers University Press, 20 - Victoria Aarons

"In his astute and deftly written study of American second-generation Holocaust literature, Wilson brings to bear theories of space and affect to illuminate the ways in which the concept of the family home is represented in these texts as a charged site of memory, trauma, and familial legacy."

author of The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction - Erin McGlothlin

"At Home with the Holocaust is an exceptional volume which breaks new ground in understanding the Shoah’s legacy as experienced by the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. This important study examines both literary texts and oral traditions with great insight in revealing how the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust endured in and through survivor homes. Successive generations of survivor families find their lives touched by the Shoah even as they seek to move ahead with their own quest for Jewish meaning after Auschwitz. This work is a finely nuanced examination which can be read with great profit by those seeking greater insight into the dynamics at work in trauma and memory studies. Additionally, and to the author’s great credit, this book sheds new light on the evolving contours of post-Auschwitz religion and Jewish identity. Franz Kafka observed that a book should be like an axe breaking up the frozen sea within. Wilson’s meticulously researched study is the instrument we need to break traditional boundaries while acknowledging the past’s hold on the present and the future.”

Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair in Holocaust Studies at Florida Atlantic University - Alan L. Berger