Inheriting the Holocaust: A Second-Generation Memoir - Hardcover

Fass, Paula S.

4.15

13 ratings by Goodreads

9780813544588: Inheriting the Holocaust: A Second-Generation Memoir

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813544580 ISBN 13: 9780813544588

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2008

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In Inheriting the Holocaust, Paula S. Fass explores her own past 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.

Fass begins her journey through time and relationships when she travels to Poland and locates birth certificates of the murdered siblings she never knew. That journey to recover her family's story provides her with ever more evidence for the perplexing reliability of memory and its winding path toward historical reconstruction. In the end, Fass recovers parts of her family's history only to discover that Poland is rapidly re-imagining the role Jews played in the nation's past.

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About the Author:

Paula S. Fass is Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She has written many books and articles, including Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization, and Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America.

Review:

"Paula Fass''s moving memoir is written with quiet dignity and the most impressive moral lucidity. Her account of a family devastated by genocide is testimony both to human resilience and to the painful price of emotional fragility paid in the midst of the resilience."

--Robert Alter "University of California, Berkeley "

"In this moving and eloquent book, Paula Fass explores the legacies of love and loss that the children of Holocaust survivors inherit."

--James Sheehan "Stanford University "

"Paula Fass's moving memoir is written with quiet dignity and the most impressive moral lucidity. Her account of a family devastated by genocide is testimony both to human resilience and to the painful price of emotional fragility paid in the midst of the resilience."

--Robert Alter "University of California, Berkeley "

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