POSTMEMORIAL STRUCTURES: PORTRAITS OF SURVIVOR-FAMILY HOMES IN SECOND-GENERATION HOLOCAUST LITERATURE AND ORAL HISTORY

This study demonstrates the relationship between intergenerational trauma and domestic space, specifically focusing on how Holocaust survivors’ homes became extensions of their traumatized psyches that their children “inhabited.” Based on my analysis of literature and oral histories of the second generation, my project employs the theory of postmemory to demonstrate how the spatial and temporal conditions of survivor-family homes, along with the domestic practices and objects contained therein, rendered these domestic milieus spaces of traumatic contagion. Postmemorial structures often functioned as spaces that afforded few illusions of familial permanency, thereby familiarizing survivors’ children with an intimate and pervading fear of external threat at a young age, which challenged or precluded feelings of parental protection and refuge within the domestic. I discuss the ways by which the second generation’s inherited perceptions of space—along with their inherited perception of matter and time— structured and structure their perceptions of their domestic lives. This study explores how, in turn, postmemorial structures shaped and shape the second generation’s inherited perceptions of space, matter, and time. As survivors’ traumas were registered in the very space of their homes, their homes functioned as material archives of their Holocaust pasts, creating domestic environments that commonly also wounded their children. In addition to survivors’ unspoken traumas, their spoken narratives of the Holocaust were also imbued in the space of postmemorial structures to such an extent that these homes became the very “framework” or “architecture” of their psychosocial lives. I argue that insofar as survivor-family homes were imaginatively transformed by survivors’ children into the sites of their parents’ traumas—whether they were concentration camps, ghettoes, places of hiding, etc.—their domestic spaces became central technologies that catalyzed and perpetuated the intergenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma and embodied experience. I further argue that the ways by which they describe their home lives constitute indirect expressions of their belated relationships to the Holocaust.