Another Memory: A New Reading of Second-Generation Holocaust Literature in Israel

The writing about the memory of the Holocaust by the second generation in Israel is in dialogue with the Israeli consensus about the Holocaust. Since its emergence in the mid-1980s, this corpus has re-appropriated the memory of the Holocaust from the public sphere in which it was shaped almost exclusively as a national memory (under the banner of “Shoah, heroism, redemption”), and presented it as the personal and authentic memory of the survivors and their offspring who were raised with the trauma. These works are written in a country where this national consensus about the Holocaust facilitates intimate relations between the political and military reality and the memory of the Holocaust.

A feminist method is employed for a new reading of this second-generation literature. The linguistic project of its authors—to forge a new language to represent the Holocaust—is considered through the lens of the feminist project: the development of a new language whose linguistically irregular components are viewed not as a failure, but as an expressive asset with a subversive potential to oppose the organizing schemata of the dominant language.