In the shadow of history: second generation writers and artists and the shaping of Holocaust memory in Israel and America

The phoenix-like birth of the Jewish State fifty years ago could not after all escape the shadows of Jewish history in Europe, despite the attempt to create a new Sabra culture and despite the stigmatization of the Holocaust survivors in the early years of the state. The drive to start new lives, to succeed and assimilate, plus Ben-Gurion's determination to mold a nation out of what he called "avak haadam" (the human debris of the survivor-immigrants) and the political caution under Roosevelt and during the McCarthy years in the United States, all did much to delay the impact of Holocaust memory. After the Eichmann Trial a new consciousness of the Holocaust formed in both Israel and America, for now a sovereign Jewish state had taken justice into its own hands and Holocaust survivors had confronted the perpetrator as they took the witness stand in front of the whole world. Ben-Tsion Tomer's Children of the Shadows (1963) and Yehuda Amichai's Not of this Time, Not of This Place (1963) were indicative of the cathartic confrontation of an entire nation with its past and with Germany. Amichai's novel in particular gives an idea of the feeling of being "here" and "over there" at the same time, of some unfinished business which creeps into the imagination of those who were not there as they contend with the surreal existence of a state under siege, haunted by an archeological memory of an ever-present past that defies closure.

The Holocaust is a shadow that won't go away. It is indelibly inscribed in ethnic and cultural identity in Israel for reasons not unconnected with changes in Israeli society and politics, especially following the traumatic puncturing of national pride and aggressive independence in the Yom Kippur war, which led some Israelis to question their moral rights to territory that could only be held by force. The Lebanon War and the Sabra and Shatilla massacres highlighted the self-doubts. If Nazi racism had singled out the Jews as victims, then leftist intellectuals felt that the Jew must abandon any nationalist ideology which excludes others, particularly one based on military occupation. According to this logic, the Palestinian Arabs became the Jews' Jews. In particular, Menachem Begin's use of the Holocaust to justify Israel's obsession with security was attacked by the Left. Influenced by the rise of the New Left in Europe in the sixties, this may be in part a response to a siege mentality, partly a defense mechanism for the vacuity of an Israeli identity which often denied the Jewish ground on which it stood. In any case it is a position that is inscribed in its various mutations in much of the discourse that touches on the Holocaust and on the role of the establishment of the state in Jewish history.

If the generation of 1948 had cut off history, their children could cut off their fathers, the pioneers of the Palmach, and the heroes who conquered the land. Like the grandchild who rebels against its father and so takes after its grandfather, the children of the post-Yom Kippur War baby-boom started questioning their identity without holding sacred the Zionist truths which negated the Diaspora and stigmatized Holocaust victims as "sheep to slaughter." Some were quick to buy the Americanization ("Cocacolanization") of Israeli society and decided their birthplace was purely coincidental, that the world was a free consumer market of life-styles and materialistic aspirations. Others began questioning their personal and collective identities. In the eighties, we started hearing of the second generation of Holocaust survivors, who voiced their inherited traumas in film, literature, and art. At the 1988 International Gathering of Children of Survivors in Jerusalem they discovered the "iron box" was shared by many around the world and that there was a growing psychological literature of case-histories of children of survivors in therapy.