Folk Visions and Voices by Art Rosenbaum

Steinfeld’s Holocaust-inflected poetry, I analyze how Steinfeld explores his childhood upbringing in relation to his parents’ experience via cinematic images and family photos as postmemorial artifacts by which to gain access to an otherwise unlived and virtually unknowable past. In the fourth and last chapter on postmemory in J. This form of remembrance, and its implicit notion of “fidelity to trauma” does not allow for gaining critical distance from the past. In the third chapter on traumatic re-enactment, I examine how Steinfeld’s characters’ total transposition into the traumatic past via performative acts of remembrance and revenge, in the form of theatrical performance and traumatic revenge fantasies, does not lead to cathartic relief but to greater feelings of guilt, helplessness and turmoil. In the second chapter on Holocaust tattoos and second-generation identity, I explore how Steinfeld’s characters show that the mimetic repetition of parental suffering leads to violent self-wounding whereas the re-exploration of Jewish history and tradition is a more constructive alternative to countenance the spiritual devastation and soul murder of the Holocaust. After this historical overview I delineate a brief survey of various recurrent psycho-social elements in the lives of children of Holocaust survivors followed by a more detailed discussion of my methodology concerning Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” and LaCapra’s trauma-theoretical concepts. In the first chapter, I first provide a general socio-historical overview of the Canadian Jewish response to the Holocaust, showing how the belated impact of Holocaust awareness developed in three stages from 1945-1960, 85, with only the latter period seeing the incorporation of the Holocaust into Canadian culture (which falls in approximately the same period as the burgeoning of second-generation literature).

Folk Visions and Voices by Art Rosenbaum