Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature is a much needed, penetrating analysis of a growing body of literature. Drawing upon the insights of an all-star array of scholars, it spans a variety of literary works from a variety of genres and geographical origins. It is an indispensable resource for students and scholars alike. In this age of the fading memory of the Holocaust, this important volume is a clarion call to memory and testimony. It will transform its reader into witnesses.

David Patterson, University of Texas at Dallas

This book’s superb scholars, engaging essays, and incisive insights show not only that the Holocaust’s reverberating trauma remains but also how the Shoah’s call to remember and resist endures, as it must, to challenge and morally impel one generation after another. The well-told stories in these pages—haunting, moving, life-changing—highlight warnings and yearnings that must never be forgotten.

John K. Roth, Claremont McKenna College

Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature is an important book about the challenges, power, and complexity of memory on the “third generation” of Holocaust survivors, perpetrators, and collaborators. Emerging Trends is not an easy volume to read, but it is a necessary one, if you want “to negotiate the vast distance – psychological, affective, physical, and otherwise – between lived experiences in the past and the shadows it casts on contemporary life.” It is a book that reveals the past is never past. It lives in the present and into the future.

Carol Rittner, Stockton University

The essays in this collection are particularly strong: they are insightful, well researched, and well written. There is now a robust critical literature about the second generation, the children of Holocaust survivors (sometimes the term is also applied to the children of perpetrators). In the present volume Berger and Wilson take the next step, analyzing the fiction, memoirs, and films of the third generation—the grandchildren. Berger and Victoria Aarons have both written well-received volumes on both generations. The notion of postmemory—a term coined by Marianne Hirsch to signal the transmission of trauma from the generation that actually experienced the Holocaust to their offspring—is central to understanding 2G and 3G, as the second and third generations are often termed. The contributors are diverse, as are the authors discussed. The tropes discussed in the essays vary widely—return, witnessing, inherited memory, grief, regret, resentment, revenge—and many of the essays are quest narratives, as the grandchildren go in search of their grandparents' story after their death. Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Choice Reviews