Grandparents Reveal Their Secrets: A New Holocaust Narrative for the Young ‘Third Generation’ in Israel

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yael Darr
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Third Generation ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Safe Distance ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Very Young Children ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
New Type

Since the 1990s, a new type of Holocaust story has been emerging in Israeli children's literature. This new narrative is directed towards very young children, from preschool to the first years of elementary school, and its official goal is to instil in them an authentic ‘first Holocaust memory’. This essay presents the literary characteristics of this new Holocaust narrative for children and its master narrative. It brings into light a new profile of both writers and readers. The writers were young children during the Holocaust, and first chose to tell their stories from the safe distance of three generations. The readers are their grand-children and their grand-children's peers, who are assigned an essential role as listeners. These generational roles – the roles of a First Generation of writers and of a Third Generation of readers – are intrinsically familial ones. As such, they mark a significant change in the profile of yet another important figure in the Israeli intergenerational Holocaust discourse, the agent of the Holocaust story for children. Due to the new literary initiatives, the task of providing young children with a ‘first Holocaust memory’ is transferred from the educational authority, where it used to reside, to the domestic sphere.

scholarly journals “To Extract from It Some Sort of Beautiful Thing”: The Holocaust in the Families and Fiction of Nava Semel and Etgar Keret

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 137
Author(s):  
Ranen Omer-Sherman
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Children And Adolescents ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Third Generation ◽  
Children Of Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Distant Future ◽  
Tel Aviv ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Scientific Report

In literary narratives by Nava Semel (1954–2017) and Etgar Keret (b. 1967), both Israeli children of Holocaust survivors, readers encounter the kinds of searching questions about inheriting the burden of traumatic inheritance, witnessing, and postmemory frequently intrinsic to second-generation literature in other national contexts. However, their works are further distinguished by acute examinations that probe the moral fabric of Israeli society itself, including dehumanization of the enemy through slogans and other debased forms of language and misuses of historical memory. In addition, their fiction measures the distance between the suffering and pain of intimate family memory (what Semel once dubbed their “private Shoah”) and ceremonial, nationalistic forms of Holocaust memory, and the apartness felt by the children of survivors who sense themselves somehow at odds with their society’s heroic values. Semel’s numerous articles, and fiction as well as nonfiction books, frequently address second and third-generation trauma, arguably most impressively in her harrowing five-part novel And the Rat Laughed (2001) that spans 150 years but most crucially juxtaposes the experiences of a “hidden child” in a remote wartime Polish village repeatedly raped with that of her grandchild writing a dutiful report for her class in contemporary Israel. Elsewhere, in a distant future, a bewildered but determined anthropologist is set on assembling a scientific report with coherent meaning from the fragmented “myths” inherited from the barbaric past. Over the years, Keret (generally known more for whimsical and surreal tales) has often spoken in interviews as well as his memoir about being raised by survivors. “Siren”, set in a Tel Aviv high school, is one of the most acclaimed of Keret’s realist stories (and required reading in Israeli high schools), raises troubling questions about Israeli society’s official forms of Holocaust mourning and remembrance and individual conscience. It is through their portrayals of the cognitive and moral struggles of children and adolescents, the destruction of their innocence, and gradual awakening into compassionate awareness that Semel and Keret most shine, each unwavering in preserving the Shoah’s legacy as a form of vigilance against society’s abuses, whether toward “internal” or “external” others.

scholarly journals Memory images: Holocaust memory in Balkan cinema(s)

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (32) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nevena Daković
Keyword(s):  
Master Narrative ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Future ◽  
Hybrid Format ◽  
Manifold Effect

The aim of this paper is to analyse the shift of the representational and narrative paradigms of Holocaust memory in the Balkan films that belong to two genres – of melodrama and historicalfiction. The hybrid format positons the Holocaust (hi)stories – already caught between forgetting and remembrance – on the unstable ground between trauma and nostalgia; between history and memory; or facts and fiction. The “regained visibility of the Holocaust grant us access” to Balkan past and present and oblige us to investigate the convergence of the history and the memory into Holocaust master narrative of the Holocaust.“Bringing the dark past to light” in cinema has manifold effect. First, the Balkan wave of Holocaustfilms, with its mixed generic performances, offers new answers to the traditional issues of, both, the ethics of memory and the ethics of representation. Second, the analysis of five films reveals that the trauma from the past – resisting the closure – has the potential to powerfully resonate in the present day political crises. Re-dressing the trauma of the past, the films present the future violence while fulfilling “the Holocaust dictum ‘never forget’”. Eventually, new representational paradigm gives consistency to the Balkan (hi)stories of the past and coherence to the identity in the present.

Use of diluted insulin in the management of very young children with type 1 diabetes: case report and literature review

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
A Emile J Hendriks ◽  
Ross L Ewen ◽  
Yoke Sin Hoh ◽  
Nazia Bhatti ◽  
Rachel M Williams ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Type 1 Diabetes ◽  
Case Report ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Diabetes Case ◽  
Very Young Children

scholarly journals On Becoming a Non-Jewish Holocaust Writer: Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Rachel F. Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
Family Level ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Origins

To appraise Martel’s non-Jewish perspective of Holocaust thematic, it is important to assess it in the context of the Jewish relations with the Holocaust. Even though the Jewish claim to the uniqueness of the Holocaust has been disputed since the end of the war especially in Eastern Europe, the Jewish response determined to a large extent the reception of the disaster on the global scene. On a family level, the children of survivors have identified themselves as the legitimate heirs of the unknowable experience of their parents. On a collective level, the decree of Jewish annihilation constructed a Jewish identity that imposed an obligation to keep the Holocaust memory in the consciousness of the world. Martel proposes to supersede the history of the Holocaust with a story which would downplay the Jewish filiation with the Holocaust, elicit an affiliative response to the event of the non-Jewish writer and consequently integrate it into the memory of humanity at large. However, the Holocaust theme of Beatrice and Virgil refuses to assimilate within the general memory of humanity; rather, the consciousness of the event, which pervades the post-Holocaust world, insists on its constant presence. The omnipresence of the Holocaust blurs the distinctions between the filiative (Jewish) and affiliative (non-Jewish) attitudes toward the Jewish tragedy, gripping the writer in its transcendent horror. Disregarding his ethnic or religious origins, the Holocaust takes over the writer’s personal life and determines his story.

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