A Testimony to "The War After": Remembrance and its Discontent in Second Generation Literature

First and foremost, it is manifested in the avoidance on the part of their parents of any reference to r heir life prior to, and during World War II. While Amichai describes the voyage of a survivor,44 second-generation literature portrays the journeys of sons and daughters of survivors to the territories of their ancestors. [...]Arnon Greenbers from Levi's Legend of the Sad Lake goes to Germany, to trace the true identity of his father; other literary figures go to Poland: Amalaia Aurbach from Govrin's The Name tries to produce a photograph album in memory of her father's first wife, including photos taken in the places where she lived and had her career; Shlomo Neumann from See Under: Love searches there for the key to a textual representation of the concentrationary universe; and Eleonora Lev joins an official Israeli delegation and tries to discover the origins of her family, "the archeology of belonging"-as she defines it.45 Their journey is portrayed as an obsession for, and an uncontrolled attraction to, the territories of death. The direct confrontation with the "Lieux de Memoire" invokes a wish to withdraw and seek refuge. [...]Grossman's See Under: Love, Barbash's My First Sony, Govrin's The Name, Levi's Legends of the Sad Lakes, Keren's Anatomy of Revenge, Avigur-Rotem's Heatwave and Crazy Birds, as well as all other second-generation travelogues, portray the second generation's voyage as taking a physically and psychologically twisted course, zigzagging back and forth toward the boundaries defining the "inside" of the impenetrable sites and away from them. According to the reading suggested here, the textual crypts of the three works under consideration contain almost identical stories of the failure to build a new family on the ruins of a family that had perished in the Holocaust.