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Shaping the Shoah: the Second Generation and After
Poetry by children of survivors or others who did not experience the Shoah first-hand shows the psychological strains of receiving such knowledge and passing it in usable form to future generations. The writers are directly concerned with the question of shaping future "memory" and frequently wrestle with survivors' silence or emotional chaos.
In texts that often revealing a coded language expressing an ineradicable anxiety, they generate trenchant dramatic scenes, startling midrashim, dark quests for phenomena analogous to the Shoah---poems of engulfment and potential control, of family tensions about acknowledging the continued presence of the Shoah in Jewish life. These works, remarkable in their own right, are important tools for teaching new ways of understanding this central Jewish experience and its use for the modern world.
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