Grandsons Who Remember: Intersections of Holocaust Heritage and Contemporary Male Positioning
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Grandsons Who Remember: Intersections of Holocaust Heritage and Contemporary Male Positioning Master’s Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate School or Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Departments: Near Eastern & Judaic Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies ChaeRan Freeze, Advisor In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Master’s Degree By Golan Moskowitz May 2012 Copyright by Golan Moskowitz © 2012 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis owes a great deal to the support, skilled guidance, and sensitive investment of Professor ChaeRan Freeze, whose advising and close mentoring have earned my great admiration and have been fundamental to my work and personal growth as a scholar. I am grateful to Professor Sylvia Fishman for being a reader, offering guidance along the way, and inspiring my thinking. I also offer sincere gratitude to Professor Ilana Szobel for her feedback and insights in conversations about post- Holocaust subjectivity and psychoanalytic theory. Two generous awards funded this project – I extend heartfelt thanks to the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, as well as to Rena Olshansky for her grant supporting Research on Jewish Family Life. I would like to thank Rena, as well as Sylvia Fuks Fried and Miriam Hoffman of the Tauber Institute, for being remarkably supportive mentors and advocates for my professional development. I am honored to know each of them personally. I thank Annette Koren at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies for speaking candidly with me about interviewing methodology. Anna LeMahieu, Mariel Boyarsky, and Tamar Moskowitz deserve my appreciation for carefully transcribing my interviews. Finally, I thank my family, friends, and other educators for the pushing, pulling, retreating, and supporting that has inspired in me the drive to live my own truth. iii ABSTRACT Grandsons Who Remember: Intersections of Holocaust Heritage and Contemporary Male Positioning A thesis presented to the departments of Near Eastern & Judaic Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts By Golan Moskowitz Research on the psychological wellbeing and self-positioning of HSG (Holocaust survivors’ grandchildren) remains limited and inconclusive. Given postmodern sensibilities that resist fixed identity categories, it would be hasty to generalize too much about the “third generation” as an identity group. But it is equally hasty to dismiss these grandchildren’s experiences from critical studies of post-Holocaust positioning. Situated in a discussion of HSO (Holocaust survivors’ offspring) studies and relevant theory in psychological, trauma, and gender studies, this project uses 24 semi-structured interviews with adult, male HSG to offer a preliminary collective biography and analysis of Jewish American HSG. It focuses on the subject positioning of contemporary Jewish American manhood as it interacts with varying internalizations of a shared Holocaust heritage. The concept of narrative is central to this project. HSG experience is, in large part, learning to locate oneself within the context of existing stories on personal, familial, and collective levels. HSG construct their own narratives in relation to their pre-history, fantasies that iv may form in post-traumatic absence, cultural and historical narratives, and the firsthand experiences of coming of age as a contemporary Jewish American man raised in a household of HSO parents. The voices I bring together in this project show that HSG increasingly see their own subject positions as constructed by competing social discourses, such as commercialized gender ideals, family mythology and survival stories, and personal values regarding individual fulfillment. The postmodern zeitgeist offers critical reexamination of how and why subjects become limited or removed from their own potential to operate in the multiple discourses that characterize a particular time and place. Though disparate, HSG are united by a feeling of serious obligation or privilege – a kind of designation to responsibly handle the representative position of bearing the Holocaust legacy. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER ONE: From Generations to Subjectivities……………………...9 What is the Third Generation?...........................................................9 Second Generation Studies................................................................11 Models of Intergenerational Transmission.........................................21 Postmodern, Post-Holocaust Studies.................................................38 CHAPTER TWO: American Grandsons of Holocaust Survivors………….44 From HSO to HSG.............................................................................44 HSG Research....................................................................................46 My Research Sample..........................................................................48 “Third-Generation” Context...............................................................51 Masculinity and Family Trauma.........................................................56 Reported Effects of Holocaust Heritage.............................................69 Emotional Internalizations..................................................................80 HSO Mothers.......................................................................................82 HSO Fathers........................................................................................87 CHAPTER THREE: Working Through in Public and Private……………..92 Crypts and Postmemory.....................................................................94 Processing with Creativity and Fantasy.............................................97 Making History as Working Through...............................................109 Completing Circles and Bridging Gaps.............................................112 Public Discourse................................................................................116 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………….122 Appendix…………………………………………………………………...127 Bibliography………………………………………………………………..131 vi LIST OF TABLES Table of Interviewees……………………………………………………….49 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS/FIGURES Figure from Beyond Words (Miklós Adler)…………………………………14 Figure 1 from Metamaus (Art Spiegelman)………………………………....19 Chart of prisoner markings used in concentration camps c. 1938-1942…….71 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) Figure 2 from Metamaus (Art Spiegelman)……………………………….....80 Part Hole excerpt (Golan Moskowitz)……………………………………....94 vii INTRODUCTION When I think of my Papa…I think of his demeanor and persona being pretty integral to his survival…a tough village boy who can be secretive and fend for himself very independently and fight his way through… I don’t feel like him…It’s a problem in a certain way. I don’t want it to be a problem. It’s a problem on an internal level, because since he valued that toughness (“When I was a kid, you needed to know how to fight”)…Part of me wants to say, “Yea, but Papa, I don’t need to know how to fight.” And I want to believe that, but there’s part of me that doesn’t, because I respect him, and I respect what that attitude and that toughness did for him. -Simon, HSG interviewee To be a man in the legacy of the Holocaust, even in the third generation, is to grapple with the sometimes conflicting pressures of contemporary manhood, of undeniable social privilege in contrast to survivors, and a legacy that induces both vulnerability and strength. Third generation experience is varied, the schisms within that experience delimited by the experiences of survivors and those of the second generation, by the specific dynamics of family communication and developmental factors, as well as by public and institutional handling of the Holocaust. This study begins a preliminary collective biography for a disparate group united by a sense of responsibility to a dying legacy. The task of characterizing a social group is a daunting and slippery one. Given postmodern sensibilities that resist fixed identity categories, it would be hasty to generalize too much about the “third generation” as an identity group. But it is equally 1 hasty to dismiss these grandchildren’s experiences or to exclude them from critical studies of post-Holocaust positioning. I offer the lens of gender to illuminate how one might understand post-traumatic positions, like gender identity, as both internally and externally generated, experienced and performed, interacting with psychological control and the social implications of that control. A careful study of how HSG (Holocaust survivors’ grandchildren) narrate and position their own lives may grant better understanding of how the Holocaust and other family traumas interact with twice-removed descendants of those legacies. Specifically, grandsons come into knowledge, whether factual or embodied, of their grandparents’ traumas as they simultaneously come into themselves as Jewish American boys and men. Often American HSG receive their most extensive Holocaust education when they move from childhood into what is marked in both Jewish and American traditions as early manhood, the years in which boys learn that they are no longer allowed to cry and that they must prove themselves by new social codes of endurance and independence. HSG narratives of coming into Holocaust knowledge intersect meaningfully with their coming of age narratives, thus merging or contradicting a sort of family mythology with their own