Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

The personal stories and the "fiction" in this collection were very impactful...and told a story that only children of survivors could identify with.

Published just in time for Passover, the holiday of freedom, Melvin Jules Bukiet (STRANGE FIRE, NEUROTICA, SIGNS AND WONDERS, Professor at Sarah Lawrence) has collected some of the works of the children of Shoah survivors, the Second Gen'ers, the "2G." I was drawn to this book by its cover art, in which the sign over the gates to Auschwitz reads "NOTHING MAKES YOU FREE" instead of the actual "WORK MAKES YOU FREE/Arbeit Macht Frei". Included in the book are pieces in English and those translated into English from Italian, French, Serbian, Swedish, Hebrew, German, and Hungarian. Although these adult "CHILDREN" grew up around the world, they carry a common literary burden and can spot each other in crowded rooms. Bukiet (the son of number 108016) asks "how atrocity gets filtered through imagination." This collection helps to answer it. He writes that if the Holocaust is a historic Rorschach blot, in it the depressive can justify despair, the hopeful can find redemption, and the stupid can discern the triumph of the spirit. The collected authors grew up as children of a nightmare, children of the khurban that "is a black hole that devours the light." Bukiet explains that they lived with parents that had numbers tattooed on their arms; parents who saw their kids as replacements for murdered family members; parents whose Yiddish language was now as dead as Sanskrit; parents who appreciated life having known death (or resigned themselves to suicide); parents with cauterized tear ducts; and parents who never wasted food at the dinner table, having known hunger intimately. Their parents lived with the aftermath of atrocity and passed on these psyches to their 2G-Second Generation children (either through speaking of it always or never speaking of it). Many of the 2G authors are rage filled, angry, cynical, and distrustful. And This makes for good writing. The authors included in the collection are, in Part 1: Carl Friedman, Eva Hoffman, Victoria Reel, Tammie Bob, Ruth Knafo Setton, Goran Rosenberg, Doron Rabinovici, Alan Kaufman, and Barbara Finkelstein; in Part 2: Savyon Liebrecht, JJ Steinfeld, Thane Rosenbaum, Henri Raczymov, Sonia Pilcer, Lily Brett, Val Vinokurov, Helena Janaczek, Esther Dischereit, and cartoonist Art Spiegelman; and in Part 3: Anne Karpf, Lea Anini, Gila Lustiger, Joseph Skibell, Leon De Winter, Alcina Lubitch Domecq, Mihaly Kornis, Peter Singer, David Albahari, Alain Finkielkraut, and the editor Melvin Jules Bukiet. I recommend that you read the authors' brief bios before starting to read the collected works. Not included are authors like David Lehman and David Curzon, who identify as 2G, but whose parents escaped Vienna in 1939; and the journalist, Joseph Berger (Displaced Persons), since he were born slightly prior to May 7, 1945.