The tracing of connections between writers' work and the circumstances of their parents' lives is always problematic. But for children of parents who survived Adolf Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews, parental experience is both formative and variable. For every person who endured it, the Holocaust was different. And although critics, historians, and psychologists believe they now understand the effects of the Holocaust on those who lived through it, their generalizations do not always correspond to the works of survivors' children, the "second generation." Scholars assume that survivors could not process trauma when it happened, that they often deferred the psychological work of mourning because they needed to turn their energies to the labor of living, and that they transferred a legacy of unmourned traumatic loss to their children. But the nature of their legacy, like the Holocaust itself after it has passed through the prism of individual...