SOURCE: Review of After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Aftermath of the Holocaust, by Eva Hoffman. Publishers Weekly 250, no. 47 (24 November 2003): 54-5.

In the following review, the critic lauds Hoffman's essays in After Such Knowledge, praising the collection as a “beautifully wrought, deftly argued examination of how we might attempt to understand the Holocaust.”

“Sixty years after the Holocaust took place … [and] this immense catastrophe recedes from us in time, our preoccupation with it seems only to increase,” writes Hoffman in [After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Aftermath of the Holocaust,] this beautifully wrought, deftly argued examination of how we might attempt to understand the Holocaust. In seven short essays, Hoffman (Lost in Translation, etc.) focuses on the consciousness and experience of the Holocaust's second generation—the children of survivors—as theirs is a “strong case-study in the deep and long-lasting impact of atrocity.” Synthesizing personal history...