SOURCE: Review of After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Aftermath of the Holocaust, by Eva Hoffman. Kirkus Reviews 71, no. 22 (15 November 2003): 1350.

In the following review, the critic calls After Such Knowledge a “commendable contribution” to Holocaust studies, noting Hoffman's engaging representation of the challenges faced by the children of Holocaust survivors.

[After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Aftermath of the Holocaust, l]iterate if sometimes arid essays on the world—intellectual, cultural, and emotional—of the Holocaust's “second generation.”

Memoirist Hoffman (Shtetl, 1997, etc.), a representative of that generation, writes, “I was the designated carrier for the cargo of awesome knowledge transferred to me by my parents, and its burden had to be transported carefully, with all the iterated accounts literally intact.” Literally intact: to tinker with the narrative of the survivors, she writes, in order to streamline, even to make more comprehensible, would have been “to make...