When my father first arrived in the United States in 1946 after surviving Auschwitz and other concentration camps, no one, not even Jewish relatives, was particularly interested in hearing about his ordeal. People would say things like, “We suffered too. Did you know that we couldn't get sugar [during the war] and that gasoline was rationed?” So my father and other survivors like him stopped talking about their experiences.
References
1.
JeffreyC. Alexander, “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The ‘Holocaust’ from War Crime to Trauma Drama.” In JeffreyC. Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (University of California Press, 2004). A sociological account of how the Holocaust was transformed from a particularistic event to a moral universal.
2.
StevenM. CohenArnoldEisen.The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America (Indiana University Press, 2000). A study of the baby-boom generation's turn to religious individualism and its implications for contemporary Jewish identity.
3.
DanielLevyNathanSznaider.The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Temple University Press, 2006). An examination of collective memories of the Holocaust in global context, with particular emphasis on Germany, Israel, and the United States.
4.
PeterNovick.The Holocaust in American Life (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). One historian's treatment of how collective memories of the Holocaust have been incorporated into American culture.
5.
JonathanSarna.American Judaism: A History (Yale University Press, 2004). A comprehensive history of Jews in the United States.
