Toward Postmemory: Second Generation Holocaust Survivors in Contemporary Polish Memoir Literature

The book thoroughly explores postmemory in the Polish historical and political contexts to reveal the multidimensional identity strategies of the second generation of Jews in Poland after the Holocaust, also called the "generation after". Kuchta provides a captivating reflection by focusing on transgenerational transmission of trauma, strategies adapted toward the Holocaust legacy, and ways of constructing Polish-Jewish identity projects in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book comparatively analyzes literary works by the "generation after" while considering the influence of postmemory on the identity of people born after the Second World War. To that end, Kuchta analyzes autobiographical threads in texts by six Polish writers born in the 1940s and 1950s into families of Holocaust survivors, whose works can be read as identity declarations, namely Ewa Kuryluk, Bożena Keff, Roman Gren, Magdalena Tulli, Agata Tuszyńska, and Monika Sznajderman.