The Swedish journalist and author Margit Silberstein’s autobiographical memoir, Förintelsens Barn (2021), represents her post-war upbringing in a survivor family. Both parents were Hungarian-speaking Jews from Transylvania, who were the only members of their respective families to survive horrendous persecution and conditions during the war. After the war they immigrated to a small town in Sweden, where Margit and her brother were born. This chapter examines the tensions in Silberstein’s account of her childhood and her relations with her parents, particularly her mother, viewing these tensions as stemming from characteristics of and contradictions between later postmemorial writing and the im/migrant literature of Sweden today, both of which are conditioned by their social contexts, including those of antisemitism. Silberstein’s work brings Holocaust postmemoir into dialogue with im/migrant autobiography in contemporary Sweden, and it suggests that this dialogue will continue to the third generation, Silberstein’s children.

In the last decade, critical interest in the effects of institutional and technical protocols on recorded Holocaust testimony has grown. The role of professional or volunteer adult interviewers has been re-examined, particularly in relation to taped, archival testimony, and studies demonstrate that survivor testimony is shaped by the interview situation and listening practices. However, the role of the child listener in a domestic setting in relation to postmemory autobiography and memoir has received less attention. In the analysis that follows, I focus on Irene Oore's 2019 memoir, The Listener: In the Shadow of the Holocaust, because, as the title suggests, Oore thematizes the question of listening, asking what it means to listen to a survivor parent. My analysis considers domestic listening in relation to Holocaust testimony as well as to listening as emotion work. Oore's text posits life writing as the most desirable outcome of domestic listening, for it can be an act of care which elicits the retelling of witness accounts. In publishing her mother's stories, as well as her own experiences of listening to them, Oore's postmemory writing functions as deferred and mediated testimony which her mother never publicly gave.

Family and kinship carry special significance to Holocaust survivors and their descendants. In autobiographies and family memoirs, writers of what Marianne Hirsch terms the postmemory generation employ different narrative strategies for coming to terms with the ways in which the Holocaust has marked their identities and family ties. This article focuses on women’s writing of the postmemory generation, examining three works in English by daughters of survivors in the UK, the US, and Canada, written during the 1990s. It investigates the narrative strategies used by Anne Karpf, Helen Fremont, and Lisa Appignanesi to represent maternal sexual agency and vulnerability in a survival context. It suggests that these representations are strongly influenced by matrophobia and matrophilia, defined as the conflicting dread of becoming and desire to be one’s mother, which are themselves strongly conditioned by Holocaust history, particularly the gendered history of vulnerability among women in open hiding during the war.

Denna specialnummer av Tidskrift för Genusvetenskap handlar om abort och reproduktiva val. Den innehåller en inledning av gästredaktörerna och 6 vetenskapliga artiklar som belyser ämnet från olika feministiska perspektiv. Den innehåller dessutom en diskussion kring "det kvinnliga ansvaret", samt bokrescensioner och inlägg från Sveriges genusforskarförbund.

Eva Hoffman, known primarily for her autobiography of exile, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), is also the author of a work of Gothic science fiction, set in the future. The Secret: A Fable for our Time (2001) is narrated by a human clone, whose discovery that she is the “monstrous” cloned offspring of a single mother emerges with growing discomfort at the uncanny similarities and tight bonds between her and her mother. This article places Hoffman’s use of the uncanny in relation to her understanding of Holocaust history and the condition of the postmemory generation. Relying on Freud’s definition of the uncanny as being “both very alien and deeply familiar,” she insists that “the second generation has grown up with the uncanny.” In The Secret, growing up with the uncanny leads to matrophobia, a strong dread of becoming one’s mother. This article draws on theoretical work by Adrienne Rich and Deborah D. Rogers to argue that the novel brings to “the matrophobic Gothic” specific insights into the uncanniness of second-generation experiences of kinship, particularly kinship between survivor mothers and their daughters.