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.

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.

Eva Hoffman is not known for her speculations about the future, but for her engagement with the past. Her autobiography, Lost in Translation (1989), accounts for her personal history as a post-war Polish emigrant to Canada and the US, and her major works of non-fiction examine different aspects of Eastern European and Jewish history. Hoffman repeatedly connects the experiences of the postmemory generation (Hirsch), of children of Holocaust survivors such as herself, with the uncanny. As she explains, “this is . . . the second generation’s difficulty: that it has inherited not experiences, but its shadows. The uncanny, in Freud’s formulation, is the sensation of something that is both very alien and deeply familiar, something that only the unconscious knows. If so, then the second generation has grown up with the uncanny” (ASK 66).

This paper explores the uncanny in Hoffman’s little known work of Gothic science fiction (Wasson and Alder), The Secret: A Fable for our Time (2001). The protagonist, Iris, retrospectively narrates her coming-of-age from the vantage of the not-too-distant future of 2025. In The Secret, cloning is a practicable but somewhat disparaged mode of human reproduction, and Iris, the narrator, is the “monstrous” cloned offspring of her single mother. As Iris grows into adulthood, the uncanny similarities and tight bonds between her and her mother lead Iris to develop matrophobia, a strong dread of becoming her mother (Sukenick, Rich). Hoffman’s novel can thus be understood in terms of “the matrophobic Gothic” (Rogers), but, I argue, it also modifies this genre by bringing to it insights into the uncanniness of second-generation experiences of mother-daughter kinship.