Fragile Knowledge: Owning the Scars of Second-Generation Holocaust Survivors in Argentina

I will explore the complex nature of resettlement in Argentina for Holocaust survivors, Jewish refugees, and their descendants from an ethnographic, psychological, and cultural studies perspective. In her groundbreaking article “Remembering the Unknown,” French Historian Nadine Fresco analyzes the experience of Jews “[b]orn after the war, because of the war, sometimes to replace a child who died in the war” who feel their existence as a “sort of exile.”1 This perpetual and ambiguous loss, this “sort of exile,” is the subject of my work with artifacts and interviews with members of Generations of the Shoah in Argentina (Diana Wang, Aída Ender, and Natalia Rus), establishing a testimonial and historical framework of the Holocaust’s aftermath, through which I address representations of Jewish identity and the experience of descendants of survivors in literature (Manuela Fingueret’s Hija del Silencio / Daughter of Silence), film (Daniel Burman’s El abrazo partido / Lost Embrace), and art (Mirta Kupferminc).

1. Fresco, Nadine. “Remembering the Unknown.” International Review of Psychoanalysis 11 (1984): 417-27. “Born after the war, because of the war, sometimes to replace a child who died in the war, the Jews I am speaking of here feel their existence as a sort of exile, not from a place in the present or future, but from a time, now gone forever, which would have been that of identity itself.” (421)