Psychoanalytic and Cultural Aspects of Trauma and the Holocaust

Rony Alfandary, Ph.D., is a clinical social worker, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and photographer. He is a lecturer at the School of Social Work at the University of Haifa and the former director of the Post-Graduate Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His recent publications include Exile and Return: A Psychoanalytic Study of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet and Postmemory, Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Ghosts: The Salonica Cohen Family and Trauma across Generations, both published by Routledge. Professor Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz is the director of the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research, the Abraham and Edita Spiegel family professor in Holocaust Research, the Rabbi Pynchas Brener professor in Research on the Holocaust of European Jewry, and professor of Modern Jewish History in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, Israel.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

1. Introduction

Judy Tydor Baumel Schwartz and Rony Alfandary

Part One – Cultural and Psychological Aspects of Postmemorial Work

2. Searching, searching, searching…. Are there any relatives in the room?

Rony Alfandary

3. Then Came Hitler: A Lifetime of Choices on My Path of Postmemorial Work

Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz

4. Reflections on Postmemory – with some notes from Ireland and Greece

Richard Pine

5. Traumatic Childhood and Growing up in the Shadow of Trauma: When Post-Trauma Meets Postmemory: The story of David, a Holocaust survivor

Maia Jessica Shoham

6. From Stone Tomb to Flourishing Vineyard: Moving from Silent Testimony to Living Creativity in "Creating memory", a Bibliotherapy Initiative for Third Generation Holocaust Survivors

Bella Sagi

7. Never Forget – The Net Will Remember: Connective Memory as a Form of Postmemory in the Age of Digital Platforms

Oshri Bar-Gil

Part Two - Postmemorial work in Literature and Art

8. Letting the Monster in? Illustrating the Holocaust in Contemporary Israeli Children’s Picture Books

Erga Heller

9. "Where's the little girl? What little girl? Was there ever a little girl?": From Narrative Memory to Emotional Memory in Nava Semel's Book "And the Rat Laughed"

Naama Reshef

10. The presence of absence Post-memory in my life

Naomi Shmuel

11. "I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors": Second Generation Postmemory in Animated Documentary

Liat Steir-Livny

12. "If It's ME Reading the Signs": Carl Jung's Synchronicity and the a-causal in Holocaust Postmemory at the Movies

Michelle Lisses-Topaz

13. Writing the erasure

Ilana Eilati Shalit

List of Contributors