I was immediately struck by the narrative similarity between the protagonist in the fictional short story “The Legacy of Raizel Kaidish,” by noted author Rebecca Goldstein, and Janet Jacobs's interviews in her intensive in-depth study of seventy-five children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors in the United States. In these interviews, descendants offer detailed accounts of the memories and stories conveyed to them by their survivor parents and grandparents. Like Goldstein's protagonist, Jacobs's narrators “remember” the past in ways that sometimes blur the lines between the past and the present and between them and their parents/grandparents. Her analyses of traumatic transference, post-Holocaust family culture, and collective memory are fluidly interwoven with the individual narratives of her respondents.

While Jacobs covers a host of interrelated theories important to psychology and psychoanalysis, what distinguishes her work from thematically similar books is her emphasis on the sociological modes of trauma transmission (e.g., family narratives, ritual practices, religious beliefs, and place) from one generation to the other. Her feminist perspective, another distinguishing feature, not only leads her to engage with gender differences, but also theoretically and methodologically informs her book from beginning to end. This critique undercuts traditional theories by moving from essentialist and/or static development models to more dynamic ones about the way we transmit values, world views, feelings, and motivations from one generation to the next. In contrast to male-centered models, Jacobs posits that both male and female children of survivors develop a connection and empathy/attachment to the survivor parent normally associated with female development. She employs a feminist model of self-in-relation theory that shifts the emphasis from the internalization of a parent-object at an early and somewhat irreversible stage of life to one that changes over life-course stages and sociohistoric time.

Jacobs focuses on the transfer of trauma not as fixed moments in time, but rather “as an ongoing dynamic of integration, reidentification, and reattachment in which succeeding generations continually negotiate and strengthen the bonds of kinship with survivors and their pasts” (151). Grandchildren, more than children of survivors, for instance, are less likely to blur the lines between self and survivor and/or between past and present, even during rituals associated with deep emotional mourning and remembrance of the dead, such as Yom Kippur. Jacobs's descendants reflect stories (perhaps tempered by a greater distancing and working through of some of the trauma by the aging survivor and their descendants) that challenge passivity and powerlessness as the major traumatic narrative. This is evinced in the way some descendants offer a more nuanced interpretation of survivor stories to reflect “quiet” acts of heroism and agency in their parents’ and grandparents’ stories. Grandchildren show a greater willingness to accept a more universal, rather than particular, Holocaust message about genocide than their parents.

Rather than dysfunction and psychological strain, Jacobs summarizes her descendants’ narratives as moving from sorrow and sadness in the construction of their Jewish identities to an emphasis on prewar communities and on new and often life-affirming rituals (both personal and communal) in expressing those identities. She suggests that the difference between her work and earlier studies is that many of the latter focus on children of survivors who had not yet resolved the difficulties of a postwar childhood. Her account reflects the passage of generational time, the aging of survivors and their descendants, and a narrative shift toward “reparation and healing” (151).

Another strength of Jacobs's book is that she does not divorce sociohistoric timing from the ways in which descendants interpret, shape, and experience the trauma legacy they inherited (e.g., a rethinking of heroism at a time when the public at large is becoming increasingly more informed by Holocaust scholarship, art, memorials, and literature). Changes in religious beliefs from a transcendent God to a more personal and individualized portrait of the Divine characterize not only many of Jacobs's Holocaust descendants, but also many in the Baby Boom generation in general. Similarly, many descendants’ disenchantment with the God of traditional Judaism shares a sociocultural moment with a post-Holocaust Jewish feminist critique of a patriarchal Divine.

Because it is not at the center of her analysis, Jacobs touches only lightly on descendants’ narratives within the larger and burgeoning research on contemporary Jewish identities and the role of the Holocaust among those who are not descendants of survivors. The convergence and differences between their identity stories and descendants’ identity stories add to the narrative of the making of a trauma legacy and coming of age Jewish after the Holocaust. The Pew Research Center's 2013 survey and report A Portrait of Jewish Americans tells us that over 70 percent of Jews today believe that remembering the Holocaust ranks among the most essential attributes of what being Jewish means to them. Qualitative data on the place of the Holocaust in contemporary Jewish identity suggest that some Millennial nondescendants resemble the grandchildren of Holocaust descendants in that they, too, reject a Jewish-based victim identity; look to life-affirming, often nontraditional rituals as part of their Jewish identity repertoire; assign a new priority to and interest in prewar Jewish culture and place; and understand “never again” to be both particular and universal.

Jacobs's book is a must for scholars who research and teach genocide and/or Jewish studies courses on the Holocaust. It has scholarly depth for colleagues and graduate students and is accessible enough for undergraduates. And because it also provides a new lens through which we can understand the meaning and measure of trauma for Jewish identity among Holocaust descendants, it might serve as a supplementary text for courses on contemporary Jewish identities as well.