“Small acts of repair”: Yom Hashoah scholar-in-residence discusses postmemory of the Holocaust, April 25, 2013

Dr. Marianne Hirsch

Dr. Anthony Kemp, USC English Department

Questions from the audience

The audience at Dr. Hirsch's lecture

Stephen Smith, executive director, USC Shoah Foundation

From left: Dr. Dan Leshem, associate director of research, USC Shoah Foundation; Marianne Hirsch; and Stephen D. Smith, executive director, USC Shoah Foundation

The USC Shoah Foundation organized an April 25 lecture by Marianne Hirsch, its 2013 Yom Hashoah scholar-in-residence, who discussed her work on postmemory: the relationship that children of Holocaust survivors have with the personal, collective and cultural trauma of their parents.

Hirsch was born in Romania, and her own parents are survivors of the Romanian Holocaust from Czernowitz. “During my childhood in Romania, my parent’s Holocaust stories were a daily narrative, and in their view, it was not so bad,” she says. “But as I learned more, I realized that they weren’t telling the whole story. There was a certain moment around 1986—I started talking to friends, and realized that our parents’ memories had this quality, this texture that made them more real to us than our own memories.”