The Second Generation By Helen Epstein Sparknotes

The Holocaust, the tyrannically planned and executed mass murder of nearly six million innocent Jews by the pandemonic forces of Hitler’s Nazi regime remains till date a crime unprecedented in history. The magnitude of the Holocaust trauma is so immense that it keeps percolating to generations of survivors. The second generation children of survivors, the immediate descendants of survivors of the Holocaust have also been vicariously traumatized because of their Holocaust legacy.
Some of these second generation survivors have resorted to creating their own poetics of witnessing which is a synthesis of the firsthand experiential accounts of their parents and their own vicarious experiences of the aftermath of the Holocaust. This pedagogical experience

The emphasis was no longer on assimilating with their American counterparts, but rather on making a link with their Jewish peers. Holocaust survivors in America began to identify themselves not essentially as American Jews, but rather as Jews in America.
Helen Epstein, daughter of first generation Holocaust survivors, Frances and Kurt Epstein is a renowned second generation Holocaust writer. She has written several memoirs, novels and travelogues to explicate her second generation legacy. This paper attempts to trace the trajectory of the negotiation of second generation identity as revealed in Epstein’s paradigmatic memoir, Children of the Holocaust.
As a child, Epstein had had a very disturbed childhood – haunted by nightmares of barbed wire, skeletons and rotting flesh. Although she was born ages after the end of the Holocaust, she could still imagine visions of ghettoisation and incarceration: “piles of skeletons…barbed wire… bits of flesh”. (9). Her psyche had been bogged down by the presence of an “iron box” (9), but she was never sure what it was. Perpetually conscious of this unfathomable burden, only later did she realize that it was a liminal manifestation of the horrors of the Holocaust, whose secondary witness she had become by inheriting its legacy in her

Both these young men had married daughters of survivors and felt obligatory about propagating their Jewish race through their progeny:
It isn’t just the normal parental instinct, I really feel that my raising a family is of cosmic significance. I feel that my raising a family is of cosmic significance. I feel I have a sacred duty to have children. I feel it’s the only way to respond to the evil of the Holocaust and to assure that the death of my family and the six million was not in vain. (23) Eli’s parents had constantly eluded his repetitive queries regarding their past. He had great admiration for his parents for resurging so successfully after the Holocaust, instead of succumbing to despair. However his attitude to God was one of rebellion – he could not accept the stock answer that God in his wisdom knows what he’s doing and that mortals should not question his ways. Similarly, Epstein too had dreaded going to Sunday school. She did not believe in God more than she believed in Santa Claus. She could not worship this God who had let her mother suffer.
Eli was infuriated that no one had done something to prevent the Holocaust. And his terrific rage even escalated to murderous fantasies about the