https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7853-7137
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Tess Scholfield-Peters, Keepers of Memory: The Holocaust and Transgenerational Identity. Jennifer Rich, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 39, Issue 1, Spring 2025, Pages 120–122, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcae051
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Keepers of Memory: The Holocaust and Transgenerational Identity (2021) is a timely, insightful, and astutely written book by sociology professor Jennifer Rich. The study blends autoethnography, sociological methods, and literary analysis to traverse the multidimensional issue of contemporary Holocaust storytelling and commemoration in relation to concerns of history, memory, and truth. Rich positions herself as researcher, writer, and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors—the personal dimension informs her research pursuits, given that she focuses on second- and third-generation survivors’ experiences and relationships to the Holocaust, a topic inextricable from her own life. Holocaust storytelling is interrogated from multiple angles in Rich’s text, yet it is her own personal lens that propels her interrogations and ultimately strengthens her scholarship because she is able to do so from lived experience.
Descendants of survivor witnesses—children, grandchildren, and, now increasingly, great-grandchildren—who have inherited stories of survival, trauma, loss, and resilience, are now faced with the question of how to safeguard this history as the last of the survivor generation passes away. As Rich notes, the degree of engagement, understanding, and significance of the Holocaust to the lives of the second and third generations is not uniform. The malleable, tenuous nature of memory in the context of such generational transmission is the central point of Keepers of Memory. Often incongruous with historical fact, inherited (post)memories come to define family stories, as the author notes: “We believe what we want to believe, even when it is not possible” (p. ix). The intersection of history and memory for descendants of survivors is at the crux of Rich’s study; the text does not attempt to uncover historical truth. Instead, Rich interrogates the memories of these descendant generations, arguing that there is scholarly significance in the “messiness, emotions, and interpretation” of these memories (p. x). After all, these memories are what we inherit, what shape the narratives of our past.
