Between Silence, Memory, and Postmemory: The Accounts of Shoah and Migration of the Polish Jewish Female Psychoanalysts in the United States

• In Event: Gender, Sexuality, and the Holocaust, Session 1

Abstract

Using information gleaned from long forgotten archival materials and interviews, the presentation will tell the stories of loss and survival of 21 Polish Jewish women psychoanalysts who fled the Nazis to the United States in 1933-1941. I will examine their relationships with their traumatic pasts,their perspectives of the Shoah and emigration, and their (often silent) narratives of their stories. I will also look at the transgenerational transmission of trauma to their children and grandchildren (who often also were psychoanalysts) and their retelling of these stories.

Virtually all these women endured tremendous losses and deep traumas in connection to the Shoah. Many lost family members, all lost their homes, language, cultures, and institutions. Still, Holocaust was absent from psychoanalytic literature until the late 1960s. With rare exceptions, these women tended to refuse to discuss Shoah with their children and grandchildren. But grandchildren of trauma survivors and Holocaust survivors needed answers and persistently asked. I will look at the gaps between the accounts of the women under study and the retelling of their traumatic experiences and stories of survival by their grandchildren. I will utilize the methodology of a personal and oral historian. Based on case studies of interviews with children and grandchildren, I will examine the patterns of generational storytelling and postmemory, defined as experiences transmitted from survivors to their children and grandchildren “so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (Hirsh, 2012, p. 5).

Through highlighting oral history, the presentation will provide added insights into the past beyond official sources, often discriminatory and tending to erase the voices of women, Jews, noncitizens, and other minorities. The talk is based on my ongoing research (conducted with the help of the 2024 Schlesinger Library Research Support Grant), and leading to the book, Between Silence, Memory, and Postmemory: Shoah and Migration of Polish Jewish Female Psychoanalysts in the United States (Routledge, 2027).

Author

• Klara Naszkowska, Montclair State University