"Sometimes Your Memories Are Not Your Own": The Graphic Turn and the Future of Holocaust Representation

"The legacy of the Shoah" writes Eva Hoffman, a child of Holocaust survivors, "is being passed on to ... the post-generation ... The inheritance ... is being placed in our hands, perhaps in our trust." We are entering an era that will witness the end of direct survivor testimony. As we move farther and farther from the events of the Shoah, subsequent generations, who see their own lives shaped by the defining rupture of the past, continue to respond to the call of memory. The current era has seen a burgeoning of Holocaust literary representation in the evolving genre of graphic novels, narratives that reanimate and materialize the past through the juxtapositions and intersections of text and image. Calling upon the Deuteronomic imperative to "teach your children," second and third-generation Holocaust writers, through the hybrid form of the graphic novel, attempt to give shape to the traumatic imprint of the Shoah and its haunting aftermath for generations extending beyond that history.