AFTER SUCH KNOWLEDGE Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust EVA HOFFMAN

"an ambitious book that seeks to bring together...both the psychocultural and sociopolitical aspects of [the Holocaust]...deeply felt and effectively conveyed experiences and insightful analysis."
Los Angeles Times

"One of the best responses to [the Holocaust]...Hoffman is an intellectual's intellectual and a writer's writer; the breadth and depth of her latest book is astounding."
New Jersey Jewish News

"an intensely personal new book about the legacy of the Shoah."
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

"the wisest and most sensitive writer about the Polish background to the Shoah… [a] wonderful memoir."
Financial Times

"Hoffman, the child of Holocaust survivors, elegantly writes about the experiences of the second-generation."
National Post (Canada)

"Thoughtful. Hoffman, the daughter of survivors, asks meaningful questions about the nature of memory as the distance to the events of the Holocaust stretches on."
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

"Hoffman makes an experienced guide...the book covers an impressive array of topics...her discussion of the troubled, often-overshadowed relationship between Jews and Poles is intriguing."
The Forward

"Hoffman believes in supplanting moral passion with moral thought, which means incorporating memory into our consciousness of the world. Her graceful and honorific book is the sincere expression of that belief."
The Guardian [UK]

"Hoffman's use of language, her depth of feeling, the profundity of her perceptions, astound. She has read widely and effortlessly weaves histories, psychological studies and memoirs into her own writing. She is at once hard-minded and tenderhearted, poet and dialectician....After Such Knowledge is a powerful and important book to be read with love and remembered with pain."
Hadassah

"Superb...Hoffman is both an excellent writer... and a deep thinker."
The Houston Jewish Herald-Voice

"[An] impressive meditation…her insights are intense, wise, and brilliantly expressed… Hoffman's words not only convey passion and power; they bestow authority."
Jerusalem Post

"refreshingly clear-eyed… Hoffman asks many questions, bringing a voice of reason to the irrational, reaching out for reconciliation."
Sunday Times (UK)

"[a] moving recollection…it is this conflict, the relentless honesty of her self-examination that gives the book its power and force... After Such Knowledge is an extraordinarily powerful book."
The Winnipeg Free Press

"an elegant and moving 'meditation' on being...related to the Holocaust... Her deft, sometimes even rhythmic prose is at once modest and challenging, humane and unromantic... An evening or two spent thinking along with her in these pages is time well spent."
Chicago Tribune

"Hoffman covers the vast terrain of Holocaust recollection within a human ‘receptacle of a historical legacy.' Sometimes she speaks with persuasive intimacy while limning the relationships between parents who have endured a world-devouring catastrophe and their offspring who know it vicariously… Hoffman is at her keenest when she probes the difference between tragedy and trauma… the one genuine addition of Hoffman's book… is her description of the secondary problem of the survivors' post-liberation exile from their devastated homelands."
Washington Post Book World

"[A] ferocious meditation… masterly essays on ethics and political science… She has smart things to say about eroticism and cruelty in the camps, hysterical blindness among Cambodian refugees, Zygmunt Bauman and 'the production of distance,' W.G. Sebald and Binjamin Wilkomirski, Zionism and Armenians."
Harper's,

"[A] beautifully wrought, deftly argued examination of how we might attempt to understand the Holocaust… the power of Hoffman's vision comes in her posing vital questions… Hoffman writes with a subdued but vibrant passion… a daring, controversial challenge… emblematic of Hoffman's brave and forthright thinking and places this volume in the vanguard of Holocaust studies."
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Literate...essays on the world—intellectual, cultural, and emotional—of the Holocaust's 'second generation.'... A commendable contribution."
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2003

"Eva Hoffman is as accomplished a memoirist and critic as virtually any contemporary American writer. Her...works of nonfiction constitute a singular exploration of World War II's long shadow.... In all her writing, Hoffman's consistent sensitivity is informed by her wide erudition, from her musical education to frequent Freudian insight, both psychoanalytic and philosophical."
--Neil Gordon, The New York Times Book Review