Jewish Memory, Jewish Legacies

Abstract Memory studies, when intersecting with Jewish studies, is often narrated as stories of loss. The gains of futurity usually involve the work of recovery. This essay surveys a range of texts that concern the reclaiming of Jewish identity in the contemporary world. Its primary focus is a reading of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes as a product of Jewish memory, as a memoir, and as an example of intergenerational legacy. This essay includes autobiographical elements relevant to the histories of Jewish modernity, intermarriage and conversion, Jewish “westernization,” and immigration. Theoretical perspectives are introduced and major artists considered. The relationship between history and memory, the Jewish and non-Jewish, is interrogated with special attention given to the place of individuals of “mixed” identities. Holocaust studies informs this essay, as do post-memory, life-writing, and twenty-first century technologies and discourses around ancestry.