This course is designed to introduce students to social history of Jewish family in Europe in the aftermath of the Holocaust with a particular focus on young Holocaust survivors and their multigenerational families.
We will discuss how different Jewish communities in former Nazi-occupied Europe dealt with their reconstruction, including painful recovery of Jewish children from a non-Jewish environment in France, Belgium, Holland and Poland.
We will examine the ways Jewish communities and individuals dealt with crucial problem of well-being and identity of young survivors, reunion with family members and adoptions in Great Britain, USA and Canada. We will also discuss how the second and third generations of young Holocaust survivors have engaged with the past of their ancestors and what role that past have played in their families’ lives.
Throughout, we will use a variety of sources in English translation, including diaries, memoirs, written and oral testimonies, pictorial material, and documentary films. This course will be of particular interest to anybody interested in European Jewish childhood, history of multigenerational Jewish family after 1945 and post-war Jewish culture and society.
Joanna Beata Michlic is a social and cultural historian, and founder and first Director of HBI (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute) Project on Families, Children, and the Holocaust at Brandeis University. She is based at the UCL Centre for the Study of Collective Violence, the Holocaust and Genocide, UCL IAS. Her latest book, Jewish Family 1939 –Present: History, Representation, and Memory, Brandeis University Press/NEUP, January 2017), made to the Ethical Inquiry list of the best books published in 2017 at Brandeis University:
- The Reconstruction of Jewish Life after the Holocaust.
- Child Holocaust Survivors: Searches, Recoveries, and Adoptions.
- Living in the Shadow of the Holocaust for Second Generation: Between Silence and Knowledge.
- Contemporary Multi-Generational Jewish Family and the Voice of the Third Generation.
