The Journey Home : Emerging out of the Shadow of the Past

Abstract

The Journey Home is an engrossing anthology of twenty essays. Each one tells a different story about what it means to grow up in the shadow of the Holocaust and then to fi nd a way of breaking free of the residual darkness of childhood by making a physical and emotional journey back into the past, to the ‘home’ of one’s ancestors: the ‘home’ they were forced to physically leave.

Some of these journeys are undertaken with a parent. Others are undertaken with friends or partners and some venture back alone. Along the way, new connections are forged with the living and with the dead, with the past and w ith the present.

Together with an introduction and epilogue, the book provides not only examples of the lived experience of being ‘second generation’ but also offers some theoretical background to the stories and relates them to current and important themes, such as the role of acknowledgement, memorialization and commemoration. With eighty million people around the world currently displaced by disaster, war and famine, many of these stories speak for descendants of refugees and survivors of all such catastrophes.