Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss
Edited by Mindy Weisel
Capital Publishing, 250 pages, $26.95.

By SONIA PILCER

In her book "Memorial Candles" (International Library of Group Psychotherapy, 1992), psychologist Dina Wardi describes children who are compelled to take on their family's history as "memorial candles," the ones who bear "the burden for translating the emotional world of the parents into some kind of coherence." Certainly this description finds resonance in "Daughters of Absence," edited by Mindy Weisel, a cousin of Elie Wiesel. All 14 contributors are the daughters of Holocaust survivors; many are the eldest children in their families, born in one of various displaced-persons camps scattered around Europe after the war, ad hoc solutions to the problem of thousands of refugees wandering with nowhere to live.

"Only in my studio, while painting, was my authentic voice disclosed to me," Ms. Weisel writes. "Painting became a form of prayer, a form of dance, of song, of life itself." She describes how earlier in her career, she completed a series of abstract paintings with her father's concentration-camp number covering her canvases. Some years after mining this dark history, she produced a series of cobalt-blue (her mother's favorite color) paintings that, as she writes, "depicted my mother's strength and love of beauty. Each piece became a thank you for life itself, and for her belief in me, her 'daughter the painter.'"

Clearly, a redemption-through-art theme runs through these writings. Eva Fogelman, author of "Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust" (Anchor, 1994), writes in her introduction that the book "attests to the capacity of second-generation women to embrace life rather than to dwell on the anguish and torment their parents and other close relatives endured.... It is the creative process that gives us license to speak about the dead and for the dead."

When Helen Epstein published her article "Heirs of the Holocaust" in The New York Times Magazine in June of 1977, she not only recognized that there was an "us," but also had the clout and intelligence to articulate an unrecognized group within the Jewish community. For me, another daughter of survivors, it was akin to discovering a secret society.

Like their parents who had yearly commemorations at New York's Temple Emanu-El, where they lit candles and prayed, the children of survivors began to meet at conferences in Jerusalem, New York, Los Angeles. Mr. Wiesel addressed the first conference: "Yours is a privileged generation: You remember things that you have not lived; but you remember them so well, so profoundly, that every one of your words, every one of your stories, every one of your silences comes to bear on our own. You are our justification."

After Ms. Epstein expanded her article into the groundbreaking book "Children of the Holocaust" (Putnam, 1979), the children were more widely recognized as a group. Several years later, in 1986, installments of Art Spiegelman's "Maus" began to appear in Raw, his underground magazine, where it was passed around like sacred samizdat. These thin comic books offered an indelible portrait of his father, Vladek, who narrates the story of his life in the camps with freaky moments of pride at his ingenious ruses and little-boy tricks to get his son's attention.

And now, among a flood of so-called second-generation books, we have this glossy collection of writings about the impact of the Holocaust on the lives of these prominent and semi-prominent second-generation women. The roster includes Hadassah Lieberman, filmmaker Aviva Kempner ("The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg"), a painter whose work hangs in major museums, a photographer, a violin teacher and colleague of Itzhak Perlman, a poet and a performance artist.

This idea is promising, but what undermines the seriousness of this project is the presentation. To begin with, how should we deal with Ms. Weisel's chapter introductions, which sound as if she's introducing sorority sisters? She writes, for example: "Sylvia Goldberg, my dear childhood friend, says so much in what she cannot allow herself to say. Her strength and courage shine through every unspoken word."

In fact, quite a few of the participants seem to be the editor's Washington friends, including her sister-in-law, Rosie Weisel. A sisterhood would be fine if the quality of writing were consistent, but some of the collected pieces recycle overly familiar material and many trumpet an unambiguous, distinctly triumphalist message: Look how well we've done. "My life and career have been a living testament to the presence and continuity of music and love that could be dimmed, but not extinguished, by a tyrant and circumstances," writes Patinka Kopec, co-founding faculty member of the Perlman Music Program. Rosie Weisel, a graphic artist and calligrapher, concludes her essay:

So you see, Hitler didn't succeed in his goal of wiping us out. We are here, and we are even stronger. Living a life full of tradition and joy. Raising the next generation in our country, Eretz Yisrael.

But for the intrepid reader, there are gems. Some two decades later, Ms. Epstein offers a tautly written, haunting essay about the experience of going to Berlin to publicize her book "Where She Came From" (Little Brown, 1997). "In Germany, I'm a Jewish author, and today in Germany, as my host will tell me dryly, Jews are news," she notes in "Normal." When asked by a young reporter, "What were your fantasies before coming to Germany?" she first denies having had any. Then she writes: "There is an African belief that if you allow the name of one who has hurt your family into your body, it poisons your soul. All my life, I have refused to let German into my body... no Nazis, no Communists. Not only Kafka and Rilke but Goethe and Heine and Schiller and Brecht."

For her part, Ms. Lieberman, the daughter of Auschwitz survivors and wife of Senator Joseph Lieberman, writes of being invited to join a delegation to Auschwitz, what she calls "touring the planet of death":

Before I left, my mother asked me to bring back dirt from Auschwitz. Nearly all of her family was burned and pulverized into that dirt, that stinking, evil earth... do you bring it home? Is this their grave, entire families?

Walking past the smokestacks, the fields of barracks with small slabs for bunks, she tried to reassure herself. "The American in me," she writes, "is yearning to believe and hope that the world will stand united against cruelty of this proportion. The Jew in me is fearful of repetitions of history."

New Zealand performance artist Deb Filler's essay hits a different note. She relates her experiences putting together her amazing one-woman show based on a trip to Auschwitz she took with her father, "Punch Me in the Stomach!," which PBS aired some years ago. "I told a publicist I knew that I was working on a humorous piece about the Holocaust," she writes. "He warned me that if it weren't brilliant, I'd have to leave town. No pressure."

Miriam Morsel Nathan, director of the Washington Jewish Film Festival, offers several poems. In "How a Child of Survivors Says Good-Bye," she writes:

First of all, we never say good-bye.
It's see you soon. And then, whether
someone is off to the grocery store
or en route to, let's say, Paris
we add I love you be careful and more
see you soon...

Ms. Pilcer's fifth book is "The Holocaust Kid" (Persea Books, 2001), a collection of autobiographical stories.