At Home With the Holocaust

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Alan L. Berger, the Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair in Holocaust Studies at Florida Atlantic University, says that At Home “breaks new ground.”

I can see how At Home On March 11, 2025, Rutgers University Press released At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives by Lucas F. W. Wilson, PhD. At Home is 188 pages long, inclusive of an index, end notes, and a bibliography. The book’s goal is to analyze how children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are traumatized by their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences. The book focuses on how homes – that is, houses and geographic locations – can transmit trauma from one generation to the next.

In an online biography, author Wilson says, “I am the Justice, Equity, and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Calgary.” On a University of Calgary page, Wilson follows his name with “Pronouns: he/him/his.” In an interview, Wilson says, “My work has largely centered on the Holocaust, but given the rise in anti-queer and anti-trans violence, public policy, and legislation, I redirected my attention on a main catalyst of homophobia and transphobia today: white Christian nationalism …  Both the Holocaust and conversion therapy are inextricably connected to Christianity … The Christian scriptures and Christian theology laid the seedbed for the Holocaust … Christianity has so easily lent itself to such hatred.” Christians have “genocidal intentions” toward GLBT people, Jews, and “Indigenous folks in North America.”

Wilson, though young, is an exceptionally successful scholar, enjoying a degree of financial support and accolades that most scholars can only dream of. “I have received several fellowships and awards for my work.” An incomplete list of his honors: The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi’s Dissertation Fellowship; a European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Fellowship; The Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman Memorial Fellowship from the American Jewish Archives; a Regent Scholarship, two Edwin L. Stockton, Jr., Graduate Scholarships from Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society, an Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship, and a Zaglembier Society Scholarship awarded by The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

At Home with the Holocaust has received high praise. Scholar and author Victoria Aarons says that the book “makes a vital contribution to the research on second and third-generation Holocaust descendants with the Holocaust meets the needs of a reader happily immersed and unquestioningly invested in academic trends in writing styles, thought processes, ideology, and ethics. I am not that reader. This book exemplifies serious problems in contemporary academia, as I will detail in the review, below. First, a word on why I care about this topic.

As soon as I saw the Rutgers University Press ad for this new book, I was eager to read it. I have been swimming in the water of post-World-War-Two trauma for my entire life. I’m a baby boomer, a drop in the post-World-War-II demographic surge. I didn’t give it much thought in my childhood, but I was surrounded by post-war trauma.

On August 14, 1945, Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captured “V-J Day in Times Square.” A sailor is kissing a young woman wearing a medical uniform – white dress, white stockings, white shoes. The photo expertly captures the ecstatic jubilation of the end of worldwide horror and atrocity.

Or does it? Just a year later, in 1946, there was little of ecstatic jubilation in the film that won the Academy Awards for best picture, best director, best actor, best supporting actor, best film editing, best adapted screenplay, and best original score. The Best Years of Our Lives depicted a veteran, a former pillar of the community, succumbing to alcoholism; another veteran struggled with PTSD and came close to becoming an isolated, homeless, unemployable bum; a third lost his hands in the war. He could barely stand being around his former family, friends, and the love of his life. His community had no idea how to interact with an amputee. Film Noir, a bleak genre depicting a no-exit world where main characters generally died, reached its peak in the post-war era.

By one estimate, perhaps 30,000 concentration camp inmates who had been liberated by Allied troops died in the immediate aftermath of their liberation. They were beyond help.

My father was a combat first sergeant in the Pacific Theater. His black-and-white photographs, including one of a pile of human skulls, testified to the horrors he encountered. My dad’s beloved kid brother lost his life in uniform. My father’s family in Poland, he told me, was “wiped out” by Nazis. My mother’s relatives in Slovakia lived through Nazi occupation and were scarred for life, as I learned when my mother and I returned to her natal village in the 1970s, shortly after Soviets crushed the Prague Spring.

All four of my teenage boyfriend’s grandparents had been in the Soviet Gulag. Their only crime was their ethnicity and their socioeconomic status. Three died there; one escaped. Refeeding syndrome killed him shortly after he returned to his home. Refeeding syndrome, by one estimate, killed almost a quarter of the survivors of camps like Bergen Belsen within a few days of their deliverance.

One of my childhood friends, “Ola,” was the daughter of a concentration camp survivor. She was Christian and Slavic. Her father was irrational and abusive. On one occasion, he physically assaulted some of Ola’s girlfriends visiting her home to play with her. Ola was a timid loner. She seemed to walk around with a sign on her back reading, “Kick me.” She was violently bullied by other girls and I took it upon myself to beat up the girls who bullied Ola.

Bill Van Wilpe was a custodian at my high school. The Japanese navy torpedoed and sank the USS Indianapolis on July 30, 1945. Three hundred of 1,195 crewmen went down with the ship. The remaining 890 men were in the open ocean facing dehydration, sun, hypothermia, and sharks. Only 316 survived. It took the navy days to find them. Van Wilpe, only a teenager, repeatedly dove into the Pacific amidst sharks, sticky, heavy bunker fuel, and human body parts. He did this in spite of orders from his superior not to enter the dangerous waters. The men he rescued were often delusional and fought him off. I didn’t know any of this as I passed Van Wilpe in my high school’s hallways. No one did. He never talked about it.

I began visiting eastern Europe in the 1970s and I met people who survived Nazi occupation and children of Holocaust survivors. “Dan,” the son of a concentration camp survivor, put his feet up and ate popcorn while watching grisly footage of the liberation of Auschwitz. Some felt that popcorn-eating was disrespectful, but I understood the gesture. Dan said, “Being in Auschwitz is the first time in my life I realize I’m not in a concentration camp.” In other words, his survivor parent had been abusive, and had passed on feelings of impending catastrophe, paranoia, and despair. Visting the real Auschwitz was a form of liberation for Dan.

There’s a related reason I was eager to read this book. I used to attend Twelve Step meetings for adult children of abusive parents. I met people at these meetings who had been subjected to beatings, abandonment, incest, and life-threatening neglect. Some members’ parents were active addicts and these children had to parent their own parents, getting them sober, getting them to work, addressing their debts, etc. One of the men I befriended at these meetings was a double winner. His father was both a Holocaust survivor and an abusive alcoholic parent.

I also met a Holocaust scholar who had been abused as a child. She was not Jewish and had no survivors in her family tree. Her grim childhood experience exemplifies how domestic architecture can be used to terrorize a child. Her twisted foster father wanted her to be dirty, so he limited her ability to use the family bathroom. In her adult life, owning a plug, that she could place in the drain making taking a bath possible, was a victory. Other survivors of child abuse recounted parents forcibly feeding them either laxatives or emetics and they also had traumatic relationships to bathrooms. Claustrophobic children were locked in closets; children afraid of the dark were locked in dark rooms. During family celebrations, girls might be relegated to working in the kitchen. In short, I very much wanted to read a book about how actual domestic architecture might be the source of transmitted trauma for the children of Holocaust survivors or any child who survived abusive parenting.

In all these relationships with children of Holocaust survivors and children of abusive parents and children of both, it was impossible not to notice common behaviors. One Twelve Stepper said, “You could drop one of us in the desert with nothing and we would just accept it and make the best of it.” In other words, this demographic expected the worst from life, and was used to making do alone. In one of my early trips to Poland, I met an American tourist who was not of Polish descent. I asked her why she was visiting a then-poor and obscure Communist country. She said, “I’m a nurse, and I comfort people by placing my hand on their shoulders. When I do that, I can feel most patients’ muscles relax. When I do that with Poles, I can feel them tense up. I wanted to know what kind of a country produced such people.”

Wilson’s focus on actual, physical homes as sources of inherited trauma intrigued me. I thought of my own relation to my physical spaces over the years. Since leaving my childhood home, I have chosen to live in Spartan surroundings: no wall hangings, no window treatments, no carpeting. I use a piece of cardboard as my shower mat. Furniture is minimal, elderly and second hand. I give my books away rather than buy a bookcase. My parents hammered into me that everything could disappear at any moment, and, at any moment, I could be driven out of my home.

I don’t sit with my back to a room’s main entrance. I’m no engineer, architect, or carpenter, but I have spent hours imagining systems that could make any room I am in inviolable to assault by criminals, stormtroopers, or the Apocalypse. During COVID lockdowns, I never ran out of paper towels, toilet paper, isopropyl alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, canned goods, dried grains and beans, or dehydrated food. “How full is your closet of stockpiled canned goods?” is one question we often ask someone who seems to be in the club. If both parties laugh, we know we are talking to kindred spirits.

I didn’t plan this and I didn’t seek this out, but all of the people I most frequently talk to on any given day are children, grandchildren, or grand-nephews of Holocaust victims, Holocaust survivors, or victims of the Soviet Gulag. Some of these are “double winners,” that is their parents were both victimized and victimizers, abused by totalitarian monsters and eventually abusive of their own children.

I can say that we tend to share some qualities in common. Toughness is a value. Humor can be very dark. One of the nicest, most conventional and mild-mannered men I know, a gray-haired professional, is the Orthodox Jewish grand nephew of Holocaust victims. He tells jokes that could curdle your stomach or make you want to report him in a 911 call. Most of us appreciate the kind of humor that, if someone recorded it and released the transcripts, we could all be canceled. Conventional piety is despicable and mocked. Championing the underdog is essential. Courage is primary. An insistence on justice for all, no matter the ethnicity or worth of the accused, is universal. Did we gravitate towards each other because we share these personality traits? Or are metaphysical patterns at work? I often wonder about my previously mentioned high school boyfriend. Decades later, we are still friends. Our relationship began when I saw him across a crowded room. Out of the hundreds of boys in my school, how did I manage to pick out the boy who has Gulag and World-War-Two trauma running through his veins?

There’s another feature that children of Holocaust victims and children of abusive parents have in common. Anne Karpf’s excellent memoir The War After comments on this shared feature. Karpf’s parents were camp survivors. She wrote, “Hating one’s parents is a necessary stage of childhood … How could you hate those who’d already been hated so much?” Others reminded Karpf, “‘Remember what she’s been though.’ … I came to abominate what she’d been through no longer on her account, but on ours … It’s hard to speak about Holocaust survivors in anything but a reverent tone.”

For adults who were abused as children, whether their parents were in concentration camps or if they just had punishing lives, it’s difficult to say, “My mother / father abused me / my siblings.” Children are not supposed to say negative things about their parents. Children especially should not criticize parents whose own lives included much suffering, either as immigrants in a sweat shop or a coal mine or as concentration camp inmates. Karpf shows great insight in articulating this extra burden placed on children.

I was also eager to read Wilson’s book because Wilson is a young man, his research is brand new, and I wanted to see how Holocaust studies are evolving.

In his impeccably written preface, Wilson melodramatically flagellates himself for having attended Liberty University and for being a Christian. Liberty University is an Evangelical institution. It was founded by Jerry Falwell Sr. Wilson repeatedly communicates that the education he received at Liberty wasn’t just worthless. It damaged his ability to think.

Being a Christian, Wilson argues, makes it impossible to understand Jews or writing by Jews or anything that has ever happened to a Jew. After he left Liberty University and moved on to other institutions, “Christianized readings of Jewish texts proved to be a glaring issue in my writing … My thesis supervisor … recurrently had to correct my Christianized misreadings.” Wilson said to this supervisor, “I promise that I’m not stupid. I just haven’t been trained properly. Please help me!”

Once he became a teacher, Wilson passed on this concept to his students. “I had to teach my students how not to interpose their own Christianized misreadings into the texts at hand.” On the other hand, he lead a group for descendants of Holocaust survivors, where it was his job to “hold space for” group members. “To hold space for” is a trendy term that is often mocked – see this article explaining why.

Wilson read the early twentieth-century Polish-Jewish-American immigrant author Anzia Yezierska. Wilson says that he “resonated” with Yezierska. Yezierska, contrary to her natal shtetl tradition, craved an intellectual and artistic career. Wilson is gay. Like Yezierska, Wilson was “caught between two worlds … I felt as though I could  not be gay and a Christian … I felt suspended between two worlds … I felt at home in the stories of Yezierska.”

Wilson also “resonated” with stories of Holocaust survivors’ children. “Their parents’ mental health issues resonated with my own experience … My mother struggles with her mental health.” Wilson closes by saying that he “gave up my evangelical religious commitments.”

I was not comfortable reading Wilson’s self-flagellation in the preface to a book about Holocaust survivors and those who inherited trauma from them. Such personal writing, though, is very much part of current trends in academia. Postmodernism rejects the concept of objective truth. Rather, postmodernism focuses on the speaker. We need to know the speaker intimately in order to understand his idiosyncratic idea of truth. There’s an old joke about a postmodern anthropologist. He is studying a remote tribe and he says to his informant, “Enough about you. Let’s talk about me.” In this postmodern understanding, because he was a Christian, Wilson was unreliable as a scholar and he was unworthy to be read as a reporter of truth. He has rejected and now accuses Christianity. So now he is a reliable reporter.

Wilson’s confessional not only meets the needs of personal writing. It is also a conversion story. Wilson was damned. He was a Christian student at Liberty University. He found modern academia, and that saved him.

There are further problems with Wilson’s preface. To understand one such problem, all we have to do is switch some words. Suppose Wilson had said that “James Shapiro’s Judaized misreadings prevent him from being able to understand Shakespeare.” Or, “Antony Polonsky’s Judaized misreadings render him incapable of understanding the experience of Polish Catholics under Nazi occupation.” Or “Amy-Jill Levine, as a Jew, isn’t qualified to teach the New Testament.”

In fact, James Shapiro, Antony Polonsky, and Amy-Jill Levine are all Jewish, and they are all world-class scholars, and they have made irreplaceable contributions to their scholarship on Shakespeare, Christian history, and the suffering of Poles under Nazism. It would be morally wrong to reject their scholarship on racist grounds; it would also be self-sabotaging. Ninety years ago, Germany decided that Jews were unworthy as scholars. By one estimate, “By 1945, around 80% of Jewish academics had managed to emigrate. Around 14% remained in Germany, and 6% were murdered in the Holocaust.” Germany hurt itself by rejecting scholarship on racist grounds.

It’s also both racist and inaccurate to say that there is such a thing as a monolithic Jewish way of talking or thinking about the Holocaust. Wilson disproves this very idea in his own book. He cites The Holocaust Kid, a transgressive novel. Author Sonia Pilcer is a Jewish child of Holocaust survivors. In her book The Holocaust Kid, she writes about her status in a way that many Jews find unacceptable. For example, she includes a sex scene involving Nazi fantasies. Jews condemned her book as “nasty and unseemly” and treated Pilcer as “untouchable.” Her book was “mostly ignored.” “The almost universal rejection by the Jewish literary community was painful,” she says.

I think again of Dan, eating popcorn while watching Auschwitz footage. Jews criticized him for having an inappropriate reaction. But his reaction was authentic and appropriate for him.

Wilson appreciates Anzia Yezierska. Many Jews wish they could stuff Yezierska, kicking and screaming, into a memory hole. Poet Alter Brody, Yezierska’s contemporary, excoriated her for, as he alleged, creating misleading stereotypes of Jews speaking a “purely imaginary” English-Yiddish pidgin, one Brody dubbed “Yidgin.”

Wilson had almost no biographical, cultural, or biological details in common with Anzia Yezierska, and yet her powerful writing reflected his most intimate experiences. That’s the power of literature. Literature transcends artificial boundaries and speaks to the human in all of us. That’s why readers around the world can read the Psalms, three-thousand-year-old poetry produced by pre-modern Israelites, and feel, “This is about me, my life, my most intimate sorrow and joy.”

Wilson’s self-flagellating preface plays no role in the rest of his book. One must ask why he included it. The available facts: Wilson is very successful in today’s cutthroat academic market for new white, male humanities PhDs. “White Male Academics Can’t Get Jobs,” reports academic Kathleen Stock. Christian identity in academia today is a handicap. As one Inside Higher Ed op-ed put it, “No Christianity Please; We’re Academics.” Sociologist George Yancey reports that, in academia, he is more likely to be discriminated against because he is a Christian than because he is black. “My research,” Yancey says, “indicates that roughly half of all academics would be less willing to hire someone they find out was a conservative Protestant.” Being anti-Christian is a positive. Being a former Liberty University evangelical who renounces his former identity is a powerful plus.

Wilson’s writing style, which is smooth and professional in the confessional preface, changes dramatically in the body of the book. There Wilson is clearly writing not for the average reader, but for an academic audience. No paragraph is without mention of previous scholarship or use of academic jargon. “Postmemory,” for example, is not a word most people would use. Scholar Marianne Hirsch coined it to mean memories forced on someone by someone else. Wilson cites several scholars to define the word “home” and also to explain how parents and children communicate with each other. A home offers a “generative topoanalytic entry point.” Children of survivors “struggle with their nonlinear positionality.”

Wilson opens with an analysis of Art Spiegelman’s comic book Maus. Maus has won many prizes, including the 1992 Pulitzer. Spiegelman’s parents, Vladek and Anja, were in Auschwitz. In Maus, Spiegelman depicts Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Polish non-Jews as pigs. Given his focus on the home, Wilson mentions, for example, Spiegelman saying that he feared that Zyklon B would emerge from the showerhead in his bathroom. “Artie’s childhood home serves as a spatialization of his traumas, cognition, and emotions.”

Maus has received a great deal of attention. Wilson does not break new ground. He could have. Wilson draws attention to Anja’s suicide and Spiegelman’s intense criticism of his mother. For these and other reasons, I would like to see more scholars show the courage to address the misogyny in Maus. Women are used as things. Lucia Greenberg, who opens the book, exists only to certify Vladek’s sexual prowess and male dominance of a clinging, irrational, sexualized, submissive female. Anja is a “bitch,” in Spiegelman’s word, a smothering mother. Few scholars have exercised the courage to address this misogyny. In 2016, Sadie Dossett, a student, published “Lucia Greenberg: In Depth Analysis.” I agree with Dossett’s analysis and I admire her courage.

Spiegelman’s choice to depict Poles as pigs has generated much controversy, controversy Wilson ignores. Over twenty years ago, Maryann Wojciechowski sent the following to Spiegelman. She received no reply.

“My Polish mother, a resister, was arrested by the Gestapo at age 18. She spent years in Nazi custody, all the while joining resistance cells. At Ravensbruck, she and other Polish women were forcibly injected with caustic chemicals. This was a test of mass sterilization methods for the planned genocide of the Polish nation. My Polish father fought for three years and was then arrested and tortured in Auschwitz. My Polish uncles, all resisters, were arrested; one was buried in a mass grave. One barely survived internment in Auschwitz and Dachau. My Polish grandmother survived Ravensbruck; my Polish grandfather was killed in Auschwitz. Which one of my Polish family members would you depict as a pig?”

Historian Michael C. Steinlauf, the son of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors, wrote that Poles, “after the Jews and the Gypsies [were] the most relentlessly tormented national group in Hitler’s Europe.”

A well-funded scholar wrote, and Rutgers University Press published, a book that revises history by conflating Nazism and Christianity. Identifying Nazism with Christianity is incorrect; see here. In declining to address Spiegelman’s use of pigs, Wilson participates in an erasure of Nazism’s genocidal assault on non-Jewish Poles. Poland is famously Catholic. Catholic Poles would not, as Spiegelman depicts them doing, greet each other with “Sieg Heil.” Poles did not wear, as shown in Maus, Nazi uniforms. Acknowledging Nazism’s genocidal assault on Catholic Poles would weaken Wilson’s insistence on conflating Christianity with Nazism, with homophobia, and with what he dubs “anti-trans … legislation.” By “anti-trans legislation,” one can assume, he means laws against surgeons performing mastectomies, orchiectomies, vaginoplasty, and phalloplasty on underage children.

Christophobes’ conflation of Nazism with Christianity does double duty for the larger anti-Western project. Insisting that “Christianity did this!” shields the actual culprits from critique. The actual culprits are darlings of the left. Nazism’s theoretical roots are found in social Darwinism, neo-Paganism, and nationalism, and they are part of an explicit rejection of Christianity. Darwin is a hero to atheists and mention of how his ideas were perverted to justify genocide is condemned –witness hostility toward historian Richard Weikart, who has published on this issue. New Agers market Paganism as a pure and innocent alternative to evil Christianity. Eric Kurlander’s 2017 Yale University Press book Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich shows just how dark Pagan ideas can get. The left doesn’t call itself “nationalist” but, in identity politics, it exercises preferential treatment and condemnation based on race and religion.

There’s another problem with Wilson declining to engage with critiques of Maus and also Everything Is Illuminated for these works’ alleged misogyny and historical revisionism. Wilson is an officially titled avatar of “justice” and “equity.” He teaches students how to understand the Holocaust in alignment with his own Christophobia. The women who recognize misogyny in these texts and the Poles and Ukrainians who object to historical revisionism would also like some justice and equity, but this text, and much of academia, denies them. Contemporary academia’s picking and choosing of worthy and unworthy recipients of justice and equity undermines any pursuit of truth.

It would be incorrect to interpret Wilson’s approach to Maus, Everything, and his own discarded Christianity as any kind of academic seal of approval for Judaism or Jews. Recent campus protests belie any such interpretation. On the Rutgers campus, for example, in March, 2024, Rivka Schafer, a Jewish freshman, was terrorized by pro-jihad protestors calling for death to Jews. Pro-jihad campus protests reached epidemic proportions before Republicans, including Elise Stefanik and Donald Trump, began to condemn them and to punish their academic hosts.

Appearing to champion Jews in one context – the protests over Maus and Everything Is Illuminated – and abandoning Jews to jihadis in another context – campus protests – is not as contradictory as it may seem. In both instances, contemporary American academia selected, of a binary choice, the anti-Western stance. Catholicism is more associated with the West than Judaism, so it’s okay to morph Catholic victims of Nazism into porcine Nazis. Judaism is more associated with the West than Islam, so Jews are betrayed and jihadis are celebrated. No one is safe from the cold calculations of leftist triage. Leftists would sacrifice Lucas F. W. Wilson in a heartbeat were he personally to experience Islamic homophobia.

Chapter three of At Home with the Holocaust addresses Sonia Pilcer’s The Holocaust Kid. In a January 25, 2024 article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Pilcer recounts her encounters with Wilson. She was happy that he was engaging with her work. As previously mentioned, many Jews, in the US and Israel, found her work inappropriate because of its irreverence. But, she says, Wilson may have gone too far in understanding her work as a non-fiction reflection of her experience as a child of Holocaust survivors. Her work is fiction, and she invented key features of it. Her Nazi-themed sex scene, for example, is fictional, and not, as characterized, a factual depiction of her own inherited sexual trauma. She also points out that S&M role play is not limited to Jews or Holocaust survivors. In reference to Wilson and his thesis advisor, Pilcer concludes, “I did not agree with the scholars’ thesis.”

Wilson’s chapter on Pilcer’s work includes a sentence that demonstrates why academic writing can be so alienating to non-academic audiences. Wilson attempts to explain why, as a teen, Pilcer hung out with other teenage girls and tried to look like the then-popular movie star Elizabeth Taylor. Wilson writes, “Shedding light on Zosha’s motivations behind her aesthetic of choice, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton explain that the easiest way one can demonstrate one’s self-control … is by becoming ‘cool.'” Next time you need to understand why teenage girls need friends and want to look pretty, just reread your Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton.

Chapter four addresses Elizabeth Rosner’s novel The Speed of Light. The two main characters of the novel are sibling children of a Holocaust survivor father. In the beginning, the brother is a recluse and the sister is outgoing. At the end, the brother has been changed by the love of a good woman, and is now outgoing, and the sister is overcome by discovering that her father was a member of the Sonderkommando. She becomes a recluse. Again, in this chapter, Wilson resorts to academic-speak to state the obvious. “As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton remind us, the act of watching TV is largely a passive … pastime.” Good to know, because the rest of us thought that TV watching was a demanding Olympic endurance sport.

Chapter five is devoted to Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated. This novel, Wilson remarks, is different from the previous material, as it addresses the longing children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors may feel for homelands that they have never visited, but heard their parents discuss. Wilson proposes a new term to address this phenomenon: postnostalgia. In Everything is Illuminated, Safran Foer’s American character yearns to find some ancestral homeland in Ukraine.

Wilson does not address the allegation of misogyny in Safran Foer’s novel. In a March 14, 2018 article in Lilith, Shira Small voices her objections to what she reads as the book’s misogyny. University of Ottawa Prof. Ivan Katchanovski, in a 2004 article in the Prague Post, argues that Everything Is Illuminated distorts important history, for example, “Among the omissions in author Jonathan Safran Foer’s tale is the mass execution of residents of a Ukrainian village in retaliation for having helped their Jewish neighbors. Ironically these Jewish neighbors quite possibly included Foer’s grandfather.”

Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.