Out of Chaos: Hidden Children Remember the Holocaust

This anthology is aptly titled. The volume pulls together the life stories of twenty-four different American Jews who survived the Holocaust as children, bringing their stories, quite literally, Out of Chaos and into print. But, beyond offering a fine teaching tool for Holocaust or Life-Writing classes, the anthology challenges us to think about the conditions of memory for American Jewish Holocaust survivors in the twenty-first century. On the back cover, historian Peter Hayes hails this book as “an awakener of empathy.” Does this mean that our capacity to empathize in general—or with American Jewish Holocaust survivors in particular—may have gone to sleep? Possibly. Books like Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life or Gary Weissman’s Fantasies of Witnessing have offered academics a thick vocabulary for criticizing North American Holocaust commemoration practices, educational efforts, and popular culture.¹ Scholarship has become so alert to all forms of sentimentality, hyperbole, or...