Memory Without Aftermath: Recalibrating Postmemory in Holocaust and Nakba Literature

Memory studies has relied heavily on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory to describe how catastrophic histories reach generations that did not live through them. This article asks what becomes of that framework when the catastrophe has not ended. Reading Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl and Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet alongside Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin and Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance, it argues that postmemory rests on three assumptions that Palestinian literary memory unsettles: that the traumatic event has concluded, that the postgeneration stands at a remove from it, and that the labor of memory is fundamentally reparative. The analysis moves through three registers drawn from Hirsch’s own architecture of transmission. At the level of the object, a shawl functions as a relic mediating irrevocable loss, while house keys and Ottoman land registers operate as counter-archival evidence underwriting claims to return. At the level of place, an indifferent New York neglects the past, whereas Jaffa undergoes administrative erasure through renaming. At the level of the body, residual injury gives way to ongoing inscription. Drawing on decolonizing trauma scholarship, settler colonial theory, and clinical work on continuous traumatic stress, the article contends that postmemory requires recalibration rather than rejection, and that Sa’di and Abu-Lughod’s account of a doubling of memory and postmemory indicates one route. Throughout, the comparison presumes asymmetry rather than equivalence between the two histories.