A Life Inherited: Unraveling the Trauma of a Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor

A few weeks ago, Rena Lipiner Katz's husband, Ron, posted about his wife's book in Renee's Reading Club on Facebook. I was intrigued by the subtitle - Unraveling the Trauma of a Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor. My ex-husband is a second-generation Holocaust survivor, ex being the key part of that sentence. Once he and I got divorced, I scoured the bookshelves of libraries and book stores, looking for anything I could read about inherited trauma. I'm not sure how my ex-husband behaves now, but at the time of our divorce, he acted more like a survivor than some of the survivors that I knew. I thought Katz's book would give me further insight. She started out so strong and I anticipated lots of ah-ha moments as I'd read through her memoir.

With the advent of improved diagnostic tools, research has shown that children of Holocaust survivors may have more intense stress responses than are found in the general population.

...

Perverse at it was, I felt I did not deserve to live in peace or know joy, and grief was my unconscious driver. 

While her story was well-crafted, it didn't give me enough of what I was looking for. The bulk of this memoir is about her first bad marriage and the toll that marriage took on her children and on her relationship with them. I wish she would have delved a little deeper into why she thought it was a good idea to marry a non-Jewish man who showed tendencies to be cruel even prior to their marriage. She addressed it, but too briefly for me.

He seemed to inhabit a world dominated by the ethos of those who knew no fear, and I needed to belong to them, not to my own. To be a member of this insular "Gentleman's Agreement" crowd - a synthesis of everything that had been written in the books of my childhood and vividly illustrated in my mind - was the antithesis of the Holocaust.

My former husband and his family called me "a Yankee" so perhaps something similar was going on and I wanted to know more. In Katz's case, at least from what she's shared, it seems as though her first husband was much more damaged than she was due to their respective upbringings.

Lots of the details of her divorce were pretty similar to mine even though in my case, the father of my children was the child of Holocaust survivors.

She mentioned a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder towards the end of the memoir "though obsessing about what I could not control was a useless, brutal exercise, it may have been protective, helping to shield me from feeling too close to the pain of my parents' history as survivors." And perhaps as a way to control things in what felt like an out-of-control life? That was my one ah-ha moment. Again, I wish Katz had given more examples of how this played out in her life.

I'm glad I read the book. I found it very interesting. It seems like Katz is in a very good place now. A Life Inherited just wasn't what I wanted or needed to be reading about. I've contacted Katz's husband and perhaps she will correspond with me so I can dig a little deeper.