“‟We may have no choice in having the events and traumas experienced by our

ancestors visited upon us in our own lifetime‟: Eva Hoffman‟s Lost in

Translation”

Ann Ancelyne Schutzenberger, a leading figure in transgenerational psychoanalysis,

summarizes her research findings by claiming that “as mere links in a chain of generations we

may have no choice in having the events and traumas experienced by our ancestors visited

upon us in our own lifetime” (202). She argues that traumatic events of the past that have

been left unprocessed tend to resurface again in the present. A distant family member may re-

enact the trauma, mostly in different guises and modes, around the same time as the traumatic

event. She adds that “the syndrome could […] manifest itself through a link in dates or

periods, so that particular symptoms such as nightmares or panic attacks will occur or begin in

the same month as the original trauma sustained by an ancestor” (“Health and Death” 284).

In her compelling work The Ancestor Syndrome: Transgenerational Psychotherapy

and Hidden Links in the Family Tree Schutzenberger documents many cases from her own

practice in support of the argument that unprocessed past events find ways of manifesting

themselves in subsequent generations. One of these cases is about a woman comes to therapy

because her daughter repeatedly suffered from nightmares and had asthma attacks. This

condition set in right after she was born. Schutzenberger asks the woman to provide her with

detailed information about the family history and produce a family tree testifying to traumatic

happenings over many generations. In therapy she realizes that her daughter was born on

April 26, the same date around which the Germans attacked France, and used poison gas for

the first time. After doing some research into the family history, she finds out that one of her

ancestors lived near Ypres where the Germans attacked the French on April 26. As there

seemed to be a connective link between the birth of her daughter and the attack,

Schutzenberger then asks the child to produce a drawing of her nightmares. When the child

arrives in therapy, holding the drawing in her hand, she explains, “This is a driver‟s mask with

an elephant‟s trunk on it. This is the monster which tortured me every night” (Ulsamer 50).

This example is worth concentrating on for a moment. The dream of the daughter

contains an image—a driver‟s mask with an elephant‟s trunk—that stands in communication

with a family trauma. The client‟s grandfather‟s brother was gassed at Ypres. Her own great-

grandfather was wounded at Verdun in 1916. The last attack on Ypres happened on April 26,

her daughter‟s birth date. This example, which is quite striking in its narrative elements as it

conveys a series of accidental features that almost seem beyond credibility, suggests,

nevertheless, that the phenomenon of transgenerational haunting can manifest itself by means

of seemingly random dates, names, and places.

Marianne Hirsch (“The Generation of Postmemory”) confirms the assumption that

traumatic events can bring forth memories that clearly testify to earlier happenings. It is

possible that offspring of trauma survivors or what she calls “postgeneration” or “hinge

generation“ may experience with varying degree of severity the effects of traumatisation even

though the initial event occurred generations earlier (Hirsch 103). Hirsch writes,

Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after those

who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experience

of those who came before, experiences that they “remember” only

by beans of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they

grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply

and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.

Postmemory‟s connection to the past is thus not actually mediated

by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. (106/107)

Her work on Holocaust survivors reveals that photography oftentimes serves to commemorate

traumatizing events and, as such, constitute a chief linker by which, in the midst of family

members, these memories are kept alive and passed on. What the work on secondary or

vicarious traumatisation has brought forth is that distant offspring may be vulnerable to the

effects that traumas have caused in the first place and generate, in their own right, symptoms

that are either directly or associatively connected with these events. If the assumption proves

correct that traumatic events can resurface again, thereby curbing the chronology of events in

drastic ways, as Schutzenberger's research has shown, the notion of what an human being is,

and what allows for the creation of self must be subjected to substantial revisionism.

Eva Hoffmann‟s autobiography Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language is a

wonderful literary and historical document, which recounts, from the perspective of the

narrator, the story of her family over some decades. In 1958 they emigrate from Cracow to

Vancouver where they start a new life. Like Richard Rodriguez, for example, who, as the son

of Mexican immigrants to the United States, learns a new language and excels at school, or

Nathalie Sarraute, who leaves Russia with her father and appropriates French as her new

language, Hoffman, too, gradually works her way up the academic ladder, attending the best

colleges in the country, before she receives her doctorate in English. The rest of the narrative

is a kind of “Bildungsroman” taking the reader, chronologically, to different places and

offering insights into the personal world of the narrator: her first love affair, her talent for

music, her work in New York. That's all there is to it, it seems, if there were not this latent

feeling of unease flaring up, a kind of undercurrent of meaning, as if some events had not

been fully disclosed.

In fact, it is not the explicitly narrated events which make this autobiography so

appealing. Rather, from the perspective of transgenerational studies, the reader gets

acquainted with some narrative episodes, en passant, which precede the text and thus lie

outside the boundaries within which the narrative is cast, that are of particular interest.

Precisely because the silence that enshrouds these episodes creates in its absence of explicit

information a vital source for creative reshaping in the form of rewriting, rethinking, and

reacting that this narrative has much appeal. Hoffman explains,

[S]ometimes, I think of him and Zofia and myself, and others likes us

I know as part of the same story—the story of children who came from

the war, and who couldn‟t make sufficient sense of several worlds they

grew up in, and didn‟t know by what lights to act. I think, sometimes, we

were children too overshadowed by our parents‟ stories, and without

enough sympathy for ourselves, for the serious dilemmas of our own lives,

and how thereby couldn‟t live up to our parents‟ desire—amazing in its

strength—to create new life and to bestow on us a new world. (230)

In this passage Hoffman describes the impact of war on herself, her relatives and

friends with much poise, sensing, however, that something had gone amiss in her world,

anticipating what she later interprets as “a world that returns all my sense of loss like a sudden

punch in the stomach” (92). What emerges from these lines is a profound sense of alienation

and dislocation from one world to another —affective, bodily and psychic—where words go

beyond the descriptive power they hold. In fact, the reader never finds out what the parents

have experienced, but can only conjecture by the enumeration of fragmentary episodes what

the past might have looked like when they escaped to Ukraine to hide out. It is precisely this

openness of narratable logic that imposes a profound incertitude about what had actually

happened before the narrative sets in. Not being able to „make sufficient sense of the world“is

a key statement in the narrative because it recaptures the conditions under which Hoffman

grew up; a condition which can be best characterized as absence of explicit meaning in the

aftermath of trauma.

Citing Nicolas Abraham, Schutzenberger recounts the story of a man who knew

nothing about his grandfather. In his pastime he loved chasing butterflies and collecting

stones. As a geologist, this leisurely activity was nothing out of the ordinary. This man sought

professional help. Abraham suggested exploring the family history and identifying hidden

links by going back several generations. The patient then found out that he had a

grandfather—his mother‟s father—whom nobody had ever mentioned. After seeing the

grandfather‟s family, he learned that this grandfather had purportedly done shameful things

(bank robbery) and was sentenced to forced labor, to “break rocks” (casser les cailloux); a

term for forced labor in French. The grandfather was then executed in the gas chamber. The

non-figurable fate of the grandfather comes into view at the moment it transposes the very

dislocation it has brought forth into the life of a distant offspring. Schutzenberger, quoting

Abraham, writes, “What does our man do on weekends? A lover of geology, he „breaks

rocks,‟ and catches butterflies and proceeds to kill them in a can of cyanide” (47). Precisely

because the traumatic disappearance of the grandfather has been left unprocessed, hushed up,

as it were, it resurfaces in modes that are not causally, but associatively, bound to the initial

event, whereby it transposes itself into the present in modes not immediately recognizable.

Who would believe that the geologist‟s pastime and his grandfather‟s death would be

associated with each other?

The non-figurable fate of Hoffman‟s father, who experienced massive dislocation and

the danger of extermination, comes into view precisely because the narrative goes beyond

what is explicitly narrated and creates an organizing principle that lies outside its textual

confines. The power of this organizing principle can be gleaned from the following example.

Hoffman writes, “Everyone—this is common wisdom—is involved in an illicit activity of

some kind” (15). What kind of illicit activity it was remains an open question, and whether

this illicit activity is associated with survival strategies is not answered either. Howe ever, if

this illicit activity served to ward off personal danger in the face of terror because it allowed

her father to survive, then, this seemingly insignificant phrase draws on a subtext the content

of which is too traumatic to be broached. Hoffman brings the non-figurable into view by

recreating a glaring absence of explicitness in an elegantly crafted narrative and making it part

of its very structure. “I come from the war. It is my true origin. But as with all our origins, I

cannot grasp it. Perhaps we never know where we come from; in a way we are all created ex

nihilo” (23), she adds, yet this origin lies beyond what she knows or has experienced herself.

The absence of explicitness is also what causes the transmission of transgenerational

haunting to operate in the first place. Serge Tisseron argues that children who are exposed to

traumatic events through indirect or secondary exposure relate to what he calls “une vacuole”

(a psychic inclusion) of “anxiety-provoking and incomplete fragments” (127). The parent

becomes the mediating link through which the traumatic experience is kept alive or

reactivated. Tisseron suggests that the presence of anxiety-provoking fragments makes it

impossible for the child to fully symbolize what has factually happened. The parents most

often refuse to talk about a traumatic event, yet, as studies about family secrets have shown

(Bradshaw), these events do not lose potency even if or just because they are silenced and

hushed up. While an earlier generation fails to assimilate the trauma, the next generation will

take up on it and try to assimilate it by generating fantasy scenarios of what might have

happened earlier. Hoffman writes, “And as I listen, I lower my head in acknowledgement that

this—the pain of this—is where I come from, and that‟s useless to get away” (25). The silence

which is cast over the war is significant precisely because it is potent enough to create room

for the emergence of scenarios that fit what the protagonist has heard or assumed to be true.

It would be erroneous to assume that Eva Hoffmann‟s narrative details the

transmission of traumatic happenings over several generations. She only provides allusions to

horrific events, as mentioned earlier, that remain outside the textual boundaries. The

organizing principle outside these confines comes close to transgenerational haunting. When

Hoffman is born the idea of inheriting something which she has not experienced first hand

comes about when her parents give her a name, Ewa Alfreda, which is clearly indebted to and

marked by people of an earlier generation. She is named after her grandmothers, of whom,

Hoffman says, “I have only the dimmest memories” (16), but, who, most likely, died in the

concentration camps. The daughter thus starts life by inheriting a legacy which is too

burdensome to carry and too difficult to integrate in life. Her activate a wishful thinking so as

to commemorate the loss of close and dear family members.

Hoffman perpetuates the legacy of significant relatives of an earlier generation to

whom she is bound by her first name. Christian Flavigny ascribes the choice of first names

particular power. Through the “identifying referent” (“référent identitaire”) the child is

irrevocably marked with a reference, “phantasmal and/or mythic” (120), to something that has

occurred in the past. The name given to a child represents the name previously given to other

family members and contains in it the echoes of a stranger. This stranger remains connected

with a distant offspring through the first name they share. The name thus “functions like a

seal” (121), Flavigny asserts. Although the reader does not find out precisely what happened

to these women, it can be gleaned from the author‟s own remark (“my parents honored the

dead”) that they must have died during or shortly after the war.

To make matters more complicated, Hoffman adds that her father out of an “excess of

happiness” mistakes herself, the first born, for a son. The question arises who is who, and

what do the ones who are named actually represent? Would it be fair to speculate, along the

same theoretical lines, that through wishful thinking on her father‟s behalf the daughter

represents another family member—a brother, a father, or an uncle?—whose absence and loss

have furrowed the psyche of the survivors so as to commemorate them at unexpected

moments? Again the text remains silent. What the reader is left with is a feeling of unease and

disquiet because the text in its richly layered fabrics of allusions clearly moves beyond that

which is explicitly narrated. What other family members died, and how they died can only be

reconfigured speculatively by means of allusions, first names, and historical events. It seems

highly probable; however, that the father had lost close family members whose absence

fundamentally altered the fabrics of his family history.

Although her stay in Canada and success in the United States as a scholar are highly

fascinating, paralleling narratives, such as Agate Nesaule‟s A Woman in Amber: Healing the

Trauma of War and Exile or Loung Ung‟s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of

Cambodia Remembers, making apparent that Hoffman has found a new identity, it is the

sparsely articulated war stories, the events that preceded the narrative, which gives it a

richness that comes from afar, sustained by the dead to which this autobiography is dedicated.

The lack of explicit information constitutes this undercurrent of meaning which subtends the

narrative, imposing through its subsidiary structure a kind of reading that makes an opening

into the outside from which place the narrative is secretly organized. This kind of subsidiary

structure has a framing function and parallels, in many regards, the transmission of

transgenerational mandates that may surface to haunt the living. Hoffman wonders, “How will

I ever pin down the reality of what happened to my parents” (23), the forces of which are

beyond her control.

Works Cited

Flavigny, Christian. “Le Prénom comme illustration de la Transmission psychique.”

Filiations Psychiques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000.115-121.

Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29.1 (Spring 2008):

103-128.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost In Translation: A Life In a New Language. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Tisseron, Serge. “Le Chien et le Parapluie. Les Processus de Symbolisation entre les

Générations.” Filitations Psychiques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000.

117-131.

Schützenberger, Anne Ancelin. The Ancestor Syndrome: Transgenerational

Psychotherpay and the Hidden Links in the Family Tree. Trans. Anne Trager.

London, New York: Routledge, 1998.

——. “Health and Death: The Hidden Links Through the Family Tree.” Psychodrama with

Trauma Survivors: Acting Out Your Pain. Eds. M. K. Hudgins and Peter Felix

Kellermann. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1988. 283-299.

Ulsamer, Bertold. The Healing Power of the Past: A New Approach to Healing Family

Wounds: The Systemic Therapy of Bert Hellinger. Nevada City, CA: Underwood

Books, 2005.