Translating Trauma: The Afterlife of Holocaust Memorial Books

This article examines the contemporary phenomenon of online translations of post-Holocaust Polish Jewish memorial books. The memorial books, written primary in Hebrew and Yiddish in the decades after the war, each focus on Jewish life and death in a particular prewar Jewish community. Written originally by and for people from those communities, the books are now being translated and posted online by Jewish genealogists, and, most recently, by Polish non-Jews interested in the histories of their own towns. The paper explores what is lost and gained in the process of translating these inward facing, post-genocidal diasporic volumes for entirely new communities of readers.