The Transmutative Turn: Legacies of Loss and Love at the Source

Abstract

With few pictures and even fewer surviving relatives, three generations of women in one family try to piece together memories, mementos, and archival materials into a coherent picture in order to understand the intergenerational narrative of continuity of which they are a part. They are survivor grandmother and her granddaughter, who are prompted to understand the chilling but significant part of their family’s past that was shaped by the Holocaust years, together with the scholar-clinician who is daughter to one and mother of the other. Research conducted in Italy, Germany, Poland, Israel, and the United States archives proved to be indispensable in optimizing the original source data alongside qualitative interviews that, together, facilitated the reconstitution of a co-created narrative to understand the pathways through which traumatic experiences of one generation are passed to another.