Those who were in the death camps, the extermination camps, the concentration camps are becoming fewer, but we, their children still exist. I am one of them and I want to tell about my parents, what the Holocaust did to them, what it did to me, we who were not supposed to be. What it means to have taken in our parents’ trauma with our mother’s milk (190).Footnote 1

In Margit Silberstein’s as yet untranslated work of autobiography, Förintelsens Barn (Children of the Holocaust) (2021a), the experience of the Holocaust strongly influences the identities and parenting practices of her survivor parents, particularly her mother. Both Ernst Jakob Silberstein and Ili Channe Silberstein (née Grunzweig) were Hungarian-speaking Jews from Transylvania who were alone among their families to survive the Nazi genocide. Ernst survived incarceration in a Soviet labor camp, and Silberstein’s mother lived through first Auschwitz, then the death march to the camp in Bergen-Belsen, from which she was liberated in 1945. Ili was transported by the white buses—a rescue attempt organized by the Swedish Red Cross at the end of the war—to Norrköping in Sweden and her fiancé Ernst was reunited with her there in 1948.Footnote 2 The two lived and worked in Norrköping most of their lives, where they raised Margit (born 1950) and her younger brother, Willy (born 1954). While Ernst spoke little of his experiences in Siberia, and is represented as a quiet, introverted, and troubled man, Ili told her daughter stories about her pre-war and war experiences and was a central force in the household when Silberstein was growing up. Silberstein’s text foregrounds her childhood in this household, and the parental transmission of traumatic Holocaust memory, including the corporeal maternal transmission as suggested in the epigraph by the image of trauma flowing like milk from the mother’s breast. The text also represents Silberstein’s adult relationship with her mother, and her own maternal relation with her two sons, suggesting that she, too, inadvertently transmits a form of traumatic memory to her offspring, which affects their experience of being Jewish in Sweden.

Silberstein, a prominent journalist who has worked in print, radio, and television, wrote Förintelsens Barn after retiring from her work on national public television as a political news commentator and moving on to freelance journalism. The title she selected for her autobiography pays homage to Helen Epstein’s groundbreaking work from 1979, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors, which Silberstein explicitly cites (188). Both title and citation insert Silberstein’s text into a tradition inaugurated by Epstein, herself descending from survivors, of children of survivors identifying as members of a distinct group, frequently referred to as the postmemory generation, with unique experiences of growing up with fathers and mothers profoundly marked by Holocaust trauma.

Silberstein’s account, however, also inserts itself into another narrative tradition in which mothers figure strongly: the discourse of im/migration and the emerging discourse of im/migrant or minority literature in Sweden. The term im/migration, incorporating the words “immigration” and “migration,” is used here to attempt to retain some of the complexity and consequences of definitions, as well as the relations between categories of refugees, migrants, and immigrants. According to Anna Kuroczycka Schultes and Helen Vallianatos, refugees are frequently viewed as being subject to state violence or persecution, while migrants may be moving in order to improve their prospects for their families (2016, 1–2). While not all migrants become immigrants, most immigrants have at one time or another been migrants, in the broadest sense, even if they have not been refugees.Footnote 3 The category of im/migrant literature rests problematically but inevitably on authorship, with im/migrant literature being written by im/migrants or their descendants. Wolfgang Behschnitt uses the term “migrant literature” to discuss fiction in Sweden. He also discusses problems of definition and classification, but demonstrates that this category circulates in Swedish literary discourse and literary practice, and that authors themselves “take part in public debate and inscribe themselves into the discourse on literature, migration and cultural diversity” (2010, 81).

Sweden is today known for an immigration and refugee policy which has made it one of the leading European nations for immigration in twenty-first-century Europe, and these demographic trends, as Anna Williams notes, have come to influence contemporary literature, where im/migration and its many consequences have become a strong theme, frequently in work by children of first-generation immigrants (2021, 122). Sweden’s modern immigration history begins, however, toward the end of World War II when it began to accept refugees from the war, even if Jewish people were not considered to be political refugees at the time, but were considered by the Swedish authorities as immigrants (Kvist Geverts 2020, 154).Footnote 4 In spite of the long-standing presence of Jews in Sweden, Scandinavian Jews fleeing persecution were first admitted in 1943 and European Jews in 1944 (Grobgeld and Bursell 2021, 175). Other European Jews were taken in on at least a provisional basis from 1944, as the war neared its end. About 4000 of those Jewish immigrants who came stayed in Sweden after the war, as did Silberstein’s mother and, eventually, her father. This makes Silberstein one of the estimated 20,000 Jewish persons living in Sweden today, where Jews are a recognized national minority. In today’s Sweden, where 20% of the population is foreign-born, she is also among the 5% of the population born in Sweden to two foreign-born parents (Grobgeld and Bursell 2021, 175–176).

Though it seems obvious that Holocaust survivors have been both refugees and im/migrants to new countries, im/migrant status has been somewhat submerged in accounts by children of survivors, who instead view the Holocaust as the defining experience of their parents’ and not infrequently their own lives. Förintelsens Barn, I suggest, engages with cultural narratives of both postmemory and im/migrant identity, both of which influence the representation of motherhood and the figure of the mother. Silberstein’s mother is represented as resilient and tenacious, but also as “broken” (134), a woman who survives the horrors of the camps but fails to rid herself of the trauma or to completely assimilate to Swedish society. In keeping with both narratives, the daughter’s view of the mother and motherhood in this postmemorial account is marked by strong ambivalence.

Postmemory as a Generational Concern

From the 1980s onward, in Sweden as well as in other countries to which survivors settled after the war, autobiographies and family memoirs written by children of survivors began to explore what it meant to grow up in families marked by a history of genocide.Footnote 5 While the experiences themselves undoubtedly contribute to a sense of group identity, the sharing of childhood memories and narrativization of post-Holocaust family life have become fundamental to the generational distinctiveness of the generation known as the postmemory generation. Coined by another child of survivors, Marianne Hirsch (2012), “postmemory” refers not to an actual individual memory but to the forceful, affective traces of someone else’s—usually a survivor parent’s—memory of traumatic experiences as these traces are apprehended by their children. Hirsch’s formulations have been foundational in academic discourses on the Holocaust, trauma, and memory, and thus, they, too, contribute to a sense of generational distinctiveness. Investigating survivors, rather than children of survivors, Rebecca Clifford’s conclusions about generational identity are nevertheless relevant: “While formative events are important, a shared process of remembering and narrating is more so, fired into action by a historical context that can emerge decades after the fact” (2017, 23). In line with this insight, this chapter views Förintelsens Barn as joining an established narrative and discursive tradition which foregrounds family trauma, parental transmission, and child susceptibility. Publishing later than many of the first children of survivors, Silberstein both assumes and explores the idea that her parents’ Holocaust experiences have a bearing on her childhood, her adult relationship with her mother, and her own practice of mothering, to which her two adult sons testify in the final chapters of her book.

To consider Silberstein’s text as part of an established narrative and discursive tradition is certainly not intended to discount the reality or validity of her account. Instead, it is meant to acknowledge the ways that such traditions may affect the formation and understanding of identity, and the way that they can contribute to other cultural narratives of, for example, post-Holocaust family and motherhood.Footnote 6 While postmemorial life writing offers loving and positive portraits of survivor motherhood, many accounts by children of survivors also present complex and fraught relations. Hirsch elaborates on the consequences of postmemory for children of survivors:

To grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own life stories displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic fragments of events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present. (2012, 5)

Together with trauma and memory studies, works of autobiography and memoir thus also contribute to a widespread assumption of problematic or pathological parenting among survivors.Footnote 7 As one sociologist summarizes it, there is an “overwhelming impression that trauma is the central if not dominant dynamic in the family lives and memories of [children of survivors]” (Wolf 2019, 74). Thus, the intergenerational transmission of trauma remains key to the now classic understanding of children of survivors as the postmemory generation, arguably also affecting how these children—now parents and even grandparents themselves—understand themselves, their families, and their mothers.

This chapter argues that Förintelsens Barn largely conforms to the postmemory narrative in its treatment of maternal identity and transmission of Holocaust trauma. At the same time, the text overlaps with the emerging genre of im/migrant autobiography in Sweden—a genre which also has generational concerns at its heart. These two narratives affect the author’s portrayal and understanding of mothering and motherhood—of both Ili and of Margit—after the Holocaust and in Sweden. In other words, while complex mother-daughter relations are important to Silberstein’s interrogation of the legacy of the Holocaust and the transmission of memory, Förintelsens Barn moves toward an overlapping definition of itself as immigrant or minority autobiography.

Holocaust Mothers and Daughters

In a significant number of English-language postmemory narratives by children of survivors from about the 1980s onward, second-generation daughters take pains to represent their mother’s voices. Hybrid texts frequently result from the inclusion of quotations or entire sections from interviews or written accounts. In this way, postmemorial writing at least partially offsets the literary dominance of the daughter’s voice over that of the mother. Postmemory writing in Swedish also has examples of this effort to include the maternal voice. In Susanne Levin’s Leva vidare (1994, Live on), Anders Ohlsson observes (2000, 31–33), the third-person narrative focalizes the mother, and Lena Einhorn’s Ninas resa (2005) incorporates her mother’s words, recorded in interviews with her daughter, in both text and film versions. Förintelsens Barn both conforms to and deviates from this pattern. The work does contain sparse excerpts from letters written by Silberstein’s father to her mother after the war, as he waited to immigrate to Sweden. Silberstein and her brother did not have these letters translated from the Hungarian so they could read them until after the deaths of both parents, however. Her mother’s letters to her father, if any existed, were not preserved. Nor is there any indication that Silberstein used her journalistic skills to interview her mother about her Holocaust experiences. The daughter’s perspective is dominant in Förintelsens Barn, though motherhood is central to the narrative.

Silberstein’s text conceives of motherhood much as Adrienne Rich (1995, 13) would have it, as a position and an identity which is culturally, socially, and historically constructed. The very premise of the narrative, evident from the epigraph to this chapter, implicitly endorses the view that Holocaust history has had a strong effect on family life and Ili’s practice of mothering. Silberstein’s narrative undertaking is to explain what the Holocaust “did” to her parents and her family and to connect this to generational transmission within families, to the idea that the Holocaust also did something to her and her brother, and ultimately to Silberstein’s own children. The view of historically contingent mothering also emerges explicitly in her explanations of specific practices common to Holocaust survivors, such as her mother’s choice to name Margit after her favorite sister, murdered by the Nazis (24–25), and her mother’s encouragement of family solidarity (111). Additionally, Silberstein poses the related question of whether Holocaust survival affected the practice of parenthood in her family: “What parents would Mother and Father have been if there had not been an Auschwitz? This is impossible to answer. So that which was difficult for my brother and me in our relationship to mom and dad we usually attributed to the Holocaust” (113).Footnote 8 Silberstein observes a propensity to explain relational difficulties, “that which was difficult,” as an effect of Holocaust experience.

But what was difficult in the mother-daughter relationship, which Silberstein attributes to Ili’s Holocaust experiences? Her mother’s strongest convictions about the meaning of life, according to Silberstein, grew out of her survival of the camps: “Mother’s answer to the question of how a life after Auschwitz was possible is one word: the children. To have a new family” (57).Footnote 9 Ili’s assertion resonates with the sentiments of numerous survivors and their descendants, (including Silberstein later in life), in which the post-Holocaust creation of Jewish family successfully rebukes and defies the Nazis’ genocidal ambitions (Grobgeld and Bursell 2021, 178). For the child Margit, however, having such importance to the lives and happiness of one’s parents was a heavy burden. Silberstein writes, “My brother and I became their salvation, we gave them meaning and they loved us more than anything else on this earth. Is all-encompassing love only of good? It can instill self-esteem, but also consuming guilt” (27). She reflects as well on what she felt was the disproportionate significance she knew she had on her parents as a child: “One wishes to be important to one’s mother and father, but maybe not everything, that is unattainable” (10). Silberstein characterizes growing up as a child of survivors as being burdened by unrealistic expectations: “I wanted to be normal, not a miracle. Not the reason for Mom and Dad to find meaning in life” (97).Footnote 10 She writes movingly, and repeatedly, of the guilt she feels in relation to her mother, both in childhood and as an adult.

Silberstein also attributes parental and maternal overprotectiveness to the profound importance placed on children in the family, who defied Hitler by their very existence, and who were also seen as symbolically replacing murdered family members, such as Silberstein’s namesake, her mother’s sister, or her father’s little sister, Irma. As she puts it, “Holocaust survivors—they overprotect, they press their children close, they do not want to let go, they give everything and they want to get in return, unconditional love …” (113). Both parents watched over her health, for nothing was to happen to their little family (42). She tells of a playmate who was also a child of survivors who thought her name was “Barbro-be-careful,” because that was what her mother called to her as she supervised her play from the window of their home. Silberstein claims that she became a “Margit-be-careful” because “Nothing was to happen to me. I was to always be strong and healthy, happy and good” (43). Being overprotected, moreover, is connected in the text to unreasonable expectations, such as always being good and nice: “If you are a child of Holocaust survivors you must always be nice—that’s how it felt. I could have a guilty conscience if I went home with my best friend after school … instead of asking Mother if she needed help with anything. All my pores were wide open for self-recriminations” (98).Footnote 11 Silberstein’s adult understanding of maternal (over)protectiveness conforms to that expressed in numerous other postmemory narratives, and examples abound in Förintelsens Barn.

Silberstein writes about both of her parents and describes her father in loving terms, but her mother is clearly central to the household and to Silberstein as a child. Numerous interviews with the author confirm her mother’s importance: “Mother was central in our family” (Cederskog 2021); “ there was a lot of Mamma”; “Mamma was a strong person in our lives” (Silberstein 2021b). Footnote 12 As a child, Silberstein is very close to her mother, whom she resembles (23). A skilled seamstress and embroiderer whose talents were sought after in their small town, Ili hated being alone (47) and liked to talk with her daughter as she sewed (44). Unlike Silberstein’s father, who never spoke about what happened in the Soviet labor camp, Ili spoke of her life before and during the war, communicating her experiences to her young daughter, both through storytelling and through less verbal means, in line with Federica K. Clementi’s suggestion, in Holocaust Mothers and Daughters (2013), that mothers seem to share their memories with their children, more than fathers do (218). In one interview, Silberstein claims that “What I know I know through Mother,” even though she says that her mother did not give any details about her Holocaust experiences (Silberstein 2021b).Footnote 13

In Förintelsens Barn Silberstein observes:

I was born five years after the liberation of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and when Mother talked to me when I was a child her entire consciousness was filled with the horrors and the bottomless loss of those who died. Somehow, I became a confidante. I know, psychologists would be horrified. She absolutely did not tell me everything, but a lot. My imagination filled the gaps with grotesque, dark imaginings, thoughts that a child should not need to be caught up in. (44–45)Footnote 14

Registering her adult awareness of the negative view psychology would take of her mother making her child a confidante, Silberstein subtly criticizes her mother. She also reflects on the reasons for her mother’s confidences: Ili may have sought to replicate the intimacy she once had with her sister Margit. Silberstein, the postmemoirist, understands the impossibility of her child-self answering her mother’s need, as well as the guilty conscience resulting from that inescapable failure (46–47).

Postmemory, as Hirsch develops the concept, involves not actual recall but is mediated by embodied affect and imagination (5). As a child, Silberstein’s imagination is captured by the Holocaust, particularly camp experiences such as her mother must have undergone. For example, she writes about having “daily imaginings about selection to the gas chambers, about roll call in Auschwitz, how it was to stand completely still hour after hour in summer as well as winter, no matter the weather, before and after laboring, so that the guards could count in peace … ” (95).Footnote 15 She also fantasized about accompanying her mother on the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, and reading books such as Barnen från Frostmofjället about orphaned brothers and sisters setting out on a long trek to avoid being put into a poorhouse (85) fed this imaginative connection to her mother. As Hirsch notes, even intimate transmission of memories in the domestic or familial context are mediated by public narratives (35). Claiming that she cannot remember a time when she did not know what Auschwitz was (43), Silberstein also describes being strongly drawn to pain: “I wanted to go into it, feel it, let the intolerable, the incomprehensible, burn in me as well. As if my mother’s torture could be lessened if I shared it with her” (83).Footnote 16 This form of imaginative identification, strong in a child who idolizes her mother (100), leads the young Silberstein to reproduce her mother’s physical suffering in a vain attempt to alleviate it. She stops eating: “I starved myself so that only a thin skin covered my skeleton. Did I want to be as thin as mother in Auschwitz?” (83).

In her study of Holocaust mothers and daughters, Clementi analyzes another postmemoir which, like Förintelsens Barn, suggests that “eating disorders [are] displaced symptoms of traumatic Shoah memory or postmemory” (2013, 206).Footnote 17 In Silberstein’s case, her anorexia does indeed suggest a “dislocation” of daughterly identity (Clementi 2013, 206), a misplaced identification with her mother through self-harm. Far from alleviating her mother’s burden, Silberstein only exacerbates Ili’s pain at seeing her daughter starve as she, her sisters, and others in the camps once did. At one point, Ili tells her daughter that her emaciated body is a reminder to her, and others, of the horrors of Bergen-Belsen (85).

Silberstein appears to have viewed her parents as vulnerable and fragile, because of the suffering, starvation, and illnesses they had been through, only some of which she knew about. She writes that she later understood that many survivors “suffered from the same syndrome as my mother. Depression, nightmares, nervosity, sleep disturbances” (99).Footnote 18 Her reference to a “syndrome” confirms her familiarity with works of memoir and postmemoir, and this is underscored by the text’s many references to Holocaust writers such as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Charlotte Delbo, and Anne Frank: Frank’s diary was particularly important to the young Silberstein, who thought that if Frank had lived they would have been “twin souls” (88). Frank’s writing may even have inspired Silberstein to keep the diary from which she quotes in her autobiography.

As in other works of postmemory, Förintelsens Barn represents the daughter’s attempt to imitate or emulate her mother as futile:

But my torture could never measure up to hers. I did not have much of a claim, it was always worse for mother. How sad could I permit myself to be? My troubles were small and not very significant, silly, compared with that which mother bore, what did I have to complain about? Mother of course did not want me to feel that way, I am not even sure if she understood how her daughter was influenced by what she herself went through. (83–84).Footnote 19

Silberstein repeatedly confirms the fraught sentiments of postmemory—a sense of being dominated by other’s narratives, of having one’s own story displaced by another’s traumatic history. In Silberstein’s text, this appears to be particularly strong between her and her survivor mother.

Im/migrant Mothers and Minority Daughters

This chapter has thus far focused on Silberstein’s representation of the effect of Holocaust survival on her mother, the mother-daughter bond, and her mother’s mothering practices. This representation is for the most part in line with other postmemorial accounts by children of survivors. But postmemory writing itself also encompasses, to varying degrees, representations of survivor parents and their families as im/migrants to new countries. Hirsch emphasizes that the postmemory generation is always in some respect diasporic, marginal, or exiled (qtd in Clementi 2013, 221), and Clementi concurs. She writes:

On the one hand, all survivors want is for their children to be happy, safe, and prosperous in the free society where they have rebuilt their lives; on the other, because the parents themselves strain to fully belong to these new nations—where they arrived as adults with a heavy burden of pain and with accents, traditions, and social behaviors they retain—their children like them may end up feeling split between fully belonging … and being foreigners in their country of birth (Clementi 2013, 219).

In Förintelsens Barn, im/migration exists as an alternative explanation for Ili’s mothering practices, affecting her relationship with her daughter and her daughter’s understanding of her own and her mother’s identity. Silberstein quite explicitly inserts her writing into a discourse of im/migration and minority identity in contemporary Sweden.

Silberstein relates her mother’s story of post-war im/migration with pride. Her mother arrived from Bergen-Belsen to Norrköping on July 8, 1945. Twenty-eight years old, weighing just thirty-four kilos, Ili was transported on a stretcher (51). She lived at first with other im/migrants in a repurposed school, where she was nursed back to health (58), and later she rented a room, made friends, and began working at the public bathhouse (59). Among the letters from Silberstein’s father is one deploring the fact that Ili must work for a living. Yet, Silberstein appears proud of her mother when she writes, “My mother was not lazy. She was clever and industrious. She personified the expression, ‘someone who earns her keep’” (59).Footnote 20 In Transylvania, she had had to give up her dream of becoming a teacher for financial reasons, and she had instead learned to machine embroider, like other Romanian girls. In Norrköping, Ili starts up a cottage industry in their small apartment, embroidering sheets and towels and other dowry items. Silberstein proudly quotes from the royal permit allowing Ili to run her embroidery business as long as she remained in Norrköping, even though she was not a Swedish citizen (60). After Silberstein’s father arrived, the two of them cooperated in the business which, in the 1950s, fit nicely into the town’s burgeoning textile industry. Her parents learned Swedish, her mother better than her father (71), but they often spoke Hungarian to one another, sometimes, to their daughter’s embarrassment, in public (31). Her father worked at the wool textile factory and later at another factory for electronics, but in the 1960s he and Ili opened a shoe store together. Both parents are represented as working hard, for long hours, to support themselves and their two children, building a new life in a new country which had taken them in after the war (31).

Silberstein’s childhood memories offer a view of the economic hardships common to refugees or im/migrants who have had to start their lives over from scratch, but who are successful in supporting themselves and their children, even buying luxury items such as a piano for their child. Her memories, frequently nostalgic, recount both what they could afford and what they could not (110). Highly attuned to the nuances of class society in the 1950s, Silberstein describes her family’s small apartment with cold water and a shared bathroom in the courtyard, contrasting it with that of her friend, who shared an indoor bathroom, and with the street where some of her classmates lived, in apartments large enough that children could have their own rooms. On this street, the children addressed their parents with formality (28). Silberstein recounts an incident from her childhood, when her family’s economic status made itself felt. She enjoyed talking to the women who contracted sewing from her mother so much that when they came round to leave or pick up work from Ili, the young Silberstein routinely offered them coffee so they would stay. Her tired mother finally had to ask her not to prolong these visits, which kept her from her work. Silberstein’s awareness of economic status is something she seemed to process by playing what she called “The Poverty Game” (86) as a child—a game of endless wandering inspired by her mother’s camp experiences and by a classic of Swedish children’s literature involving orphaned children, Barnen från Frostmofjället. But in other ways she appears to be unaware of economic difficulties; only in hindsight does she register the sacrifices her parents must have made to give their daughter a piano, and she does not take in the financial side of her and her brother being sent to camp in the US. Silberstein’s postmemoir contains traces of what must have been difficult parental decisions.

As Schultes and Vallianatos observe, im/migrants are frequently confronted with a choice between enacting mothering practices based on their own experiences in the culture of their birth and their sometimes incomplete understanding of practices common to their new country (3). By extension, parenting practices thus become an index of the degree of social integration and/or im/migrant difference. These different orientations in the performance of parenthood are made visible in Silberstein’s text. Her father grew up in rural Romania where, before the war, a strict morality governed relations between boys and girls (72).Footnote 21 Her mother came from Satu Mare, a county seat in Transylvania with a thriving Jewish community. Silberstein’s parents wanted to parent in ways they knew from before the war. Their rules were strict, and Margit was not allowed to be out late or to do everything that her friends were allowed to do. Both parents, she writes, feared an all-too liberal Swedish behavior (71). Neither parent could accept “that their daughter was stamped by Swedish society, entirely different from the society they had been forced to leave, a world which in their memory had come to a standstill, like a snapshot in a photo album” (133).Footnote 22 In other words, according to Silberstein, both parents performed at least some aspects of parenthood in opposition to what they understood about Swedish practices.

Generational conflicts between parents and daughter were exacerbated by cultural differences around issues of parental supervision and the independence of young people. Silberstein describes her teenage years as a time of growing estrangement from her mother in particular, whose “children lived in a world which she could not enter, which she did not want to enter” (136).Footnote 23 Silberstein’s anorexia, as mentioned, indicates the intensity with which she identifies with her mother at this time, but her retrospective account also emphasizes her growing need for personal integrity. As she puts it, “It was not even that Mother and Father wanted to cross boundaries, my boundaries, they saw none. We were family, a constellation without barriers …” (134).Footnote 24 Silberstein describes trying to explain to her mother that “children must cut the umbilical cord, free themselves, learn to fly. No one owns another person, not even parents in relation to their offspring. She really did not understand, she became sad, she thought this meant that I would disappear from her, leave her” (130–31).Footnote 25 When Silberstein does in fact leave home, she experiences a crisis of identity, not understanding her own boundaries in relation to her parents (133). While Silberstein clearly attributes the importance of family to her mother’s Holocaust experience, as discussed, there remain elements which can be linked to the experience of im/migrant motherhood, with Ili drawing from her experiences of Jewish family life in pre-war Romania, and her daughter rooted firmly in the modern social welfare state of Sweden. Silberstein describes clashes with her parents over issues such as privacy and openness, independence and mutuality, and not least, sexuality.

While mothers have been found to have a strong influence on their daughters’ identity formation and sexuality (Giorgio 2002, 7), such a relation—anticipated by Ili, we can surmise—appears to be disrupted by the different orientations of mother and daughter, one more affected by her im/migrant status, the other by her “native” status. The estrangement between mother and daughter worsens as Silberstein’s sexuality awakens, and mild conflicts escalate when Silberstein becomes sexually active: “When Mother understood that her adult daughter had adult relations she lost her grip. I felt like all hell broke loose, she plagued me, she said things that a mother should never say to her little girl” (135).Footnote 26 The text remains reticent about what harsh words were spoken, and the timeline of sections dealing with these issues is fuzzy, but there appears to be a breach in the mother-daughter relationship which is never to be completely overcome.

Silberstein’s survivor parents were not just invested in their family but were also strongly invested in the reproduction and continuity of family. In part because of matrilineal descent in Judaism, their daughter is important. Silberstein recalls the period after she moved away from home, when her non-Jewish boyfriend lived with her on weekends. Silberstein feels responsible for her mother having a heart attack during this time: “I was not like they wanted me to be, I lived like ‘the Swedes.’ I had the key to their happiness, but I threw it away. If I only would marry and let them experience the joy of grandchildren their lives would change, they would become happy” (135).Footnote 27 While the desire for descendants can certainly be understood as springing from a history of survival in the face of ethnic persecution, the anticipated parental supervision of reproduction within the family is represented as also grounded in pre-war Jewish life in Romania.

As a child of im/migrant survivor parents, Silberstein struggles with conflicting understandings of herself as the child of survivors, as a member of the Jewish minority, and as a Swede. There is considerable overlap between these categories and the first two, if not identical, are strongly related in Silberstein’s mind. During a trip to Romania after her mother’s death, she realizes, to her distress, that she feels her mother most strongly in Auschwitz, suggesting the strength of the association between her mother and the Holocaust as well as the weight of the Holocaust on her own sense of Jewishness. In conversation with her adult sons, she sees that the Holocaust is intrinsic to her Jewish identity (181). Silberstein also conceptualizes her bi-cultural or dual identity with the help of her “Jewish” name and her “Swedish” name, a Jewish identity strongly connected to the Holocaust through her mother’s murdered sister, Margit, and a Swedish identity forged from her parents’ mistaken belief that Asta was a typically Swedish name (24). Her parents’ choice of names clearly speaks of their early recognition that their daughter will need to negotiate the demands of being both Swedish and Jewish.

Silberstein’s narrative inscribes a struggle to harmonize dual identities, both as a young person and as a mother herself. Indeed, she expresses the desire that her twin sons will also have a dual identity, as Swedes and Jews (174). While, as noted, there is no trace of interviews or other records of Ili’s voice in Förintelsens Barn, Silberstein does interview her twin sons, Markus and Joel, reporting their thoughts using indirect discourse in the penultimate chapter of her book. Her interest is in understanding what their Jewish background means to them, but also in determining if she, through her mothering, has unwillingly transmitted to them the trauma of the Holocaust. Silberstein reviews her maternal ambitions, frequently in relation to her own mother’s practices. Since she grew up feeling diffuse but debilitating guilt in relation to her mother and the Holocaust, she tried hard to avoid giving her children any feelings of guilt (174). Because she listened to the warning of the little girl “who sat at a small red table next to her machine-embroidering mother and listened to stories about Auschwitz” (175), she tried not to talk too much about the Holocaust when her boys were small. She sought to encourage and protect their integrity. The responses of her children suggest that, in spite of her strenuous efforts, she did transmit strong emotions about the Holocaust. One son felt the weight of her unspoken sorrow and instinctively encouraged her to express her grief. Her other son expresses the same feeling she had as a child, that he seemed always to have known about the Holocaust, and he remembers her as talking about it even before he began to wonder about it, though she chose her words carefully (176). Both sons see her as an overprotective mother, and one reflects on the psychological and emotional burden her strong concern for them generates. Silberstein explains: “That I am so caring about him and his brother, so afraid of instilling a guilty conscience because I have lived with one myself, also creates some type of guilt feeling in him” (184). Yet, her sons also affirm, in different ways, a commitment to Jewish identity and the remembrance of Holocaust history. Silberstein’s interviews with her adult sons return her readers to the narrative of postmemory, exploring the intergenerational transmission of Holocaust memory to the third generation and confirming the continued relevance of Jewish identity in a Swedish context.

Förintelsens Barn writes itself into discourses of both postmemory and im/migration. Im/migration concerns not only Silberstein’s survivor parents, their Romanian Jewish roots, and their im/migration to Sweden, but Silberstein herself as a Swedish Jew conceived explicitly and increasingly as the text progresses as a minority: “I am Swedish. A Swedish Jew. A Jew in Sweden. A person who belongs to another religion than the majority and to a partly different culture” (161).Footnote 28 She writes to provide insights into what it means to belong to a minority in Sweden (188) and sees the struggle to maintain two identities as common among young people “who are tossed around in a centrifuge between two worlds and don’t know where or how to land” (136).Footnote 29 She suggests that “Maybe young people with roots in other countries can recognize my experiences. To belong, but also to have another belonging” (189).Footnote 30 With her explicit focus on young people, reinforced by the dedication of her book to her sons Markus and Joel, Silberstein positions herself as a maternal, minority figure, who was once a daughter to im/migrant parents. She concludes with the hope that her story might help young immigrants know that they are not alone (189).

Conclusion

The notion of intergenerational transmission of traumatic memory through mother-child interaction—both backward and forward in time—is integral to Silberstein’s work. Förintelsens Barn captures the importance of the survivor mother to the daughter’s sense of self, and it examines the effects of the Holocaust on the performance of motherhood, as seen in the maternal practices of her mother and later of herself, to which her sons testify in the final chapters of the book. Silberstein displays a keen awareness of the narrative parameters of postmemory writing, and she clearly inserts her text into this tradition, to which parent-child relations are central.

While complex mother-daughter relations are important to Silberstein’s interrogation of the legacy of the Holocaust and the transmission of memory, Förintelsens Barn simultaneously moves to define itself as im/migrant or minority literature. In part, Silberstein accomplishes this by representing her parents as im/migrants as much as survivors, facing many of the challenges common to refugees and im/migrants, including learning a new language, making a living through hard work, and raising children in an unfamiliar climate. Her mother’s mothering practices and attitudes toward her daughter, she suggests, are as strongly influenced by her im/migrant status as by her Holocaust experience. But Silberstein also inserts her writing into the category of im/migrant writing by representing herself as having a dual identity, one of which is as a minority.

Clifford argues that “Members of a self-defined generation must have a subjective sense of collective belonging, and the work of forging this generational identity is itself deeply shaped by its own historical moment” (2017, 23). Silberstein publishes her work at a time of tension concerning im/migration to Sweden. Because of instability in the Middle East, increasing numbers of people from Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan have sought refuge in Sweden. Im/migrants with Muslim background have become significant in number. At the same time, the Sweden Democrats, a conservative, nationalist anti-immigration political party, have gained parliamentary representation and as of 2022 collaborate with the Swedish government. Antisemitism in Sweden has been reported to be on the rise, in a variety of contexts, even if there also appears to be a general weakening of support for antisemitic opinions in Sweden (Brå 2019, 7–9; Bachner and Bevelander, 2021).This social context, as well as the historical context of the Holocaust, appears to shape Silberstein’s understanding of audience and purpose, as well as her dual sense of self. She articulates a sense of what has been termed the multidirectionality of Holocaust memory, the idea that collective memories of different groups take shape via a dynamic, intercultural process in a landscape of memory traditions vying for attention and recognition, and that knowledge and insight can be gained from exchanges between the Holocaust and other memory traditions (Rothberg 2009, 21). In other words, looking both forward and backward from the entwined positions of daughter and mother, Silberstein brings Holocaust postmemoir into dialogue with im/migrant autobiography, establishing some common ground with im/migrants and their descendants in Sweden today.Footnote 31