This book visits a range of textual forms including diary, novel, and picturebook to explore the relationship between second-generation memory and
contemporary children’s literature. Ulanowicz argues that second-generation
memory—informed by intimate family relationships, textual mediation, and
technology—is characterized by vicarious, rather than direct, experience of
the past. As such, children’s literature is particularly well-suited to the representation of second-generation memory, insofar as children’s fi ction is particularly invested in the transmission and reproduction of cultural memory, and
its form promotes the formation of various complex intergenerational relationships. Further, children’s books that depict second-generation memory
have the potential to challenge conventional Western notions of selfhood and
ethics. This study shows how novels such as Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993) and
Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself (1977)—both of which feature protagonists who adapt their elders’ memories into their own mnemonic
repertoires—implicitly reject Cartesian notions of the unifi ed subject in favor
of a view of identity as always-already social, relational, and dynamic in character. This manuscript not only questions how and why second-generation
memory is represented in books for young people, but whether such representations of memory might be considered ‘radical’ or ‘conservative’. Together,
these analyses address a topic that has not been explored fully within the fi elds
of children’s literature, trauma and memory studies, and Holocaust studies.