The History of Love, the Contemporary Reader, and the Transmission of Holocaust Memory

Nicole Krauss's The History of Love (2005) represents, without the privilege of direct memory, a Holocaust past and a postmodern present. Indeed, the representation of the Holocaust in this novel serves as witness to the end of a generation of Holocaust memoirs and to a future of Holocaust literature where imagination and history are interpolated. This article reviews the range and periodicity of American Holocaust fiction, examines the presence of the Holocaust in The History of Love, and considers strategies unique to Krauss's voice as a third generation Holocaust writer. Such an examination explores the novel's ambivalent position, one that is built on a fraught triumvirate: history, a wary critical community, and a contemporary audience longing for an imaginative connection between themselves and the historical event.