The impact of the Holocaust on second generation of survivors from the former Soviet Union : a preliminary inquiry / Marina Kopman.

This dissertation explores the effects of the Holocaust on the children of Soviet Union survivors who immigrated to the United States. The primary aim of this work is to examine the psychological themes found in a small group of four interviewees who are second generation Holocaust survivors. Secondarily, the intention of this work is to explore the experience of the Nazi trauma in the lives of this small group of children of Holocaust survivors from the former Soviet Union. This dissertation sought to understand these issues through a combination of literature review and qualitative interviews with four second-generation Russian émigrés who live in the San Francisco Bay Area.Contrary to virtually all of the previous literature, the results of this quite-limited study indicate that the Holocaust appears to have had no effect on the participants' lives. This finding completely and fully contradicts the published literature on children of survivors conducted in the United States and Israel. This almost fully disparate finding may be the result of one or more of the following: the continuing effect of anti-Semitism that has been a factor in the lives of virtually all Jewish families and the fact that participants grew up in the former Soviet Union where any mention of the word Holocaust and its impact on the Jewish population was erased and controlled by the government. Nevertheless, because the findings of this limited study are at virtually complete odds with all other published literature, they cannot be accepted on their face, but would need replication and expansion before any conclusions can be drawn. As it stands, the conclusions reached here must be regarded as tentative and potentially provocative. They cannot be generalized and must be taken with extreme caution by the reader.