Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 302
•
Trim: 6½ x 9
978-1-4422-5423-7 • Hardback • November 2019 • $113.00 • (£75.00)
978-1-5381-2519-9 • Paperback • October 2019 • $39.00 • (£24.95)
978-1-5381-2520-5 • eBook • October 2019 • $37.00 • (£24.95)
Hannah Hahn maintains a full-time private practice as a psychologist and psychoanalyst in New York City. After graduate-level work in English literature, she obtained a master’s degree in psychology from Harvard University, a PhD in clinical psychology from Columbia University, and psychoanalytic certification from the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, where she currently supervises candidates. She taught attachment at the New York Institute for Psychoanalytic Training in Infancy, Childhood, and Adolescence. Her publications and presentations include “They Left it All Behind,” in M. O’Loughlin’s The Ethics of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting (2015) and “A Safe Place to Stand: The Holding Environment with Child Patients and Their Parents” (2005).
Foreword: In the Shadow of the Sthetl
Preface: They Left It All Behind
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Dramatic Personae
1 They Left It All Behind and the Disavowal of Loss
2 Communicating about the Past and Trauma
3 Missing the Old Country and Life in America
4 Childhood: Growing Up in America
5 The First Generation: Adulthood
Conclusions: From Silence to Connection: Memory, History, Trauma, and Loss
Appendix A: Questionnaire: Eastern European Jewish Immigrants and Their Children in America
Appendix B: Research Approach
Glossary: Yiddish Words and Other Terms
References
About the Author
Examining the narratives of her interview subjects through a psychoanalytic lens, Hannah Hahn has written a highly compelling and evocative account of how trauma and loss experienced in immigration—and their recognition and disavowal—impact the transmission of memory through successive generations.
— Karen Starr, author of Repair of the Soul and coauthor of A Psychotherapy for the People: Toward a Progressive Psychoanalysis
Not only does this book break the silence and inform us about the psychological lives of pre-1924 Eastern European Jewish immigrants, but it also provides a window into thinking about other pogroms: Armenians, Greeks, Turks, and Palestinian Arabs, for example, and about the intergenerational transmission of trauma and loss. They Left it All Behind is a compelling and timely book. In fact, this psychoanalytically-informed book is a must read.
— Judith L. Alpert, professor, New York University
In this uncommonly vivid study of the experiences of Jews who fled Europe and came to America before 1930, Hahn, a psychoanalyst, weaves together historical events, incidents from the lives of her interviewees (who are the adult children of the immigrants) and moving accounts of the experiences of her own grandparents. Hahn takes us on a personal and theoretical journey, and challenges us to think about what it means to "leave behind" a homeland, family, language, culture, and all that is familiar. What is the inevitable legacy, in the lives of subsequent generations, that can't simply be "left behind?" This timely account will be invaluable to clinicians and others tasked with helping today's uprooted immigrants.
— Sandra Buechler Ph.D, author of Psychoanalytic Approaches to Problems in Living
Hannah Hahn’s book is an important document on the history of Russian Jewish immigrants who were victims of the late C19 and early C20 pogroms in Europe. Via contemporary research and the application of psychoanalytic insight she shows what the experiences are that run through three generations of migrants. This intergenerational analysis is important because she shows how deeply affected each generation is and how long it can take to overcome the multi-faceted trauma of migration. The book will help descendants of those families from this specific migration, but it is written in such a way as to reach out to current migrants and to underline the importance of understanding damaged and strained attachment relationships caused by the impact of both loss and gaining a new life. The book implores us to be more empathic toward the complex needs of migrants, in the spirit of “we were all migrants once” and which might help to ease the current climate of fear and suspicion surrounding migration.
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