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Despite the abundance of psychological studies on trauma related ills of descendants of historical trauma, and the extensive scholarly work describing the memory politics of silenced traumatic pasts, there has yet to emerge a critical analysis of the constitutive practices of descendants of historical trauma. This article presents an ethnographic account of a support group for descendants of Holocaust survivors, proposing that the discursive frame of intergenerational transmission of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and support group based narrative practices allow descendants to fashion their sense of self as survivors of the distant traumatic past. The discursive frame of transmitted PTSD acts as both a mnemonic bridge to the past and a mechanism of identity making, as participants narratively reemplot their life stories as having been personally constituted by the distant past A close ethnographic reading of on‐site discursive practices points to how culture ferments to produce narratives, practices and ultimately carriers of memory to both sustain and revitalize historical grand narratives and the cultural scenarios they embed.

Despite the abundant scholarship on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the memoropolitics entailed by testimonial accounts of trauma and genocide, little is known of the everyday experience of trauma survivors and their descendants. Survivor silence is thought to signify only psychological or political repression and the "unspeakability" of traumatic pasts. It is widely accepted that the everyday lives of trauma victims and their descendants entail only the "absence of presence" of the past and the absence of descendant knowledge of that past, while the familial social milieu is thought to foster only the wounds of transmitted PTSD. Contrary to the literature, ethnographic accounts of Holocaust descendants depict the survivor home as embedding the nonpathological presence of the Holocaust past within silent, embodied practices, person-object interaction, and person-person interaction. These silent traces form an experiential matrix of Holocaust presence that sustains familial "lived memory" of the past and transmits tacit knowledge of the past within the everyday private social milieu. The ethnography of silent memory may also provide a tentative model of nontraumatic individual and familial memory work in everyday life.

Deviating from foundational assumptions regarding the semiotic and performative role of material objects, mementos of traumatic pasts are conceptualized as resisting mnemonic re-presentation and inter-objectivity. In keeping with trauma discourse, souvenirs of deathworlds are depicted as incapable of encapsulating sublime suffering or breaching the wall of silence between survivors and descendants, failing to constitute a material legacy. Rather than act as conduits for 'continuing bonds' with the past and the dead, survivors are expected to disentangle the self from souvenirs of difficult pasts facilitating separation and recovery. Ethnographic interviews with descendants depict the way discursive framing elides the semiotic potential of domestic material traces of the Holocaust and parent-child-object relations engendering intimate inter-corporeality and embodied memory. Object relations are central in the passage between life-and deathworlds, allowing survivor families to sustain the lived memory of the past in everyday life. Findings problematize the discourse of genocidal suffering that overshadows micro-moments of lived experience.

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