The essay by Hirsch is constructed in a way so that different people's stories and experiences are told so that they represented in postmemories. It is constructed this way to give support to what Hirsch is writing about, postmemories. Every passage deals with the postmemories about the Holocaust. If it was written any other way it would have been extremely difficult to paint such a clear picture of postmemories.

The style of the essay was necessary for the argument represented by the essay to work. With out it, it would have been nearly impossible for it to show you the difference seen in

a picture if you look at it as a past memory, even if it's not a memory of your own, and not as history. The passages of the essay takes you through the pictures as if it was you in the picture. You learn how "adult viewers see the child victim through the eyes of his or her own child self" (Hirsch 413).

The writers of the passages are not actual survivors of the Holocaust; they speak form the position of postmemory. Hirsch her self has postmemories of Czernowitz before the war even though she has never been there. She gets these mental images from the stories that her parents have told her. He parents lived in Czernowitz before they were forced to move during World War II. She speaks as if she lived in Czernowitz before the war. "Postmemory is not an identity position, but space of remembrance" (Hirsch 407). It is through postmemory that she and all the other authors are able to tell the stories are contained in Hirsh

Hirsch puts herself into the shoes of the children and people in the picture and wonders how she would have reacted if the door bell rang and the Gestapo were at the d

Some common words found in the essay are:
Marianne Hirsch, Ethel Rosenberg, Lorie Novak, Past Lives, War II, Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz, ethel rosenberg, , past lives, lived czernowitz, czernowitz war, little boy, picture little, lorie novak,
Approximate Word count = 738
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)