The Gifts

By Alla Efimova, Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, 2007

Four recent museum exhibitions created by the children of the Holocaust survivors deal with visual and material artifacts of their parents' experience. Marcel Mauss's classic The Gift (1924) is brought to bear on the analysis of the exhibitions, postulating that the exchange of the artifacts is akin to "gifts" that ensure a moral bond between generations and maintain a culture of obligation.