HERE ARE the titles of two novels-in-progress that I have heard of but not read a word of: "The Rage Cage" by Thane Rosenbaum and "The Holocaust Kid" by Sonia Pilcer. Playing Dr. Rorschach, I asked three people to respond to a particular word. All three, when I said "rhyme" responded "nursery," and when I said "kid" responded "school." Yet if one knew that each of the books to which these key words allude dealt with the atrocity of the century, one might expect titles like Ashes of the Holocaust or Rage in the Soul. Rosenbaum and Pilcer, both children of Holocaust survivors, both authors who must once have been rhyming kids in nursery school, are ringing changes on public expectations of the literary treatment of their basic, historical material.

Rosenbaum and Pilcer, along with Art Spiegelman, Lev Raphael, Barbara Finkelstein, the Australian Lily Brett, and the French novelist Henri Raczymow, are all offspring of the Shoah who have discovered the necessary domain of their artistic lives by writing about an experience that occurred before they were born. In an era of identity culture, when writers as various as Sherman Alexie, Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison have probed their own people's respective experiences, this group of so-called second generation writers provides a remarkably coherent world view. Growing up on breakfast-table anecdotes about concentration camps or bedtime stories from Hell has unified them in unexpected ways.

As the primary sources of knowledge of the Holocaust -- those parental voices who, once upon a time in 1943, had faint hopes of enduring the next day, let alone bearing children -- begin to shrink in numbers, oral transmission of this particular history has given way to nonfiction (ranging from Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners to the Theresienstadt recipes collected in In Memory's Kitchen) and fictional re-creation. Yet the odd thing is that there is a distinct difference between the second generation and their literary precursors, the canonical Elie Wiesels and Primo Levis of the Shoah syllabus. The first difference is stylistic: Wiesel and the (mostly) men who have written about the war emerged from a tradition of rabbinical tale telling; their works, compelled by the enormity of experience, reflect that older, more traditional mode. To be blunt, Wiesel did not go to college, whereas the second generation for the most part came of cultural age by reading Joyce, Proust, and the great shapers of modern literature. Thane Rosenbaum's writing, for example, has a manifestly contemporary texture. In Elijah Visible, his collection of nine ostensibly unlinked stories, all of the protagonists are named Adam Posner. This is a strange conceit, meant to create the sense that though the multiple Adams have different lives -- one an artist, another a lawyer -- the core of their various selves remains the same. Whatever clothes they wear, whatever occupations they pursue, they are first and foremost children of the Shoah. Other writers have also engaged in highly technical literary devices that layer their fundamental subject with a postmodernist gloss. Most obvious of these is Art Spiegelman, whose compelling melding of genres in Maus revisits history in comic book form. Primo Levi could not do this; I doubt whether there were comic books, and surely not underground comix, in his youth.

And there is also a deeper, more ominous way in which the second generation differs from the first. If an enormous chasm opened in the lives of Elie Wiesel et al., they could nonetheless sigh on the far side and recall the life before. There is no before for the second generation. On the most literal level, their fathers would not have met their mothers if not for the huge dislocations that thrust the few remnants of European Jewry into contact with mates they would never have otherwise encountered except for DP camps or in the 20th-century Diaspora. These writers attempt to peer across the chasm, but they cannot see the other side. Not for them the celebration of European Yiddish culture. Not for them the God of their fathers. In the beginning was Auschwitz.

AS A RESULT, the second generation's work is conspicuously darker than the first. This is the case whether that work explicitly goes into the war years, such as Spiegelman's chronicling of his father's life in the ghetto and camp or whether it chooses to examine the post-liberation decades of the survivors and their offspring. Lily Brett's What God Wants shows the meager sexual affairs of these people as affected by the events of the past. And in Barbara Finkelstein's Summer Long-a-Coming, a teenage boy playing stupid games with a farm truck accidentally runs over his younger sister after the family has alit in supposed safety in southern New Jersey. There is never safety anywhere after the Shoah. In Maus, Spiegelman's sly rendering of humans into animals may imply that in the author's opinion all human beings are merely animals. The only difference may be a question of who eats whom.

In every situation, in every nation, the cruel imperfections of life are what these writers' attention is drawn to. Look at Lev Raphael's Dancing on Tisha B'Av with its doubly outcast protagonist, the homosexual child of survivors who considers himself a "genetic rebuke" before he deliberately desecrates the fast day of the title, or Henri Raczymow's Writing the Book of Esther in which a delusional young Parisian woman born in 1943 imagines that she is living the life of her elders during the War before killing herself. Like a dangerous hereditary disposition to a fatal disease, the War colors every post-War perception -- maybe unto the seventh generation, and surely into the second. Even Sonia Pilcer, whose previous works include the off-B'way hit about New York neurotics, "I-Land," and a novelization of the sexy Tatum O'Neal vehicle, Little Darlings, has decided to abandon these up-to-date musings to confront the darkness she grew up with in her ironically titled novel-in-progress, "The Holocaust Kid."

More and more of these books come out every year as a statistically disproportionate number of Holocaust kids feel impelled to turn to fiction just as their less sophisticated parents have begun to write memoirs, some published by large trade houses and others by small printing presses to serve as personal testimonies if not literature. The dilemma for the children is that they have no testimony to offer, although Julie Salamon (Net of Dreams) and Lawrence Sutin (Jack and Rochelle), have nonfictionally explored their parents' history. For the majority. however, the next look at the inconceivable simply must be that of art as the memoirs will inevitably commence to dwindle. Imagination now becomes the lens used to peer at the specific history that has been the second generation's obscene gift, and, rather than shy away from it, they embrace it with disturbing, occasionally unseemly, relish. An insipid fetish for "healing" is currently sweeping psychoanalytic portrayals of the heirs of trauma, but these writers heal nothing with their fiction: They prefer the open wound.

There have been two parallel, millennia-long strands of Jewish responses to catastrophe. First, there is a tone of mournful lamentation that echoes from the psalms through medieval poetry through the somber, sober reflections of Elie Wiesel and his kin. Yet off on the side, there was always an unpleasant hectoring voice of shrieking hysteria that came from the prophets, God-haunted maniacs on hilltops, and segued into the Hasidic messianists who tossed away their worldly possessions every time another fraud promised redemption. Opposed to wishful thinking, realpolitik Zionists who aspired to salvation on earth, they were so doubtful of their era's ability to bring forth deliverance that they could only believe in redemption in connection with the end of days.

FIFTY SOME years ago, the end of days arrived for one third of the Jews on earth. Nonetheless, the literature of the Holocaust, with few exceptions until now -- notably Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird and the ferocious This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski, a gentile -- has not been written in the voice of lunacy and apocalyptic frenzy. That voice explodes with renewed vigor in the second generation, whose fury at what they have been denied -- history, deity, grandparents -- will presumably return in "The Rage Cage" and "The Holocaust Kid." These kids, locked in the cage the key to which was buried in the death pit at Babi Yar, have no choice but to continue to grin at the abyss, because otherwise they may fall into it and suffocate.