The paper focuses on the representation of trauma and the use of humor in the novel Hope: A Tragedy by contemporary American Jewish writer Shalom Auslander. The book follows the fate of the Kugel family moving to the countryside to escape the burden of the past they never experienced. As they live through their imagined horrors, they discover Ann Frank, alive and writing in their attic. The protagonist becomes eventually so absorbed with the past and their guest that he neglects his family, job and resigns from life. The paper addresses the appropriation and intergenerational transmission of the Holocaust trauma by American Jews who never even visited Europe, focusing on the comical aspect and tragic ending of the attempts to escape the collective ethnic legacy, especially when faced with a survivor who challenges the views of the individual members of the family on history, tragedy, trauma and memory.