Lost In Translation
A Life in a New Language
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
In 1959 13-year-old Eva Hoffman left her home in Cracow, Poland for a new life in America. This memoir evokes with deep feeling the sense of uprootendess and exile created by this disruption, something which has been the experience of tens of thousands of people this century.
Her autobiography is profoundly personal but also tells one of the most universal and important narratives of twentieth century history: the story of Jewish post-war experience and the tragedies and discoveries born of cultural displacement.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Daughter of Holocaust survivors, the author, a New York Times Book Review editor, lost her sense of place and belonging when she emigrated with her family from Poland to Vancouver in 1959 at the age of 13. Although she works within a familiar genre here, Hoffman's is a penetrating, lyrical memoir that casts a wide net as it joins vivid anecdotes and vigorous philosophical insights on Old World Cracow and Ivy League America; Polish anti-Semitism; the degradations suffered by immigrants; Hoffman's cultural nostalgia, self-analysis and intellectual passion; and the atrophy of her Polish from disuse and her own disabling inarticulateness in English as a newcomer. Linguistic dispossession, she explains, ``is close to the dispossession of one's self.'' As Hoffman savors the cadences and nuances of her adopted language, she remains ever conscious of assimilation's perils: ``But how does one bend toward another culture without falling over, how does one strike an elastic balance between rigidity and self-effacement?''
