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From Amazon
The condition of exile is an exaggeration of the process of change and loss that many people experience as they grow and mature, leaving behind the innocence of childhood. Eva Hoffman spent her early years in Cracow, among family friends who, like her parents, had escaped the Holocaust and were skeptical of the newly imposed Communist state. Hoffman's parents managed to immigrate to Canada in the 1950s, where Eva was old enough to feel like a stranger--bland food, a quieter life, and schoolmates who hardly knew where Poland was. Still, there were neighbors who knew something of Old World ways, and a piano teacher who was classically Middle European in his neurotic enthusiasm for music. Her true exile came in college in Texas, where she found herself among people who were frightened by and hostile to her foreignness. Later, at Harvard, Hoffman found herself initially alienated by her burgeoning intellectualism; her parents found it difficult to comprehend. Her sense of perpetual otherness was extended by encounters with childhood friends who had escaped Cracow to grow up in Israel, rather than Canada or the United States, and were preoccupied with soldiers, not scholars. Lost in Translation is a moving memoir that takes the specific experience of the exile and humanizes it to such a degree that it becomes relevant to the lives of a wider group of readers.
From 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?"
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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First Sentence
It is April 1959, I'm standing at the railing of the Batory's upper deck, and I feel that my life is ending. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
It is April 1959, I'm standing at the railing of the Batory's upper deck, and I feel that my life is ending. Read the first page
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Very interesting and stimulates reflection on identity,
By
This review is from: Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (Paperback)
I am a woman born from a multi-cultural marriage (an American mother and a Jewish Hungarian father who met in Florence, Italy) a neutral third ground. I deeply appriaciated Eva Hoffmann's description of her life in two places. For me who has always lived in one, I feel divisions in identity at a different leve. But as a daughter of parents from different cultural backrounds, I recognize the constant sense of loss and tension between and among memories and experiences originating in different places under different sets of values. I am deeply interested in this topic and have found few books that I appreciated more than Ms. Hoffmann's. I would like to suggest to people with similar interest a book that seems to me to take up where "Lost in traslation ends". It is called "Mother Tongue, An American life in Italy". The author, Wallis Wilde- Menozzi, lives in Italy and describes the divisions and syntheses in her experience of bi-culturalism in a complex and lyrical way that touches finally the minute core of being. Alessandra Pauncz
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Greater as literature than as life,
By Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (Paperback)
It is impossible to not recognize in the sensibility of the writer of this work a great power of perception and intelligence. The story of the transition from world to world, from the Poland of her childhood to the Canada of the latter part of her youth, and young adulthood is too told as the story of a family ' lost in translation'. On the purely human individual level there is an exceptional story told here by an exceptional story - teller. There are too a number of remarkably moving scenes , I think especially of her re-meeting the love of her Polish childhood, and the kind of understanding they have for each other though they now live cultures away.I nonetheless found a certain absence in the work, an absence in the making as end of the story real human connection beyond that given in childhood and early years. Every writer as Henry James has his ' donnee' the subject and material which he is given, and is not to be criticized for having. Eva Hoffman's is this lostness in translation, this perpetual not- at- homeness, but it nonetheless makes of her story at least to my mind , one which however successful on the purely literary level presents a life lacking in the higher significance of giving to and being with others.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Escape from Poland did not always equal paradise,
By
This review is from: Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (Paperback)
In 1959, when she was 13yo, Eva Hoffman fled Poland with her family to British Columbia to escape the rigors of the communist regime. It did not prove to be the tremendous relief she expected, and the book begins with a section titled Paradise, in which the author reminisces about her life back in the Old Country.The immigrant experience, a new language, new culture, new food - everything was traumatic for her. It became so bad that she felt her brain stopped working for a time. The most fascinating parts of this book are those that take the reader back into Poland for a behind the scenes glimpse of the 'good life' lived by the middle class. Altho the whole family, plus a live-in maid, lived in just 3 rooms, they lived well, attending the theater and opera regularly. All this, of course, ended when Poland's gov't began persecuting Jews in the late 50s. Fortunately for her and for us, Hoffman recovered from her period of despair and depression and went on to become editor of the New York Times Book Review.
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