Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

by EvaHoffman (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1989

  $9.46

• Used

  Paperback
  1991

  $3.50

  In 1959 13-year-old Eva Hoffman made a voyage that took her from the familiar, loved country of her childhood to the unknown New World. Her life was irrevocably divided in two. In this personal memoir, she evokes the landscapes of postwar Poland - recently war-torn, suffering oppression, yet also the land of friends, first love, first home. She then sets out to convey the shock of the disruption of exile from that home and the struggle to comprehend a suddenly alien world, in which she experienced hardships among the well-manicured lawns of suburban Vancouver. The view of an adolescent thrust into a new world with no familiar references is offered via comments on a succession of American landscapes - college education in Texas; counterculture at Harvard; the literary milieu of New York. The reader is given an insight into the profound consequences of living a bicultural identity, the risks of nostalgia, the conflicting pulls of freedom and family knowledge. The book also explores the condition of being caught between two languages - a condition that literally offers different answers in moments of important decision - and tells how Hoffman learned to rewrite herself in the splintered, challenging English idiom.

• New

  Paperback
  2008

  $13.31

  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.