Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

Hoffman, Eva

ISBN 10: 0525246010 / ISBN 13: 9780525246015

Published by E.P. Dutton, 1989

About this Item

E.P. Dutton, 1989; stated first edition, with full number line, SIGNED by Hoffman on title page; 280pp. Binding is tight and sturdy; blue and white quarter-cloth boards very good; gilt titling remains bright and bold. Ends of spine bumped. Light shelfwear to dust jacket, with mild age-toning to extremities. Small (1/8"x1/8") brown stain to fore-edge, interior unaffected, and free of previous owner markings (save, of course, author's signature). Ships same or next day from Dinkytown, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Seller Inventory # 327449

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language
• Publisher: E.P. Dutton
• Publication Date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0525246010
• ISBN 13: 9780525246015
• Binding: hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Signed: Signed by Author

About this title

Synopsis

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.

Review

The condition of exile is an exaggeration of the process of change and loss that is inevitable as we grow and mature; there is a sense in which we are all exiles from the decade of our childhood, but exiles are more so. Eva Hoffmann spent her childhood in Cracow, among family friends who, like her parents, had escaped the Holocaust and were sceptical about the newly imposed Communist state. Her parents managed to get sponsorship and emigrated to a 1950s Canada where Eva was old enough to feel a stranger--bland food and quieter lives and schoolmates hardly aware of where her original home was. Still, there were neighbours who knew something of other ways, and a piano teacher who could not have been more Middle-European in his neurotic enthusiasm. True exile was college in Texas, among people frightened and hostile and not, like Canadians, polite about it, or a Harvard where she found her new intellectual self alien even to her parents, or meeting childhood friends who had grown up in Israel and had the preoccupations of soldiers, and not scholars. Lost in Translation is a moving memoir which makes quite specific circumstances hugely more general in their application; it is a touching and an intelligent book.--Roz Kaveney