Lost In Translation
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January 22, 2012 2:00-3:30pm
Lost In Translation by Eva Hoffman
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?"
Elizabeth Drummond, Department of History, facilitator
ISBN
9780140127737
Publication Date
Spring 1-22-2012
Keywords
Jewish, memoir, linguistics
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Jewish Studies
Recommended Citation
Hoffman, Eva, "Lost In Translation" (2012). Jewish Studies Sunday Book & Discussion Group. 33.
https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/jewishbookgroup/33
