Lost In Translation: A Life in a New Language

Description

'It is one of those books, like the very best of travel writing, that hits a newly discovered nerve and takes a few steps further towards civilising the planet' - Guardian 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.

Eva Hoffman was born in Cracow, Poland and emigrated to America at the age of thirteen. The recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, she currently lives in London.

A deep and lovely book. The author manages to capture the very essence of exile experience, in beautifully human terms against a background of keen and searching intellect. This is how tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people felt in this century. Eva Hoffman speaks movingly for all of them -- Josef Skvorecky, author of The Engineer of Human Souls Eva Hoffman's elegant and elegaic autobiography is something different... It is the story...of a paradise lost but regained...a tender and memorable book * Independent * Hoffman takes her experience into the realms of universality, expressing herself in a way which has echoes and points of recognition for others who leave their history, their roots, their known identity adn must try to recreate themselves in another culture... An exquisite feast -- Angela Neustatter * Literary Review *