Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman

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Review Essay by Aaron Rubinstein

When Eva Hoffman was a young girl she wanted to be a writer. An avid reader, she took literally each story she read, as if it were a reality she could enter. "I love words," she explains, "insofar as they correspond to the world, insofar as they give it to me in a heightened form. The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become - and such lucidity is a form of joy." It is in this spirit that Eva Hoffman approached the writing of Lost in Translation, her first in a series of memoirs.

Lost in Translation recounts Hoffman's experiences as a young girl in Poland, her immigration to North America when she was thirteen, and the effect that this move had on her developing identity. It is a probing book about the immigrant experience and a deeply personal account of Hoffman's growing up.

Hoffman was born immediately after the Second World War in Kraków, Poland. Her parents, both Holocaust survivors, were repatriated along with as many as 200,000 Jewish refugees. The thirteen years she spent in Poland, recounted in the section of her book titled "Paradise," comprised a typical girlhood: going to school, studying piano, making and losing friends, and falling in love. Despite the uneasy climate in Soviet-ruled Poland and the tension felt by Jews in this milieu, Hoffman's Poland was the world of an active young person, peripherally aware of the political climate but otherwise fully engaged in the work of growing up.

Hoffman's reference to paradise is not without irony, however. Her memories of Poland are governed by the Polish concept of te¸sknota, roughly equivalent to nostalgia, and this emotion evokes the images in Lost in Translation's first section. "Nostalgia," Hoffman explains, "crystallizes around these images like amber. Arrested within it, the house, the past is clear, vivid, made more beautiful by the medium in which it is held." Thus we are selective and romantic about our past, and the power of nostalgia lends a sheen to the way we understand our experiences.

Lost in Translation is roughly organized chronologically and in three long sections, each comprised of smaller sections, several pages in length. These passages read, indeed, as if through amber. They are small mimetic fragments that move around in time and connect to each other through association. What the reader can intuit from Hoffman's imagery is that she longs for continuity and connection. Writing about this early period in her life many years later, she knows that what began as an average, unselfconscious childhood was fated to change irrevocably.

In 1959, taking advantage of the Communist government's liberalization and a loosening of immigration policy, her family headed for the then culturally desolate Canadian outpost of Vancouver. The new landscape, culture, and language began to re-write Hoffman's life as she knew it. Her story was no longer a simple European romance but something more complex, strange and sinister.

Reading Hoffman's description of this transition at the beginning of the section "Exile" is like reading a science fiction story á la Stanislaw Lem. Her Polish universe and the physical landscape that held her childhood imagination had vanished. The English language did not "correspond to her world." English was devoid of all nuances and meaning a native speaker associates with her own tongue. Hoffman gradually becomes alienated from herself as her lucidity unravels and the foundation of her identity dissolves.

During her first day of school in Vancouver, Hoffman and her sister undergo a common ritual - one experienced by virtually every immigrant during grade school roll call. Unable to properly pronounce Hoffman's first name, "Ewa (EH-vah)" or her sister's, "Alinka," their teacher Americanizes their names to Eva and Elaine. It is a scene that Hoffman returns to several times in the memoir, a "crude baptism" that marks her initiation into a new life.

Hoffman's childhood sense of the power of words was revolutionized by this experience. Her name, Ewa, had been synonymous with her identity. She was Ewa, and there was never any reason to question the source or meaning of this appellation. Its Americanization, however, illuminated the fact that she was no longer who she had been. She felt that this new name, Eva, could mean nothing to her. Hoffman's exile is an exile of self.

The juxtaposition of Paradise and Exile immediately brings to mind the biblical diaspora as well as the historical Jewish diasporas. While Hoffman's emigration reflects the age-old image of the wandering Jew, the stereotypical Jew, though expelled from his homeland, retains his Jewishness. Hoffman is not so certain that identity works this way. Without her homeland or her native language, without the names she called herself - Polish, Jewish, Ewa - her identity is suspect.

The final section, "The New World," follows Hoffman's undergraduate education at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and graduate education at Harvard. Away from her parents, studying literature at a university during the counter-culture revolution of the 1960s, Hoffman found herself forced to re-work her identity yet again. Is she Polish, American or Jewish? Is she defined by being an immigrant? Is she a girl, a woman, a New York intellectual, or a writer? How do we ever define ourselves at all? In her application to Rice, Hoffman declares that she "wants to gain general understanding of human nature," and this quest shapes her education. Hoffman sees her situation as a personal crisis, which, if studied closely, might shed light on what identity fundamentally consists of.

In the new world, Hoffman turns to literature as a way of piecing together an understanding of humanity as well as repairing her fragmented self. Each book she reads and person she meets acts like a mirror of her own self-discovery. When reading famous works in her literature classes, Hoffman focuses on the details that reflect her own life: Holden Caulfield's immaturity, Strether landing on a foreign shore in Henry James's Ambassadors, a poor Jewish shop in Malamud's The Assistant. The connection between each of these scenes and her own experience in cultural exile helps her claim her new language - and life - as her own.

The book concludes with Hoffman engaged in an act of cultural translation, trying to make clear the intricacies of American behavior to a group of newly expatriated Poles. She finds herself, at this point an inhabitant of North America more than of Poland, attempting to bridge the distance between these two world views - one with which she associates her earliest memories and the other marking her maturity and adulthood. Attempting to close the cultural gaps between her old home and her new home forces Hoffman to unify these internally competing elements.

She calls this her therapy (a true embrace of American culture!). Like a psychoanalyst approaching a set of random symptoms, Hoffman takes her crystallized fragments of memory and identity and creates a sense of psychological coherence. By the end of the book, she is no longer mourning what is lost in translation but embracing what is made intelligible by it.

Excerpts

The rest of Cracow, the city of my daily life, is a place not of mystery but of secrets. Mystery only deepens as you go further into it, but secrets give themselves up unto the light. Cracow to me is a city of shimmering light and shadow, with the shadow only adding more brilliance to the patches of wind and sun. I walk its streets in a state of musing, anticipatory pleasure. Its narrow byways, its echoing courtyards, its jewellike interiors are there for my delectation: they are there for me to get to know. The quiet street that takes me to my music teacher's is nearly always empty and almost strange in its placidity. It's as if no one lived here, as if time stopped serenely and without fuss; but then, a breeze blows, making the sky clear, and the street is enveloped in warmth. In the park where I play with my friends, there are winding paths that let us out onto the wider, more lucid adventures, and a weeping willow by the pond that is just about the most graceful thing I know: it's so melancholy, and melancholy is synonymous with beautiful. My friends and I play near that tree, jumping rope or drawing in the sand. (pages 38-39)

This could be mistaken for an ordinary suburban party - but not quite. What is out of sync here? Perhaps it is the contrast between the carefully polite manners and the occasional slap on the back, or a loud laugh that breaks through. The people in this room are behaving properly, as if for someone else's benefit. But who is watching? A Canadian superego, I think - some allegorical notion of what is correct here, and what is vulgar and "green." And so, a layer of boredom falls over the proceedings as people exchange compliments on each other's dress and comment on the garden and the weather. This is an imitation of Canadian conversation - polite, constrained, bland. It's also conversation without context. Although this small group is practicing an earnest attempt at assimilation, they have hardly entered into the web of Canadian life. They would all say that they love their adopted country; they've made it good here, after all, they have more wealth and peace than they could have dreamed of in Poland. But their love is oddly isolationist: they are not interested in Canadian politics, or the local culture, or even their neighbors, with whom, they'd be the first to say, they have nothing in common. (page 141)

"I love you," I murmur to the man beside me in the nearly inaudible voice in which these most private utterances are made. These words are meant only for my lover; they are said in that space in which there's almost no space between us, in which they're almost the palpable filament of breath.

For a long time, it was difficult to speak these words in English - that language of will and abstraction - shape itself into the tonalities of love. In Polish, the words for "boy" and "girl" embodied within them the wind and crackle of boyishness, the breeze and grace of girlhood: the words summoned the evanescent movement and melody and musk that are the interior inflections of gender itself. In English, "man" and "woman" were empty signs; terms of endearment came out as formal and foursquare as other words. In the neutral and neutered speech, words were neither masculine nor feminine; they did no arise out of erotic substance, out of sex. How could I say "darling," or "sweetheart," when the words had no fleshy fullness, when they were as dry as sticks?

But now the language has entered my body, has incorporated itself in the softest tissue of my being. "Darling," I say to my lover, "my dear," and the words are filled and brimming with the motions of my desire; they curve themselves within my mouth to the complex music of tenderness. (pages 244-245)

Questions for Discussion

1) Eva Hoffman dedicates Lost in Translation to her "family, which has given me my first world, and to my friends, who have taught me how to appreciate the new world after all." What does she mean by this dedication?

2) What role does music play in Lost in Translation?

3) Femininity is a theme that Hoffman often returns to in her memoir. How does her view of femininity change over the course of the book?

4) There are several moments in Lost in Translation when Eva Hoffman confronts something that was relegated to her memory, for example: her visit to the old neighborhood in Kraków as an adult and her reunion with her first love, Marek. How does she approach this confluence of memory and reality? Does it change her understanding of herself?

5) Hoffman's parents immigrated to Vancouver to create more opportunity for their children, and Eva benefited greatly from the access to education. Do you think Hoffman's view of her success is similar to or different from her parents' view? Does her view of "opportunity" change over the course of the book?

6) Toward the end of Lost in Translation, Hoffman describes a shift in her understanding of the Holocaust. Stories that seemed like fairy tales became horrific events that shaped her parents' lives. How does this realization affect her understanding of her parents? How does it affect her life? In general, how is the Holocaust treated in Lost in Translation?

7) Is Hoffman's story of immigration unique to the Jewish experience or is it more universal? In what ways is it Jewish? In what ways is it applicable to other groups of people?

8) By the end of the book, do you think Hoffman has really assimilated into Canadian and American culture?