Book description
"A marvelously thoughtful book . . . It is not just about emigrants and refugees. It is about us all." -The New York Times
When her parents brought her from the war-ravaged, faded elegance of her native Cracow in 1959 to settle in well-manicured, suburban Vancouver, Eva Hoffman was thirteen…
Why read it?
2 authors picked Lost in Translation as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
This is a Cold War chronicle of homesickness and identity change, written by a Polish woman who came to Canada as a child with her family.
Hoffman had to learn not only how to live in a radically new culture, or how to speak a new language, but also how to get used to a new name and to a new lifestyle. This book showed me how to make a potentially cheap sentiment, nostalgia, into a tool of lucid introspection.
As an immigrant myself, I learned from Hoffman to not feel like I must choose between loyalties—to my previous self,…
From Andreea's list on memoirs about crossing cultures to find yourself.
This book is a classic memoir of migration. It follows a traditional, chronological structure, but stands out for its luminous prose and its trenchant, precisely articulated insights. Hoffman is an introspective writer, offering an intimate and rich rendering of the inner life of a young woman who is forced to leave her native Poland as a teenager and recreate herself on a new continent.
Much of the book deals with the intimate connection between language and self. What does it mean when your first experiences of love took place in one language, and you now have to learn to love…
From Julie's list on immigration and identity.
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