One book on the list:Lost in TranslationRead about all five books on Freed's list.
by Eva Hoffman
Dutton, 1989
Eva Hoffman divides her splendid memoir into three parts: Paradise (the Krakow of her childhood: “the wonder is what you can make a paradise out of ... a lumpen apartment ... squeezed into three rudimentary rooms with four other people”); Exile (Vancouver, to which her family emigrated when she was 13: “no solid wood here, no accretion either of age or dust”); and The New World (America: “Much of the time I’m in a rage. Immigrant rage, I call it”). Hers is a story suffused by nostalgia and rage. But also by meditations on culture and language and identity. And then one day, while teaching T.S. Eliot to American college students, she finds herself, at last, actually able to feel within the English language. She has arrived.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
