Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, Paperback

A marvelously thoughtful book . . . It is not just about emigrants and refuges. 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 years old. Entering into adolescence, she endured the painful pull of nostalgia and struggled to express herself in a strange unyielding new language.
Her spiritual and intellectual odyssey continued in college and led her ultimately to New York s literary world yet still she felt caught between two languages, two cultures. But her perspective also made her a keen observer of an America in the flux of change.
A classically American chronicle of upward mobility and assimilation. Lost in Translation is also an incisive meditation on coming to terms with one s own uniqueness, on learning how deeply culture affects the mind and body, and finally, on what it means to accomplish a translation of one s self.
Hoffman raises one provocative question after another about the relationship between language and culture . . . and about the emotional cost of re-creating oneself. Newsday
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