"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...
"A marvelously thoughtful book . . . It is not just about emigrants and refuges. It is about us all." -The New York Times
Iris Surrey has a secret. Iris Surrey is a secret. An only child, Iris lives with her mother in a rambling house in a small midwestern town. Her mother is everything: provider, confidante, friend. But at seventeen, Iris begins to question their nearly symbiotic relationship--and the noticeable lack of others in their sheltered world. Where is Iris's father? Where are her grandparents? What is her mother keeping from her? When she stumbles upon the explosive truth, Iris begins a monumental journey of self-discovery--one that will throw everything she has ever known into...
Iris Surrey has a secret. Iris Surrey is a secret. An only child, Iris lives with her mother in a rambling house in a small midw...
As the Holocaust recedes in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the next generation. How should they, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors? And what are the second-generation's responsibilities to its received memories? In this meditation on the long aftermath of atrocity, Eva Hoffman--a child of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust with the help of neighbors, but whose entire families perished--probes these questions through personal reflections, and through broader...
As the Holocaust recedes in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the next generation. How shoul...
Explores various kinds and strata of secrets: intimate secrets and secrets of family past: the kinds of secrets that can be decoded from clues, and the kind that themselves seem to offer tantalizing clues to the fundamental mysteries of the human selfhood. This novel is about a mother-daughter bond and a young womans quest for individuation.
Explores various kinds and strata of secrets: intimate secrets and secrets of family past: the kinds of secrets that can be decoded from clues, and th...
In 1959 13-year-old Eva Hoffman left her home in Cracow, Poland for a new life in America. This personal 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.
In 1959 13-year-old Eva Hoffman left her home in Cracow, Poland for a new life in America. This personal memoir evokes, with deep feeling, the sense o...
Novelist, cultural commentator, memoirist, and historian Eva Hoffman examines our ever-changing perception of time in this inspired addition to the BIG IDEAS/small books series
Time has always been the great given, the element that establishes the governing facts of human fate that cannot be circumvented, deconstructed, or wished away. But these days we are tampering with time in ways that affect how we live, the textures of our experience, and our very sense of what it is to be human. What is the nature of time in our time? Why is it that even as we live longer than ever...
Novelist, cultural commentator, memoirist, and historian Eva Hoffman examines our ever-changing perception of time in this inspired addition to ...
In this arresting, intimate narrative journey, award-winning Eva Hoffman returns to her Polish homeland and five other countries--Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the two nations of the former Czechoslovakia--historically transformed by the demise of Communism. The result is the penetrating personal odyssey across the "other Europe" and a vivid portrayal of a landscape in the midst of change. Hoffman combines the wise perspective of an outsider and the passionate concern of a native daughter to illuminate the forces informing the region's complex politics as she captures the texture of...
In this arresting, intimate narrative journey, award-winning Eva Hoffman returns to her Polish homeland and five other countries--Hungary, Romania, Bu...