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Born in Krakow on July 1, 1945 as Ewa Wydra (later: Eva Hoffman), Eva Wydra Hoffman moved from Poland to Vancouver with her Jewish parents at age thirteen. Her parents had survived the Holocaust by hiding in a forest bunker and being hidden by Polish and Ukrainian neighbors. She describes their move to Canada as the formative experience of her life. "My parents had just emerged from the Holocaust when I was born. They came from a small town in the Ukraine. They had a strong sense of Jewish identity. A sense of suffering was very palpable in them. At the same time there was a sense of a tremendous will to live which I imbibed from them. They were largely self-educated but great readers. They passed along a very natural and intimate love of books... The assumption was that we would never go back. There was a great deal of a sense of rupture about it. The differences between Krakow and Vancouver were enormous. There was a cultural trauma, let us say, during those first stage of immigration."
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Eva with her parents in Cracow, 1945[/caption]
As the daughter of survivors (not camp or forest survivors), she changed her named to Eva in Canada. Initially, writing in English as a second language was a major hurdle. "Nothing fully exists until it is articulated," she writes in Lost in Translation. She has said, "This was really the main impact of immigration for me. My sense of the enormous importance of language. It is something that truly shapes us and truly shapes our perception of the world.... My struggle was for English to inhabit me." She won the struggle and received a scholarship to study English literature at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She later studied at Yale School of Music and received her Ph.D in English and American literature from Harvard in 1975. A gifted pianist, she chose literature over music with much difficulty. "The Vancouver to which I came did not have a rich musical life."
After she worked for the New York Times from 1979 to 1990, serving as deputy editor of Arts and Leisure, and as a senior book editor, she was a visiting professor at Columbia (New York), University of Minnesota and CUNY's Hunter College. She married fellow Harvard student Barry Hoffman in 1971 and they divorced in 1976. Her first book, Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (1989), describes her experiences in Poland and Vancouver. Her other books include Exit in to History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe (1993), Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (1997) and After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004). Along the way she has received the Jean Stein Award (1990) a Guggenheim Fellowship (1992), the Whiting Award and an honorary D.Litt from Warwick University (2008). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London, England.
In preparing to speak at the Annual Kristallnacht Commemorative Program as the Beth Israel Synagogue in Vancouver in 2002, Eva Hoffman said, "For those of us who are direct descendants of Holocaust survivors, that historical tragedy constituted our first childhood knowledge, and it has deeply informed our biographies and psyches. Yet we did not experience it ourselves. What can we know of the past, and what kind of knowledge do we want to pass on? The second generation after any atrocity stands in a particular relationship to events: it is the hinge generation within which living memory can be transmuted into either history or myth. I am going to suggest that our task in the second generation is to move from personal and familial knowledge to a morally informed understanding of history."
BOOKS:
Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (1989)
Exit in to History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe (1993)
Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (1997)
The Secret. A Novel (2002)
After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004)
Illuminations. A Novel (2008), US: Appassionata (2009)
Time: Big Ideas, Small Books (2009)
How to Be Bored (2016)
[BCBW 2021] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
[caption id="attachment_23390" align="alignleft" width="640"]
Eva with her parents in Cracow, 1945[/caption]As the daughter of survivors (not camp or forest survivors), she changed her named to Eva in Canada. Initially, writing in English as a second language was a major hurdle. "Nothing fully exists until it is articulated," she writes in Lost in Translation. She has said, "This was really the main impact of immigration for me. My sense of the enormous importance of language. It is something that truly shapes us and truly shapes our perception of the world.... My struggle was for English to inhabit me." She won the struggle and received a scholarship to study English literature at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She later studied at Yale School of Music and received her Ph.D in English and American literature from Harvard in 1975. A gifted pianist, she chose literature over music with much difficulty. "The Vancouver to which I came did not have a rich musical life."
After she worked for the New York Times from 1979 to 1990, serving as deputy editor of Arts and Leisure, and as a senior book editor, she was a visiting professor at Columbia (New York), University of Minnesota and CUNY's Hunter College. She married fellow Harvard student Barry Hoffman in 1971 and they divorced in 1976. Her first book, Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (1989), describes her experiences in Poland and Vancouver. Her other books include Exit in to History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe (1993), Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (1997) and After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004). Along the way she has received the Jean Stein Award (1990) a Guggenheim Fellowship (1992), the Whiting Award and an honorary D.Litt from Warwick University (2008). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London, England.
In preparing to speak at the Annual Kristallnacht Commemorative Program as the Beth Israel Synagogue in Vancouver in 2002, Eva Hoffman said, "For those of us who are direct descendants of Holocaust survivors, that historical tragedy constituted our first childhood knowledge, and it has deeply informed our biographies and psyches. Yet we did not experience it ourselves. What can we know of the past, and what kind of knowledge do we want to pass on? The second generation after any atrocity stands in a particular relationship to events: it is the hinge generation within which living memory can be transmuted into either history or myth. I am going to suggest that our task in the second generation is to move from personal and familial knowledge to a morally informed understanding of history."
BOOKS:
Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (1989)
Exit in to History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe (1993)
Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (1997)
The Secret. A Novel (2002)
After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004)
Illuminations. A Novel (2008), US: Appassionata (2009)
Time: Big Ideas, Small Books (2009)
How to Be Bored (2016)
[BCBW 2021] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
