A Life in a New Language

Lost In Translation

'It is one of those books, like the very best of travel writing, that hits a newly discovered nerve and takes a few steps further towards civilising the planet' - Guardian

A deep and lovely book. The author manages to capture the very essence of exile experience, in beautifully human terms against a background of keen and searching intellect. This is how tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people felt in this century. Eva Hoffman speaks movingly for all of them

Josef Skvorecky, author of The Engineer of Human Souls

Eva Hoffman's elegant and elegaic autobiography is something different... It is the story...of a paradise lost but regained...a tender and memorable book

Hoffman takes her experience into the realms of universality, expressing herself in a way which has echoes and points of recognition for others who leave their history, their roots, their known identity adn must try to recreate themselves in another culture... An exquisite feast

Eva Hoffman was born in Cracow, Poland and emigrated to America at the age of thirteen. The recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, she currently lives in London.

In 1959 13-year-old Eva Hoffman left her home in Cracow, Poland for a new life in America. This 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. 
 
Her autobiography is profoundly personal but also tells one of the most universal and important narratives of twentieth century history: the story of Jewish post-war experience and the tragedies and discoveries born of cultural displacement.

A Meditation on the Aftermath of the Holocaust

After Such Knowledge

An important and timely book on the legacy of the Holocaust from a world-renowned commentator on the subject.

Eloquent book, which struggles heroically to show that reason and scholarship still have value in the face of genocide and mass suffering

Hoffman draws upon disparate disciplines and forms of literature to probe the issues that haunt her generation

She is a sensitive but unsentimental writer, scrupulously fair-minded, keenly aware of the conflicts and dilemmas involved

Hoffman asks many questions, bringing a voice of reason to the irrational, reaching out for reconciliation

Eva Hoffman was born in Cracow, Poland, and emigrated to America at the age of thirteen. The recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, she currently lives in London.

As the Holocaust recedes from us in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the generation after. How should we, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors, and the second generation's responsibilities to its received memories? 
 
Eva Hoffman probes these questions through personal reflections and through broader explorations of the historical, psychological and moral implications of the second-generation experience. She examines the subterranean processes through which private memories of suffering are transmitted, and the more wilful stratagems of collective memory. As she guides us through the poignant juncture at which living memory must be relinquished, she asks what insights can be carried from the past, and urges the need to transform potent family stories into a fully-informed understanding of a forbidding history.

The Secret

A magnificent debut novel from the acclaimed author of Shtetl, Lost in Translation and Exit into History.

Eva Hoffman was born in Krakow, Poland, and immigrated to America at the age of thirteen.  The recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and letters, she currently lives in London

'Of course, I've always had a secret. Have I always known it? I suppose I did, in a way - in the way that children know such things. That is, I knew and didn't know-'In this novel, Eva Hoffman 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 is a story about a peculiarly powerful mother-daughter bond and about a haunting, about a young woman's quest for individuation and the challenges posed by contemporary science to our deepest notions of individuality. Using the near future to reflect on the conditions of the present, Hoffman has written a tale that grapples with the oldest riddles of identity, consciousness and self-knowledge - a novel of ideas for our time, and an imaginative fable whose resonance is timeless.

Eva Hoffman

Hoffman's intense novel ebbs and flows with passion and suppression...Hoffman is a writer of high intelligence and it is invigorating to spend time in her company

Paints a powerful portrait ... Hoffman achieves that most difficult feat of conveying the emotional effect of music in prose... a highly accomplished, edgy and timely novel

Hoffman captures the exhilaration of performance

Wonderful descriptions of the effect music has on its audience

An astute depiction of our era's social and political migration

Isabel Merton is a renowned concert pianist whose playing is marked by rare intensity. At the height of her career, she feels increasingly torn between the expressive musical realm she inhabits, and the fragmented life she leads as an itinerant artist, with its frequent flights, anonymous hotels and arbitrary encounters. 
Then Isabel meets Anzor Islikhanov, a political exile from war-torn Chechnya driven by a powerful desire to help and avenge his people. As their paths cross in several cities, they are drawn to each other - until a menacing incident throws Isabel into crisis.

Eva Hoffman

Praise for Illuminations

Hoffman's intense novel ebbs and flows with passion and suppression...Hoffman is a writer of high intelligence and it is invigorating to spend time in her company

Paints a powerful portrait ... Hoffman achieves that most difficult feat of conveying the emotional effect of music in prose... a highly accomplished, edgy and timely novel

Hoffman captures the exhilaration of performance

Hoffman's intense novel ebbs and flows with passion and suppression...Hoffman is a writer of high intelligence and it is invigorating to spend time in her company

Paints a powerful portrait ... Hoffman achieves that most difficult feat of conveying the emotional effect of music in prose... a highly accomplished, edgy and timely novel

Hoffman captures the exhilaration of performance

Hoffman's intense novel ebbs and flows with passion and suppression...Hoffman is a writer of high intelligence and it is invigorating to spend time in her company

Paints a powerful portrait ... Hoffman achieves that most difficult feat of conveying the emotional effect of music in prose... a highly accomplished, edgy and timely novel

Hoffman captures the exhilaration of performance

Books by Eva Hoffman

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter