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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com
The condition of exile is an exaggeration of the process of change and loss that many people experience as they grow and mature, leaving behind the innocence of childhood. Eva Hoffman spent her early years in Cracow, among family friends who, like her parents, had escaped the Holocaust and were skeptical of the newly imposed Communist state. Hoffman's parents managed to immigrate to Canada in the 1950s, where Eva was old enough to feel like a stranger--bland food, a quieter life, and schoolmates who hardly knew where Poland was. Still, there were neighbors who knew something of Old World ways, and a piano teacher who was classically Middle European in his neurotic enthusiasm for music. Her true exile came in college in Texas, where she found herself among people who were frightened by and hostile to her foreignness. Later, at Harvard, Hoffman found herself initially alienated by her burgeoning intellectualism; her parents found it difficult to comprehend. Her sense of perpetual otherness was extended by encounters with childhood friends who had escaped Cracow to grow up in Israel, rather than Canada or the United States, and were preoccupied with soldiers, not scholars. Lost in Translation is a moving memoir that takes the specific experience of the exile and humanizes it to such a degree that it becomes relevant to the lives of a wider group of readers.

From Publishers Weekly
Daughter of Holocaust survivors, the author, a New York Times Book Review editor, lost her sense of place and belonging when she emigrated with her family from Poland to Vancouver in 1959 at the age of 13. Although she works within a familiar genre here, Hoffman's is a penetrating, lyrical memoir that casts a wide net as it joins vivid anecdotes and vigorous philosophical insights on Old World Cracow and Ivy League America; Polish anti-Semitism; the degradations suffered by immigrants; Hoffman's cultural nostalgia, self-analysis and intellectual passion; and the atrophy of her Polish from disuse and her own disabling inarticulateness in English as a newcomer. Linguistic dispossession, she explains, "is close to the dispossession of one's self." As Hoffman savors the cadences and nuances of her adopted language, she remains ever conscious of assimilation's perils: "But how does one bend toward another culture without falling over, how does one strike an elastic balance between rigidity and self-effacement?"

From Library Journal
Born in Poland shortly after World War II, Hoffman emigrated to Canada with her parents in 1959. Gifted both as a writer and a musician, Hoffman succeeded enough in her "second" culture to win scholarships to Rice and Harvard and to become a published author in her adopted language and a New York Times editor. But, as this perceptive and moving memoir demonstrates, no matter how successful the adaptation to a new culture, the immigrant experiences loss as well as gain. Hoffman makes one feel intensely the pain of an abrupt rupture with one's culture and native language, as well as the difficulties of adjusting to a new idiom. Recommended for public and college libraries.

From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Prudence Hockley
Lost in Translation traces the struggle of a musically gifted, passionate, and thoughtful adolescent who is painfully uprooted when her Polish family emigrates to Canada. First as a member of a Jewish family in Catholic Poland, then as an immigrant in Canada, "stuffed into a false persona," and pitched headlong into a strange language, Eva Hoffman describes her early years as defined by marginality and dislocation. Recreating her frustration at being unable to express wit and irony, and her confusion and distress over her loss of verbal spontaneity, she articulates her personal experience of the idea that linguistic dispossession is "close to dispossession of oneself." Above all, Lost in Translation is a deeply felt meditation on the nature of language and its crucial connections to personal identity. Eva Hoffman explores the agony of learning to articulate in a new voice which can encompass all the tongues we must speak in our lives: the language of dreams and intimacy, of political discourse and academic argument, of memory and gossip. Her journey is one from the Poland of her childhood to adult life as a professional New York writer, and one from the nostalgia, rage, and alienation of internal exile to the fully fledged "invention of another me."

Ingram
This remarkable book is Eva Hoffman's personal story of her experiences as an emigre who loses and remakes her identity in a new land and translates her sense of self into a new culture and a different language.