[In the following essay, Fjellestad explores the marginalization of Central European American literature by focusing on how Hoffman's Lost in Translation portrays the immigrant writer's experience.]

For the European, even today, America represents something akin to exile, a phantasy of emigration and, therefore, a form of interiorization of his or her own culture.

—Jean Baudrillard, America

Our present age is one of exile.

—Julia Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual”

The demand to recognize an irreducible presence of the Other in American literary history has brought about qualifications or the substitution of “American” with ethnic-specific adjectives, leading to distinctions between, for instance, African American, American Indian, Asian American, Chicano, Hispanic, and Puerto Rican literature. Redefining American Literary History, edited by A. La Vonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (1990), may serve as a typical example of recent critical anthologies of American literature. And, although in the critical/theoretical debate on the meaning of “ethnic,” a broad spectrum of positions could be mapped, in anthologies and histories of American literature “European ethnics” are almost never mentioned (The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 1990, edited by Paul Lauter being an exception). From the perspective of a European academic interested in American literature, this predominant absence of the category of European American literature is quite baffling. Even if the ideological motives behind this recoil from Eurocentrism may be understandable and even desirable, some of the unspoken assumptions behind it strike me as problematic. What bothers me most is the implied homogenization of Euro-American literature. I think that the assumptions informing this unitary perception of Euro-American literature need careful reexamination. In what follows, however, I will only very briefly outline a few general and very tentative queries, hoping to open a debate on the principles of present-day constructions of ethnic literature. My initial remarks on the problematic neglect of Central European literature will serve as a pre-text for a more detailed discussion of Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989). I will approach Hoffman's book as an example of postmodern autobiography written by a Central European étrangère. What I would like to argue for is an insertion of what may (awkwardly) be called Central European American literature in the “Other” canon of American literature.¹

The first assumption encouraging a homogenizing view on Euro-American literature seems to be the persistent myth of the so-called “European model” of voluntary immigration, acculturation and assimilation that leads directly to a seamless if not quite painless absorption. From this vantage point, the melting pot is an apt metaphor in the case of Euro-Americans who, once acculturated, merge into the mainstream (read: oppressive) culture. And although the idea of the melting pot has been challenged since its very birth (the production of Israel Zangwill's play of that name in 1908), the concept seems to have reasserted its grip on the public awareness in recent years, as Rudolf Vecoli points out in his “Return to the Melting Pot: Ethnicity in the United States in the Eighties.”² The classic success tale often quoted as embodying this belief is of course Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912). In criticism, Antin's narrative has been interpreted as “a prime example of smooth, one-way assimilation. Her autobiography is a singular celebration of her successful transformation from an Old World shtetl girl into a New England Woman.”³ Few critics seem to have noticed the ambiguities and deep contradictions in Antin's autobiography; William A. Proefriedt's illuminating reading of The Promised Land is an exception rather than the rule.⁴ It is indeed surprising that deconstruction-inspired suspicion of any “seamless” reading has not as yet led to a radical re-examination of The Promised Land and of the “straight line” theory of assimilation. My feeling is that the deconstructive critical gaze has been averted from Antin's text because the writer is a Caucasian immigrant.

The second popular assumption behind the recoil from what has come to be called “Eurocentrism” is the naive yet stubborn belief that Europe is a cultural—if not political—unity. This lumping together of all countries in Europe ignores the fact that in the forty-five years of post-war Europe at least two generations of Central and East Europeans have grown up in a political and social system which created specific cultural techniques for constructing, monitoring, and controlling the self, techniques which were radically different from those in the West. The two Europes have come to speak mutually incomprehensible languages, if by language we understand a cultural system.⁵ It seems to me that this cultural specificity of Central Europe is all too flippantly passed over in the process of revising the American canon; the otherness of Central Europe is all too easily domesticated and assimilated into the sameness of the culture of the West. Hence the patent absence of such writers as Joseph Brodsky or Czeslaw Milosz in many ethnic-specific anthologies of and critical books on American literature.

Granted, there is a whole industry of critical interest in immigrant literature. However, although on the whole “archeological” studies on European Americans have been relatively rich, the post World War II wave of Eastern and Central European immigration remains a virtual terra incognita.⁶ Moreover, the letters, memoirs, and autobiographies of various ethnic groups which have emigrated to the New World from Europe are scrutinized primarily as documents of social history; seldom are they treated as literature in the sense of belles-lettres. There are of course perfectly good reasons for that. To name just a few: the aesthetic value (however defined) of letters is as a rule considered negligible compared to their informative function; the vast majority of “economic” emigrants to the United States consisted of illiterate or poorly educated people; few of those who did write memoirs had any literary ambitions and a vast majority of them wrote in their native languages.

It is also somewhat surprising that, while the experiences of the turn of the century European emigrants to the New World have been recorded by them in numerous memoirs and autobiographies, the refugees from the Communist system have seldom bothered to document their plight. They are only marginally present in literature, despite the fact that among the hundreds of thousands of post Second World War “Communist” emigrants a substantial number can boast of university education. The Central European intellectual emigrés to the West have so far produced but a handful of texts addressing the problem of emigration. Slawomir Mrozek, Czeslaw Milosz, Milan Kundera, Joseph Brodsky, Josef Skvorecky, Vassily Aksyonov, Alexander Wat and, more recently, Adam Zagajewski and Stanislaw Baranczak are among the precious few. Yet these refugees from the Communist countries remain in a literary no-man's land in their new homelands, exiled from American literary histories, anthologies and public discussions on ethnic literature. This situation is particularly puzzling because the United States is the home of such Nobel Prize laureates as Milosz and Brodsky and a country known to be proud of its long tradition of ethnic and emigrant literature.⁷ Considering the rarity of stories of the post-war exile and the strange absence of Central European emigrant autobiography, the recent publication of Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language is significant in itself. Viewed by Hoffman herself as a book that follows up “a trace of the other story behind the story of triumphant progress” of Mary Antin's tale (163), Lost in Translation is, to the best of my knowledge, the first “postmodern” autobiography written in English by an émigré from a European Communist country.⁸ The book records the author's life path from the post-war Poland of her childhood, through the pains of emigration to Vancouver, British Columbia, in the late 1950s, and further on through the process of acquiring a university education in the United States (at Rice, Texas, and Harvard), to a successful career in the New York publishing world.

The trajectory of Hoffman's fate may be viewed as a typical success tale: from the strict, prison-like Communist system of Central Europe to the free world of North America.⁹ But Hoffman destabilizes such neat divisions and complicates the popular picture by focusing on the charms and blessings of the System and the terrors and curses of the Promised Land. This problematization of formulaic descriptions of the two political, social, and cultural systems emerges as Hoffman re-visions and reconstructs her Polish self through her American identity, and re-examines her American subjectivity through the memory of her Polish selfhood. Hoffman's re-presentation of her experience becomes a deep probing into the phenomenon of exile in the second half of the twentieth century.¹⁰ The book speaks of the results of the loss of what poststructuralist wisdom would call a romantic illusion of unity and center and of the costs and rewards, the joys and the terrors, of being thrown into the postmodern world of constantly shifting boundaries and borderless possibilities.

It is precisely the question of borders and boundaries that is central to the exiled self. Paradoxically, in the Communist system, with its explicit rules and principles aimed at regulating every aspect of the citizens' lives, even their ideology and morality, Eva can perceive herself as a free agent. Felt as something imposed and external, the boundaries of the System are clearly defined, and as such they can be trespassed and broken, giving a feeling of freedom. Once in Canada and then in the United States, the narrator feels lost: the old familiar System with its clear network of rules has disappeared and the boundaries of the new world are invisible to her. Carrying the old System now within herself, she tries to impose its rules upon the new territory. Simultaneously, she stumbles upon imperceptible boundaries within the new culture and as a result is lost between the two systems' networks, or, as she puts it, she falls “out of the net of meaning into the weightlessness of chaos” (151).

To describe the moment of crossing the borders, of initiation into exile, Hoffman self-consciously employs two tropes typical of emigrant autobiography: that of division into two and of second birth. She compares her train journey towards the new destination with “scissors cutting a three thousand-mile rip” through her life (100). On the third night in the new country, she has a nightmare in which she is drowning in the ocean and, scared, wakes up in the middle of a scream which she calls “the primal scream of my birth into the New World” (104). Thus the physical and geographical separation from the mother country becomes also a symbolic separation from one's moorings; the familiar, well-mapped territory gives way to an incomprehensible space.

To describe her emotional response to the New World, Hoffman repeatedly resorts to the image of flatness and desert. In her new world, she observes only sterility and absence of depth. The Canadian landscape appears “vast, dull, and formless” (100); the Canadian interiors seem “oddly flat, devoid of imagination, ingenuous” (102); the spaces are “plain” and “obvious”; even the Canadian accent is “flat.” Smoothness is another term that Hoffman uses, in particular to describe her impression of Canadian and American faces. For her, the cheerful looks seem to be imitations of the expressions in ads and commercials, and as such they are strangely impersonal and unreadable. She senses danger in the matted look in the eyes of her new friends, because it “flattens [her] features” (147), obliterates her. She links this “open sincerity of the simple spaces, open right out to the street” (102) with lack of privacy, depth, interiority.¹¹

Another image is that of a desert. At some point Hoffman refers to Canada as her “lush Sahara” and the oxymoron echoes Baudrillard's view of America¹²: “Culture, politics—and sexuality too—are seen exclusively in terms of the desert, which here assumes the status of a primal scene. Everything disappears before that desert vision. Even the body, by an ensuing effect of undernourishment, takes on a transparent form, a lightness near to complete disappearance” (America 28). Both the image of flatness and of a desert signal a terrifying rather than liberating disappearance of boundaries and imply an unmapped and therefore both unknown and unknowable territory.

Also the Promised Land's internal landscapes are arranged in different formations. The insertion into the Canadian culture forces Eva to suppress, or rather restructure, her emotional world. For instance, she learns that in English there is a prohibition against using uncharitable words. This knowledge makes her refrain from passing explicitly strong judgments at the cost of suppressing her instincts and her quick reactions. While in Polish she might have called the people she meets “silly” and “dull,” in English she forces herself to call them “kindly” and “pleasant” (108). Her emotional life is invaded by the new taboos. Having to express gratitude for hand-me-down clothes and to make other gestures of kindness, Eva is “beginning to master the trick of saying thank you with just the right turn of the head, just the right balance between modesty and obsequiousness,” but in her heart she feels “no gratitude at being the recipient of so much mercy” (104).

Eva's odyssey of comprehending the other culture is paralleled by her experience of her own otherness. Emigration forces her not only and not primarily to learn how to move in a strange external landscape; the inner landscape has to be remoulded. Eva's thoughts, feelings, impressions have to be cast in language; but which one, if Polish does not cover the new physical world and English seems inadequate to describe the inner?¹³

Ironically, Eva's entry into the English language at the age of fourteen begins with a phrase of silencing: “shut up” is what she hears all around her on her first day in school. Years afterwards, a graduate student in English literature, Eva experiences a return of this “shuddup” to silence her Polish self. Faced with the question of marriage, she is faced with the problem of making her choice in English or in Polish. In a dramatized dialogue between the two languages, two cultural systems emerge:

Should you marry him? the question comes in English.

Yes.

Should you marry him? the question echoes in Polish.

No.

But I love him; I'm in love with him.

Really? Really? Do you love him as you understand love? As you loved Marek?

Forget Marek. He is another person. He's handsome and kind and good.

You don't feel creaturely warmth. You're imagining him. You're imagining your emotions. You're forcing it …

(199)¹⁴

For her, each language structures the process of decision-making along different coordinates and preferences: the Polish “no” to marrying an American is a response to an absence of (Polish) “creaturely warmth” towards the man; her English “yes” to the marriage question is rooted in a critique of her Polish understanding of love as a “romantic illusion” that has to “shuddup” (199). She realizes that “between the two stories and two vocabularies, there's a vast alteration in the diagram of the psyche and the relationship to inner life” (269). Making a choice in Polish means following one's passion and a sense of duty to oneself; a choice in English entails reasoning and calculating. (And reasoning wins: she marries her American only to divorce him later on.)

Language acquisition is far from an innocent intellectual activity; in Lost in Translation it is presented as a carnivorous process. From the start, English “invents” another Eva (121), not only changing her intellectual perception of the world, but inscribing itself into her body, becoming incorporated “in the softest tissue of [her] being” (245). Attuned to the noise of “the Babel of American voices” but lacking a voice of her own, Hoffman feels powerless against the invasion of other voices, voices of the Other: “They ricochet within me, carrying on conversations, lending me their modulations, intonations, rhythms. I do not possess them; they possess me,” she writes (220). She is conscious of her experience of a linguistic construction of her self.

But by far the most painful form of exile is not the expulsion from her “natural” geographical, political, social, cultural, or linguistic milieu, but Eva's exile from her own gendered body. The physical and intellectual are always linked in Eva's account. “Telling a joke is like doing a linguistic pirouette,” “laughter is … the eroticism of conversation” (118), she observes. In the New World, the gaze of others dislodges her perception of her own body. While in Poland, Eva is considered a “pretty young girl”; on the other side of the Atlantic she is suddenly found “less attractive, less graceful, less desirable,” and “a somewhat pitiful specimen” (109). The othering of her body is most violent when she is subjected to actions aimed at making her body look like “typical” American female bodies. For others, her “other” body is intolerable, and it has to be acculturated, remolded to fit new categories of beauty and decency; it has to be harnessed to conform to the local category of femininity. Eva's armpits are shaven, her eyebrows plucked, her hair set up in curls, her feet forced into high-heeled shoes and her breasts modestly bridled by a bra. This external acculturation of the body only augments the sense of alienation which, Eva feels, “is beginning to be inscribed in [her] flesh and face” (110).¹⁵

Thus her experience of exile becomes a lesson in what after Bourdieu may be called symbolic violence, a lesson in the legitimate ways of (re)presenting her body to others and to herself.¹⁶ Through social criticism and censorship she is taught the “right” gestures, manners, ways of walking, dressing, and looking at the world. New social power relations are inscribed onto her very body, turning her into a stranger to herself.

An outsider to the American construction of the feminine of the fifties, Eva has to consciously learn the highly standardized semiotics of dating and behavior towards the other sex in the New World; in comparison, the conventions of Polish dating seem “natural” because its rules have never been spelled out. In fact, though, in both cultures the codes of sexual behavior are mediated through an elaborate social process of education. In Poland Eva is initiated into the world of sex by books: Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis? with the scenes of Roman orgies, Boccaccio's Decameron with “scenes of hermits giving in to fleshly temptresses” (28) and Ann of Green Gables with its portrayal of complications in romantic love. Like one of the family maids, Eva studies For Women for advice on how to be glamorous, sexy, and constantly seductive. Most of all, however, Eva's Polish world is filled with her childhood companion and first boy friend, Marek, and their “tousles and sex games” (40). Marek is the center of her erotic and emotional universe. While in Poland, she never questions her own femininity, she merely tries to find ways of expressing it. Faced with the Canadian feminine, Eva recognizes the fact that “the allegory of gender is different here, and it unfolds around different typologies and different themes. I can't become a ‘Pani’ [lady, mistress, madam, Mrs.] of any sort: not like the authoritative Pani Orlovska, or the vampy, practical Pani Dombarska, or the flirty, romantic woman writer I once met. None of these modes of femininity makes sense here, none of them would find corresponding counterparts in the men I know.” Unsure of how to transpose herself “into a new erotic valence” (189), Eva is initiated into the rules and constraints of sexual behavior by her new friend Penny and the artifacts of American culture: ads, movies, literature. The male faces are understood as handsome because they resemble figures in cigarette ads (148); her first American boy friend's male beauty is mediated through the images she has seen on posters and in the movies (187). Ultimate Americanization means for Eva being able to “recognize sexuality in the American grain” (245). This recognition means for her not merely knowing about the sexual rules but first of all having them inscribed onto her body so that they stop being cultural and begin to feel “natural.” But her becoming a woman in the American grain can never end in a return to “nature”—Eva's destiny is an awareness of culture-generated rules, principles, constraints, boundaries and borders which mark emotional life and relationships, especially between the sexes. Thus Hoffman's book registers a recognition not only of the impossibility of such a “return” but also of the fictionality of every construct of nature.

Despite the constantly recorded pain of exile, Lost in Translation may be seen as an account of a relatively successful process of coming to terms with one's otherness. Writing her book, Eva speaks after all not from a socially marginal position but from what can easily be perceived as a center (the intellectual world of New York). One could argue that she merely recapitulates the process of marginalization and subsequent centralization.¹⁷ And yet, quite ironically, Eva's success trajectory means moving from one kind of marginality to another. In Poland her marginality was linked to her Jewishness and was a source of strength and pride. Not saying the words of the prayer at school, refusing to weep with the others to mourn the death of Stalin, eating Jewish bread—that is, resistance against the dominant group, stressing one's marginality, made her, in her mother's words, “perhaps better than others.” Silence, lack of tears, matzoth became markers of difference which she experienced as something positive. In the Polish Communist culture whose dominant ideology extols homogeneity, an individual's gesture of differentiation is an act of defying the centre, an act of courage. By a strange reversal, in the New World with its central ethos of difference, sameness seems to be the object of everybody's desire. In Eva's experience of herself the value of difference is shifted: “to be different” now reads “to be worse,” and as an emigrant she finds herself decentered and powerless. Paradoxically, her ultimately successful journey to the inner circles of New York's professional life results in yet another and more complex form of exile, that of a postmodern subject. That is, her sense of physical and emotional exile in geographical, social, and cultural terms is now overshadowed by her awareness of being exiled from selfhood into subjectivity.¹⁸ Aware of being constructed by a variety of competing discourses, Eva finds herself in the precarious position of “always simultaneously [living] in the centre and on the periphery” (275). Ultimately, Eva is thrown into the postmodern world, into the poststructuralist universe.

Eva's poststructuralist world is first of all a world of awareness of the problematic nature of self-consciousness. The narrator suggests that it is in her awareness that her exile should be situated: “From now on, I'll be made, like mosaic, of fragments—and my consciousness of them. It is only in that observing consciousness that I remain, after all, an immigrant” (164). This closing statement of the middle section of the book (called “Exile”) summarizes the experience of her physical and cultural expulsion from the native country and her socially and culturally successful adaptation to the New World. At the same time, the same observation marks the beginning of a permanent state of exile, an exile that she says she shares with her American generation. This form of exile may be called postmodern in its “acute sense of dislocation and the equally acute challenge of having to invent a place and an identity … without the traditional supports” (197; emphasis added).

Eva's narrative is full of marked tensions between her intellectual understanding of her condition and her experience of loss. The titles of the three parts of Lost in Translation (“Paradise,” “Exile,” “The New World”) bring forth a whole range of biblical and cultural associations, the most prevalent of which is a loss of innocence coinciding with leaving behind one's childhood and entering one's teens. Exiled from what she experiences as “nature” into the American culture, she loses the (seeming) immediacy of experiencing her self as herself. When, in an attempt to come to terms with the loss, Eva decides to undergo psychotherapy, she sees it as a cure against her “American disease,” defined as “anomie, loneliness, emotional repression, and excessive self-consciousness” (268). Ironically, the homologue of her “talking cure,” the cure of writing her book, turns out to be saturated with self-conscious reflections on her consciousness. Her vocabulary is surfeited with self-conscious references to literature and postmodern theory and philosophy. Sometimes with a touch of irony, sometimes in despair, Hoffman turns to the insights of Freud, Lacan, Jameson, Derrida and others to understand and name her condition.¹⁹ A child of her (postmodern) age, Eva tries to intellectualize even her suffering. She clearly posits a difference between her own distance from her feelings and her mother's total symbiosis with her emotions: “My mother cannot imagine tampering with her feelings, which are the most authentic part of her, which are her. She suffers her emotions as if they were forces of nature, winds and storms and volcanic eruptions” (269). Yet Hoffman's attempts to affirm a (poststructuralist) fragmented, decentered, and fictional self are subverted by outbursts of rage and an acute sense of loss. Eva's knowledge of her social and cultural subjectivity fails to offer her a satisfactory explanation of her experience of pain. Intellectually embracing subjectivity, she seems to create a space for selfhood when she phrases the following question: “Suffering and conflict are the best proof that there's something like a psyche, a soul; or else, what is it that suffers?” (273).

Throughout, Lost in Translation dwells on the question of relationship between lived experience, its textual representation, and theoretical discourse interpreting both the experience and its representation. For Hoffman, the space between the memory of her selfhood and her intellectual understanding of herself as a script becomes the space of exile.

It is this exile that seems to generate Hoffman's writing, quite in keeping with Kristeva's view of exile as the very condition of writing: “How can one avoid sinking into the mire of common sense, if not by becoming a stranger to one's own country, language, sex and identity?” (“A New Type of Intellectual” 298). Eva's is a truly contingent mode of being. She feels caught between two incompatible narratives of being, the Polish story telling her that “circumstance plays the part of fate,” the American story anchoring fate in character. This radical incompatibility generates the process of never-ending translation, of both interpretation and transference. Eva can never securely inhabit any one system: she is engrossed in a constant process of crossing boundaries. Unlike the fiction of Mary Antin's America with its central ethos of “a steady, self-assured ego, the sturdy energy of forward movement, and the excitement of being swept up into a greater national purpose,” Eva's Promised Land offers a postmodern narrative of “the blessings and the terrors of multiplicity” (164), always reminding Eva of the contingent nature of (her)self.

In its mixture of various modes of expression, in its abundance of metacommentary, in its awareness of structuralist and poststructuralist theories, in its predominant concern with linguistic and cultural constructions of the self, Lost in Translation resembles such tales of exile as Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior or Ihab Hassan's Out of Egypt. Stanislaw Baranczak's term for this kind of text, “semiotic memoir” (224), strikes me as exceptionally felicitous since it may be seen as evoking both the Saussurian-Peircean signifying processes and Kristeva's semiotic chora.

In its intellectual interest in the costs and rewards of exile, Eva Hoffman's book has much in common with the books by Milan Kundera, Stanislaw Baranczak, Czeslaw Milosz, or Julia Kristeva. A careful examination of the treatment of exile by Central European writers as compared to that of other ethnic exiles (for example, those from other Communist regimes: Central American, South East Asian, Chinese) bears the promise of yielding interesting insights into the various techniques of constructing a sense of self-identity. The striking generality of the phenomenon of exile in the present-day world should not obliterate the culture-bound specificity of the experience and representation of exile.

All said and done, it strikes me that it would be a loss to the new American literature if texts like Hoffman's were to remain marginalized because classified as “mere” emigrant autobiography or silenced because they have been written by some European by birth. The ideological critique of Eurocentrism should not turn into a renewal of the imperialistic politics it denounces.

Notes

1. It is true that many names of Central and East European writers can be found in various anthologies and literary history books if they happen to be Jewish; indeed, at times the impression is created that East and Central European equals Jewish, even if Jewishness has been of very little importance in the texts of those writers.

2. For a succinct introduction to the debates over the “melting pot” versus “cultural pluralism” theories, see Jules Chametzky's article. See also Werner Sollors's Beyond Ethnicity.

3. See Stepp L. Tiefenthaler, “The Search for Cultural Identity: Jewish-American Immigrant Autobiographies as Agents of Ethnicity,” 37. Also see William Boelhower, “The Brave New World of Immigrant Autobiography”; James Craig Holte, “The Representative Voice: Autobiography and the Ethnic Experience.”

4. See William Proefriedt, “The Education of Mary Antin” and his scattered comments on Antin in “The Education of Eva Hoffman.”

5. The difficulty—if not impossibility—of cultural translation, even when the speakers share the same natural language, may be illustrated by the recent traumas of East and West Germany after the reunion. Obviously the same words cover different mental (although socially constructed) concepts. It is tempting to see this as an illustration of the sliding of signifieds. For a very illuminating discussion of the problems of translating such concepts as “liberal,” “justice,” “democracy,” etc. from Polish into English (and vice versa), see Stanislaw Baranczak, Breathing under Water, 9-15. Baranczak discusses how such concepts gain different charge depending on the political system, society, and historical traditions which have shaped them and in which they are used.

6. For an illuminating—though dated—review of studies on the European immigration to the United States see Rudolph J. Vecoli's “European Americans: From Immigrants to Ethnics.”

7. I admit that there are serious problems of classification here, the most serious of which is, no doubt, the question of language itself. Since many Central European emigrés write in their native languages first, the English translations of their books may be viewed as belonging to foreign rather than American ethnic literature. I wonder to what extent Sollors's claim that “writers of national fame or of striking formal accomplishments or of international fame are often categorically excluded from the realm of ethnic writing” (242) holds in the case of Milosz or Brodsky.

8. Hoffman sees Mary Antin as her “ancestress” (162). Both women were born in Jewish families in roughly the same geographical region: Mary Antin (1881) in Polotsk, Russian Pale, Eva (Wydra) Hoffman (1946) in Cracow, Poland. Both Antin and Hoffman were just thirteen years old when they emigrated with their families to the North American continent. Finally, both settled down on the East Coast (Antin in Boston, Hoffman in New York). In their autobiographies, both women celebrate education. Some episodes in Hoffman's book seem to be direct re-writing of passages in Antin's memoir. To give just one example: both writers describe Americanization of their names. But while Antin is disappointed that she is called just Mary, which sounds too much like her Hebrew Maryashe (Russian Marya), Hoffman regards the change in spelling of her name from Polish Ewa to English Eva as a “small, seismic mental shift” which makes her a stranger to herself (105). It is worth noting that although the title of Hoffman's book uncannily echoes Isaac Bashevis Singer's autobiographical Lost in America, he is never mentioned in Lost in Translation. Yet another echo is that of John Barth's classic postmodern text, Lost in the Funhouse, the implications of which I cannot explore here.

9. The ratio of “success” to “failure” stories may be different in various ethnic groups, but despite numerous “real life” success stories among Polish-Americans, the success narrative is very rare in the literature of this ethnic group. Franciszek Lyra, in his short survey of Polish-American literature, points out the fact that the “success story,” as presented in the memoirs and letters of Poles who have emigrated to the United States, is a very modest one indeed: “The majority of the memoirists belong to the intermediary social class between the lowest and the lower/middle stratum. In America, a handful made it into the middle class. There are neither men of letters nor intellectuals among them” (68).

10. In an oblique way, Lost in Translation is an attempt to re-define experience. I agree with Joan W. Scott when she writes: “Experience is not a word we can do without, although, given its usage to essentialize identity and reify the subject, it is tempting to abandon it altogether” (797). Just like the concept of experience, exile also seems to be attracting more and more critical interest; see for instance Julia Kristeva.

11. This external flatness seems to compensate a constant and merciless travelling inside the self; her American friends are fine-tuned to any changes within their selves. Her Polish friends believe that they just have an identity or character: they focus on the external world, the world outside the self. If the American mode is confessional, the Polish is factual, anecdotal, Hoffman observes. “A culture talks most about what most bothers it: the Poles talk compulsively about the Russians and the most minute shifts of political strategy. Americans worry about who they are” (264).

12. In common parlance “America” and “American,” as used by emigrants (and many other non-Americans, I suspect), become very protean and homogenizing concepts. At times “America” stands for the United States of America, at times for the whole North American continent, or for the ideal world of freedom, equality, and opportunity. “American” may refer to constructions of culture “typical” of the United States only or of North America in general; at times “American” is used as a synonym for “Western,” to describe everything that is perceived as different from, say, Central European culture and social system. In her autobiography, Hoffman's use of “America” and “American” may be confusing at times, as the two terms are sometimes given geographical and historical specificity but are often used as very general and abstract constructs.

13. Hoffman's analysis of the role of language in the construction of her self and her experience is clearly informed by the Bakhtinian/Foucouldian understanding of discourse. It is quite surprising that in her otherwise very self-conscious narrative Hoffman seems to persistently avoid explicit references to the role of class, gender, or race in designating her own speaking position.

14. This dialogue is of course also a dialogue between Eva's (Polish) childhood memories and beliefs and her adult (English) set of values and convictions, a point which I cannot pursue here.

15. Lost in Translation explores both existentialist and poststructuralist conceptualization of alienation. The teenage Eva is a kind of Sartreian existentialist; the adult Hoffman appears to be a Foucauldian. Most often, the author of Lost in Translation inhabits the site between the two positions. Hoffman thus problematizes the poststructuralist understanding of the experience of alienation as stemming “from the creation of new identities in new intersubjective contexts, not from some existential split between the social and the true self” (McGowan 245) but by introducing the category of memory of a “true self.”

16. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction. Toril Moi gives a very lucid presentation of Bourdieu's main concepts and analyzes their usefulness to feminists in her “Appropriating Bourdieu.”

17. To regard Hoffman's autobiography as belonging to “the genre of the American success story,” as William Proefriedt does (“The Education of Eva Hoffman” 124), means to focus on traditional markers of the author's social climb. But such an interpretation misses the main point of the book, it seems to me. Hoffman proposes other perspectives and other criteria for constructing the emigrant experience; she problematizes the whole genre of emigrant autobiography.

18. I do not intend to enter the quagmire of theoretical discussion on self and identity, but it may be useful to state that “selfhood” denotes here the liberal and humanist concept of identity, whereas “subjectivity” is conceived of as an identity which is linguistically and discursively constructed. Cf., for instance, Belsey, Critical Practice, 57-59.

19. Throughout her book, Hoffman analyzes and deconstructs whatever observations she makes. Proefriedt puts it well indeed when he writes: “In the task of assigning meaning or recognizing the impossibility of finding meaning, she is there first, sucking dry the import of the events of her life” (“The Education of Eva Hoffman” 124).

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