Disintegration of Jewish Polish Identity and Re-Invention of a Postmodern Hybridized Self in Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language

Abstract

Despite the calls for a comparative analysis of multicultural/ethnic American life writing, voiced, for example, by Werner Sollors in Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986) or James Robert Payne Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives (1992 ), relatively few studies have been devoted to contemporary Central or Eastern European immigrant autobiographies. One of the early discussions of several “European ethnics” (of Vladimir Nabokov, Alfred Kazin and Eva Hoffman) was featured in Between Cultures: Contemporary American Bicultural Autobiography (1994) and authored by a Polish Americanist, Jerzy Durczak (Danuta Zadworna Fjellestad “European ethnics”). Although many Central or Eastern European immigrant autobiographers are university educated (some of them are even Nobel Prize winners such as Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky) and express their “passing into a new language” in quite complex narratives, their autobiographies have been analyzed primarily in comparison to other ethnic American life narratives of visible minorities such as those written by Maxine Hong Kingston or Richard Rodriguez (e.g. Petra Fachinger’s “Lost in Nostalgia: The Autobiographies of Eva Hoffman and Richard Rodriguez” or Ada Savin’s “Transnational Memoirs in Dialogue: Eva Hoffman and Richard Rodriguez” Gunthorun Gudmendsdottir -Eva Hoffman, Michael Ondantje, Kyoko Mori in Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing 2003 etc.).