Polish American writer and academic Eva Hoffman.

Eva Hoffman

Eva Hoffman was born in Poland in 1945 to parents who survived the Holocaust by hiding in a bunker in the Ukrainian forest. Brought to Vancouver at the age of thirteen, Hoffman moved to the U.S. six years later to study at Rice University, where she fell in love with twentieth-century American literature, the reading of which she claimed was “a way to help me understand the new world I found myself in.” Throughout the 1980s she served as an editor of various sections of the New York Times—among them “Week in Review” and “Arts and Leisure”—and published her memoir Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language in 1989. “Every immigrant,” Hoffman once said, “becomes a kind of amateur anthropologist.”

Issues Contributed