In Search of Home

I am lying in bed, watching the slowly moving shadows on the ceiling made by the gently blowing curtains, and the lights of an occasional car moving by. I’m trying hard not to fall asleep. Being awake is so sweet that I want to delay the loss of consciousness . . . It is Cracow, 1949. I’m four years old, and I don’t know that this happiness is taking place in a country recently destroyed by war, a place where my father has to hustle to get us a bit more than our meagre ration of meat and sugar. I only know that I’m in my room, which to me is an everywhere . . . Occasionally, a few blocks away, I hear the hum of the tramway, and I’m filled by a sense of utter contentment . . . I repeat to myself that I’m in Cracow, Cracow, which to me is both home and the universe . . .

Eva Hoffman was born in 1945, the child of secular Jewish parents who had survived the Holocaust by hiding in a bunker deep in the Ukrainian forest. Clever and musical, she grew up in postwar Communist Poland: the era of Stalin; of collectivization; of Radio Free Europe listened to behind locked doors. She lived in ‘a lumpen apartment . . . squeezed into three rudimentary rooms’ with her parents, her little sister Alinka and the maid, surrounded by squabbles, dark political rumblings, memories of wartime suffering and the daily struggle for existence. ‘And yet, when it came time to leave, I felt I was being pushed out of the happy, safe enclosures of Eden.’ In 1957, the ban on emigration from Poland was lifted for Jews. Two years later the family set sail, not for Israel, where many of their friends chose to go, including the family of Eva’s childhood sweetheart Marek, but for Vancouver. From here an old friend of her father’s wrote to say he would sponsor them as immigrants to ‘the land of opportunity, the place where you can grow rich and be happy. For my father, this is an irresistibly alluring vision – to become a man of means in the American way, a man of substance.’ For his daughter, the move represented a profound dislocation of the spirit.

It is April 1959, I’m standing at the railing of the Batory’s upper deck, and I feel that my life is ending . . . I am thirteen years old, and we are emigrating. It’s a notion of such crushing, definitive finality that to me it might as well mean the end of the world.

Lost in Translation (1989) could not be more specific to time and place – lost and longed-for postwar Cracow, ‘a city of shimmering light and shadow’, of ‘narrow byways . . . echoing courtyards . . . medieval church spires, and low, Baroque arcades’, whose very streets were impregnated with Hoffman’s sense of her developing self; and suburban ’60s Vancouver, with its improbably smooth and velvety lawns, enormous picture windows, ‘disingenuous’ furniture, all of it whitish with gold trimmings. But the power of this memoir lies not only in its charged memories and evocations, but in its universality, as it asks the ceaseless human questions: Who am I? What has made me? Where do I belong? For a long time, uprooted and transplanted, the young Eva Hoffman felt she belonged only to the past. ‘As I walk the streets of Vancouver I am pregnant with images of Poland, pregnant and sick.’ There is so much that is strange here: the rituals of ‘dating’ to someone who has always enjoyed the easy camaraderie of boys and girls, and for whom Marek had long been both best friend and first, passionate love; the endless TV advertisements; the conspicuous consumption from dining-tables groaning with cakes; stupefying choices of ten varieties of soap and toothpaste. But above all this, and far more serious, is her sense of self slipping away as she struggles not just to learn but to inhabit a new language.

‘River’ in Polish was a vital sound, energized with the essence of river-hood, of my rivers, of my being immersed in rivers. ‘River’ in English is cold – a word without an aura . . . I don’t see what I’ve seen, don’t comprehend what’s in front of me. I’m not filled with language any more . . . [and so] I don’t really exist.

While she suffers, and conceals her distress with a mask of indifference, her parents are endeavouring to make a new life, buying and selling second-hand furniture. And gradually she and – especially – her sister, who has fewer memories of the precious past, begin to grow up, and away. ‘In Poland, I would have known how to bring you up, I would have known what to do,’ her mother says wistfully, when Alinka starts staying out late. ‘Truth to tell,’ writes Hoffman, ‘I don’t want the fabric of loyalty and affection, and even obligation, to unravel either. I don’t want my parents to lose us, I don’t want to betray our common life . . . I don’t want us to turn into perpetually cheerful suburbanites, with hygienic smiles and equally hygienic feelings. I want to keep our sadness, the great sadness from which my parents have come.’ It is music, which is of course beyond language, that provides the great unifying link with the past. Eva has an elderly Russian piano tutor; she gives concerts, in private houses and in city halls; she is acclaimed. Might she make music her profession? After studying literature at Rice University, Texas, Eva gives herself a year at Yale Music School, and then goes to Harvard. Here she re-immerses herself in poetry and prose, and takes her doctorate. By the mid-’70s she is able to say:

English now flows in my bloodstream . . . Words are no longer spiky bits of hard matter, which refer only to themselves. They become, more and more, a transparent medium in which I live and which lives in me . . . English is the language in which I’ve become an adult . . . seen my favourite movies and read my favourite novels, and sung along with Janis Joplin records. [Now] I don’t know Polish words for ‘microchips’ or ‘pathetic fallacy’ . . . I no longer triangulate to Polish as to an authentic criterion, no longer refer back to it as a point of origin . . .

Nonetheless, successfully living the life of a metropolitan intellectual in New York, she enters psychoanalysis, and in English seeks to say what has long been hidden about all these experiences: ‘In English, I wind myself back to my old, Polish melancholy. When I meet it, I re-enter myself, fold myself again in my old skin.’ That ‘old, Polish melancholy . . .’ In 1976, Eva and Marek, her childhood love, meet again. She is married now, and so is he, with children in Israel. He is in New York on business. In their conversation they are once again half siblings, half lovers. He recites Polish poetry to her, and says, ‘Your skin, your smile; it’s home. Home.’ He goes back to Israel; for a while they write. And then, on a drizzly day in Vancouver, on one of her visits home, her parents tell her he is dead. He has taken his own life, and there is no known cause. ‘I leave the park bench where I’m sitting with my parents, and I want, urgently, to talk to Marek. I want him to tell me what happened; I want him to tell me why he couldn’t go on.’ The ‘old Polish melancholy’ of which Hoffman writes so powerfully: I know it well. I know it through my Polish in-laws, who after the Warsaw Rising of 1944 were also uprooted, arriving in Britain as young ex-combatants. I know this great sadness and longing through my father-in-law, who in his eighties sits in his chair with a map of wartime Warsaw always at his side; through my mother-in-law, whose doctor father was killed in the war and who never ceases to talk of him; through my sister-in-law, who as a little girl used to pray that this unknown, mythical, longed-for grandfather would come back to life, walk through the door, and make her mother happy again.

Sometimes [writes Hoffman] I think of [Marek] . . . and others like us I know, as part of the same story – the story of children who came from the war and who couldn’t make sufficient sense of the several worlds they grew up in . . . I think, sometimes, that we were children too overshadowed by our parents’ stories, and without enough sympathy for ourselves, for the serious dilemmas of our own lives.

Eventually, I took this theme as the subject of my first novel, spanning 1939 to 1981, the year of a bitter winter in which, under General Jaruzelski, Poland was put under martial law. By then, Eva Hoffman was living the literary life of New York, having discovered that her adventures were to be in reading and writing. Among her friends were the Polish émigrés from a country in the death-throes of Communism. Soon a new wave of young people would come to the West in search of the dream which had taken her family from the beloved childhood home she evokes so unforgettably. And now: ‘Poland is only a long plane ride from the East Coast. That distended, uncrossable, otherworldly distance I had created had been the immeasurable distance of loss and longing, a distance of the imagination.’ Lost in Translation is one of those books which begin to redefine a genre. The memoir and life-writing courses which now proliferate in universities up and down the country barely existed when it came out, but it surely stands behind many of them as a new kind of autobiography: both lyrical and analytical, describing two very different worlds. The clear young voice with which it opens, inflected with such sadness, is completely haunting, and the themes of exile and identity with which Hoffman struggles well into adulthood are the great themes of the twentieth century. It’s a modern classic.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 55 © Sue Gee 2017