Explores various kinds and strata of secrets: intimate secrets and secrets of family past: the kinds of secrets that can be decoded from clues, and the kind that themselves seem to offer tantalizing clues to the fundamental mysteries of the human selfhood. This novel is about a mother-daughter bond and a young womans quest for individuation.

The Secret

Literature & Fiction

Eva Hoffman

Contemporary

Random House]

<p>In 1959 13-year-old Eva Hoffman left her home in Cracow, Poland for a new life in America. This personal memoir evokes with deep feeling the sense of uprootendess and exile created by this disruption, something which has been the experience of tens of thousands of people this century.</p>

Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Vintage Books USA

After Such Knowledge

This is an important and timely book on the legacy of the Holocaust from a world-renowned commentator on the subject. As the Holocaust recedes from us in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the generation after. How should we, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors, and the second generation's responsibilities to its received memories? Eva Hoffman probes these questions through personal reflections and through broader explorations of the historical, psychological and moral implications of the second-generation experience. She examines the subterranean processes through which private memories of suffering are transmitted, and the more wilful stratagems of collective memory. As she guides us through the poignant juncture at which living memory must be relinquished, she asks what insights can be carried from the past, and urges the need to transform potent family stories into a fully-informed understanding of a forbidding history. Author Bio: Eva Hoffman was born in Cracow, Poland, and emigrated to America at the age of thirteen. The recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, she currently lives in London. 'Hoffman draws upon disparate disciplines and forms of literature to probe the issues that haunt her generation' - Frances Spalding, "Independent". 'Hoffman asks many questions, bringing a voice of reason to the irrational, reaching out for reconciliation' - "Sunday Times". 'Eloquent testimony to the need not only to understand and absorb the past but also to recognise the danger - of focusing on the memory at the expense of the object of the memory' - "Jewish Chronicle".

After Such Knowledge: A Meditation on the Aftermath of the Holocaust

History

Isabel Merton is a renowned concert pianist whose playing is marked by rare intensity. At the height of her career, she feels increasingly torn between the expressive musical realm she inhabits, and the fragmented life she leads as an itinerant artist, with its frequent flights, anonymous hotels and arbitrary encounters. Then Isabel meets Anzor Islikhanov, a political exile from war-torn Chechnya driven by a powerful desire to help and avenge his people. As their paths cross in several cities, they are drawn to each other - until a menacing incident throws Isabel into crisis.

Illuminations

Of course, I've always had a secret. Have I always known it? I suppose I did, in a way - in the way that children know such things. That is, I knew and didn't know."" In this novel Eva Hoffman explores various kinds and strata of secrets- intimate secrets, and secrets of family past; the kinds of secrets that can be decoded from clues, and the kind that themselves seem to offer tantalizing clues to the fundamental mysteries of the human selfhood. This is a story about a peculiarly powerful mother-daughter bond and about a haunting, about a young woman's quest for individuation and the challenges posed by contemporary science to our deepest notions of individuality. Using the near future to reflect on the conditions of the present, Hoffman has written a tale that grapples with the oldest riddles of identity, consciousness and self-knowledge - a novel of ideas for our time, and an imaginative fable whose resonances are timeless.

Vintage Books

Shortly after the dramatic events of 1989, Eva Hoffman spent several months travelling through her native Poland and four other Eastern European countries which had just undergone an historic transformation. This is the personal narrative of that journey and a portrayal of a social landscape in the midst of change. While making her way from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Hoffman ranged from capital cities to wayside villages and sleepy provincial towns; she visited shipyards, museums, homes and coffee-houses of the intelligentsia; and she talked with a great variety of people, many of them struggling with the transition from an unwanted past to an uncertain future. Most of all, she uses her bi-cultural perspective to enter deeply into Eastern European minds and sensibilities and to convey what the larger social shifts mean to particular people: to former dissidents wielding political power, deposed apparatchiks turned successful entrepreneurs, artists and technocrats, literate ex-censors, Polish aristocrats, Hungarian gypsies and Bulgarian Turks.

Exit into History

William Heinemann, Ltd.

As the Holocaust recedes from us in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the generation after. How should we, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors, and the second generation's responsibilities to its received memories? In this meditation on the long aftermath of atrocity, Eva Hoffman probes these questions through personal reflections and through broader explorations of the historical, psychological and moral implications of the second-generation experience. She examines the subterranean processes through which private memories of suffering are transmitted, and the more wilful stratagems of collective memory. She traces the second-generation's trajectory from childhood intimations of horror, through its struggles between allegiance and autonomy, and its complex transactions with children of perpetrators. As she guides us through the poignant juncture at which living memory must be relinquished, she asks what insights can be carried from the past to the newly problematic present, and urges the need to transform potent family stories into a fully-informed understanding.

World

Secker Warburg

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

VINTAGE (RAND)

Exit Into History

Minerva

Introducing Children to...: Their Intelligences v.3 (Vol 3)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Learn to Learn

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Books by Eva Hoffman