The shtetl was a unique micro-society with its own customs, beliefs and rituals, its own social distinctions, organisation and civic structures. It was also a long and fascinating experiment in multiculturalism, cut short by the Holocaust. Before World War II, Bransk, in eastern Poland, was a shtetl whose population was equally divided between Poles and Jews. Today there are no Jews left in Bransk. In SHTETL, Eva Hoffman explores the culture and institutions of Polish Jews, and by probing the deep ambivalence that coloured relations between Poles and Jews on the eve of World War II, SHTETL throws new light on motives which influenced Christian villagers' descisions to rescue or betray their Jewish neighbours when the Nazis invaded. Hoffman brings a penetrating intelligence and compassionate eye to a history that is fraught with intensely private emotions and profound implications for humanity.

Shtetl : The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World

History

HOFFMAN, Eva

World

Vintage

“A marvelously thoughtful book . . . It is not just about emigrants and refugees. It is about us all.” –The New York Times When her parents brought her from the war-ravaged, faded elegance of her native Cracow in 1959 to settle in well-manicured, suburban Vancouver, Eva Hoffman was thirteen years old. Entering into adolescence, she endured the painful pull of nostalgia and struggled to express herself in a strange unyielding new language. Her spiritual and intellectual odyssey continued in college and led her ultimately to New York’s literary world yet still she felt caught between two languages, two cultures. But her perspective also made her a keen observer of an America in the flux of change. A classically American chronicle of upward mobility and assimilation. Lost in Translation is also an incisive meditation on coming to terms with one’s own uniqueness, on learning how deeply culture affects the mind and body, and finally, on what it means to accomplish a translation of one’s self. “Hoffman raises one provocative question after another about the relationship between language and culture . . . and about the emotional cost of re-creating oneself.” –Newsday

Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Penguin Publishing Group

In this arresting, intimate narrative journey, award-winning Eva Hoffman returns to her Polish homeland and five other countries—Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the two nations of the former Czechoslovakia—historically transformed by the demise of Communism. The result is the penetrating personal odyssey across the “other Europe” and a vivid portrayal of a landscape in the midst of change. Hoffman combines the wise perspective of an outsider and the passionate concern of a native daughter to illuminate the forces informing the region’s complex politics as she captures the texture of everyday life in a world in flux. “Indispensable for anyone who wants to seriously come to grips with the experience of Eastern Europe.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer “Complex and full of the unexpected . . . Hoffman earns our trust as an observer.”—Tina Rosenberg, New York Newsday “Written with incredible literary talent and intellectual soundness . . . An indispensable clue for anyone who is keen to understand how the new Europe is emerging from the debris of the Cold War period.”—Ryszard Kapuscinski

Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe

Europe

Penguin??Books

Novelist, cultural commentator, memoirist, and historian Eva Hoffman examines our ever-changing perception of time in this inspired addition to the BIG IDEAS/small books series 
Time has always been the great given, the element that establishes the governing facts of human fate that cannot be circumvented, deconstructed, or wished away. But these days we are tampering with time in ways that affect how we live, the textures of our experience, and our very sense of what it is to be human. What is the nature of time in our time? Why is it that even as we live longer than ever before, we feel that we have ever less of this basic good? What effects do the hyperfast technologies--computers, video games, instant communications--have on our inner lives and even our bodies? And as we examine biology and mind on evermore microscopic levels, what are we learning about the process and parameters of human time? Hoffman regards our relationship to time--from jet lag to aging, sleep to cryogenic freezing--in this broad, eye-opening meditation on life's essential medium and its contemporary challenges.

Time: Big Ideas, Small Books

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Picador

Iris Surrey has a secret. Iris Surrey is a secret. An only child, Iris lives with her mother in a rambling house in a small midwestern town. Her mother is everything: provider, confidante, friend. But at seventeen, Iris begins to question their nearly symbiotic relationship—and the noticeable lack of others in their sheltered world. Where is Iris’s father? Where are her grandparents? What is her mother keeping from her? When she stumbles upon the explosive truth, Iris begins a monumental journey of self-discovery—one that will throw everything she has ever known into turmoil.

The Secret

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Random House Publishing Group

Based in part on a PBS documentary, a chronicle of the small-town life of East European Jewry from the 1500s to the Holocaust focuses on the ghetto of Bransk, in eastern Poland, whose Jewish members died in the camps.

Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews

Asia

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

An unforgettable evocation of the lost world of Polish Jewry, Shtetl is a "beautifully written" (Village Voice) mining of the deep rifts in Polish-Jewish relations in the small town of Bransk. With understanding and sensitivity, Shtetl limns the culture that influenced Christian villagers' decisions to conceal or betray Jewish neighbors when the Nazis invaded. A New York Times Notable Book.

Mariner Books

E.P.Dutton

Shtetl: The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World

Secker Warburg

"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.

The secret: A fable for our time

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HOFFMAN, Eva. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by HOFFMAN, Eva

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HOFFMAN, Eva. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Shtetl : The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World

Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe

Time: Big Ideas, Small Books

The Secret

Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews

Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews

Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

Shtetl: The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World

The secret: A fable for our time