This article was downloaded by: [Florida Atlantic University]

On: 10 November 2014, At: 09:11

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered
Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41
Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Auto/Biography
Studies
Publication details, including
instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/
raut20

The Family in Exile,

Between Languages:
Eva Hoffman's Lost
in Translation; Lisa
Appignanesi's Losing
the Dead, Anca
Vlasopolos's No
Return Address
a
Mary Besemeres
a
Curtin University of
Technology—Western Australia
Published online: 28 Mar 2014.

To cite this article: Mary Besemeres (2004) The Family in Exile,

Between Languages: Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation; Lisa
Appignanesi's Losing the Dead, Anca Vlasopolos's No Return Address,
Auto/Biography Studies, 19:1-2, 239-248

To link to this article: http://

dx.doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2004.10815331

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy

of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the
publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
 our agents, and our licensors make no representations or
warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,
or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and
views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed
by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not
be relied upon and should be independently verified with
primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be
liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands,
costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection
with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private

Downloaded by [Florida Atlantic University] at 09:11 10 November 2014

study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction,

redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply,
or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
 The Family in Exile, Between
Languages: Eva Hoffman's
Lost in Translation, Lisa
Appignanesi's Losing the
Dead, Anca Vlasopolos's
Downloaded by [Florida Atlantic University] at 09:11 10 November 2014

No Return Address
By Mary Besemeres

T HIS PAPER EXPLORES Polish-born Jewish authors Eva Hoffman's and

Lisa Appignanesi's memoirs of migrating to Canada as children
from the aftermath of war in Central Europe. Lost in Translation (1989)
and Losing the Dead (1999) resonate with each other in a number of
ways, from the authors' parallel journeys between Poland and 1950s
Canada to the invocation of loss in both titles. Hoffman's book imag-
ines her whole life as lost in translation from Polish to English;
Appignanesi reflects on ways in which she may have to "lose" her par-
ents' extinguished generation anew to remember them fully. The theme
of loss-at once cultural, personal, linguistic, and historical-is cen-
tral to both these immigrant autobiographies.
Equally significant is each writer's relationship to her family. The
cover of Lost in Translation shows Hoffman as a child with her arm
protectively around her sister Alina, and the cover of Losing the Dead
depicts a young Appignanesi with older brother Stanley leaning on her
shoulder. I compare how Hoffman and Appignanesi portray differences
between their parents', their siblings', and their own responses to the
upheaval and confusion of migrating from war-scarred Europe to un-
known Canada. I highlight how language is a form of "farewell" for
these families, in the words of Canadian novelist Anne Michaels (89),
since by speaking Polish or Yiddish in the strange present to which
they're struggling to adapt, they are constantly reminded of the cultur-
ally distant past. For Hoffman and Appignanesi alike, the change of
language and culture has profoundly affected their sense of who they
and their family members now are.
 240 alb: Auto/Biography Studies
Appignanesi's family, the Borensztejns, migrated to Canada in 1951
from France (two years after leaving Poland), settling in Francophone
Montreal when Lisa was five. Hoffman's family, the Wydras, arrived
in English-speaking Vancouver in 1959 when Eva was thirteen. There
are significant differences, then, both in the authors' destinations as
migrants and in what they can remember of Poland. Appignanesi has
dim, tantalizing memories: smells of bread and wild berries, re-awak-
ened on her first return trip to Warsaw as an adult, and a terrible im-
age of a footless, probably frostbitten, man. Hoffman's whole early
Downloaded by [Florida Atlantic University] at 09:11 10 November 2014

life was lived in the mediaeval city of Krakow, her education, first love,
friendships, and sense of beauty nourished by that first landscape and
language. Hence her deeper sense of loss of self in translation to the
new, Canadian, reality. What both share, most indelibly, is the experi-
ence of being born to parents whose entire families had perished in
the war; neither Eva nor Lisa had any memory of relatives beyond their
own nuclear family.
Before saying more about Lost in Translation and Losing the Dead,
I want to introduce another recent immigrant memoir that has clear
points of comparison with these texts and which helps illuminate some
of the issues I'll be discussing. This is No Return Address: A Memoir
of Displacement (2000), by the Romanian-born American poet Anca
Vlasopolos. No Return Address marvelously evokes the experience of
growing up in postwar Romania with remarkable parents-one an
Auschwitz survivor, the other a frequently interned dissident-and the
texture of Bucharest city life for a half-Greek, half-Jewish child, as well
as exile in Paris, Brussels, and Detroit. The narrative turns on the bond
between the author and her mother Mimi, a woman of unusual warmth
and integrity, which remained strong through their multiple displace-
ments. Mimi Vlasopolos chose permanent, "voluntary exile" after her
husband's early death, which meant renouncing Romanian citizenship
and being banned from any legal work during the four years before her
application to leave was granted. She and Anca lived in France, Bel-
gium, and Germany before emigrating to the United States in 1962 when
the author was fourteen.
Vlasopolos gives intriguing glimpses of her cross-cultural and
translingual experiences. She remembers hearing herself inwardly re-
ject American things she doesn't like but "curiously" always in her
mother's voice (159). Her mother sacrificed her native Romanian in
their home life, bringing Anca up exclusively in English while in
America. Romanian was the language in which Mimi could express
herself most richly, as opposed to her more utilitarian English, so she
accepted a handicap for Anca's sake, as her daughter realized later.
"To save me, she severed herself from her chief intimacy, her greatest
 The Family in Exile 241
love-a language whose rhetoric, nuances, brutalities and subterfuges
she inhabited fully" (134). At the same time, we're told, she "resisted
adaptation" fiercely. Vlasopolos remembers assimilating fairly eagerly
as a teenager in the 1960s and recalls, movingly, the pain this caused
her mother. "She watched me be seduced, corrupted, alienated by this
... culture and tried to pull me back, only there was no shore onto
which she could have rescued me, only herself, and she too was afloat"
(196).
Yet overall, Vlasopolos gives less weight than might be expected to
Downloaded by [Florida Atlantic University] at 09:11 10 November 2014

this cultural aspect of the "displacement" otherwise so evocatively

portrayed in her memoir. The chapters dealing with her life after mi-
gration refer to it only glancingly, while dwelling on other things, for
example the small-town mentality of Detroit village neighbors. The
conflicts she recalls having with Mimi in America are mostly rendered
as the clashes between a protective mother and independent daughter,
which might feature in any American family. Vlasopolos writes of the
discomfort, even guilty shame, that she felt at her mother's insistent
stories of her experiences at Auschwitz in company. She conveys her
sense of being overwhelmed by this burden of experience in the con-
text of casual conversations with friends, none of whom were survi-
vors themselves. However, she also emphasizes the extent to which
she and her mother shared a common political outlook, expressed in
their responses to issues such as racism and feminism. Less attention
is given to their differences. Mimi vehemently rejects "the American
concept of friendship" as superficial compared with friendships she
had known in Romania. Vlasopolos touches briefly on her own impa-
tience with this attitude of her mother's, but does not explore its im-
plications. There is a degree of elision, especially towards the end, of
the cultural gap that divides Anca from Mimi, who continues to iden-
tify as a Romanian immigrant, where her daughter has, in some senses
at least, ceased to be an immigrant. The Americanness of Vlasopolos's
own cultural perspective is underplayed in her narrative.
In Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman explores the similar divergence
between her own and her mother's immigrant paths in more depth.
The following passage deals particularly eloquently with this inter-
generational difference:
My mother says I'm becoming "English." This hurts me,
because I know she means I'm becoming cold. I'm no colder
than I've ever been, but I'm learning to be less demonstrative .
. . . I learn my new reserve from people who take a step back
when we talk, because l'm standing too close, crowding them.
Cultural distances are different, I later learn in a sociology
class, but I know it already. I learn restraint from Penny, who
 242 alb: Auto/Biography Studies
looks offended when I shake her by the arm in excitement, as
if my gesture had been one of aggression instead of friendliness.
I learn it from a girl who pulls away when I hook my arm
through hers as we walk down the street-this movement of
friendly intimacy is an embarrassment to her.

Perhaps my mother is right, after all; perhaps I'm becoming

colder. After a while, emotion follows action, response grows
warmer or cooler according to gesture. I'm more careful about
Downloaded by [Florida Atlantic University] at 09:11 10 November 2014

what I say, how loud I laugh, whether I give vent to grief. The
storminess of emotion prevailing in our family is in excess of
the normal here, and the unwritten rules for the normal have
their osmotic effect. (146-4 7)
Hoffman's memoir suggests that the self is shaped intimately and at
the deepest level by language and culture, including shared, "subcuta-
neous beliefs" about how feelings may be expressed (210). Cultural
differences in expression may in turn affect the very nature of those
feelings. Hoffman compares the disconcerting change she discerns in
herself as a girl of fourteen in Vancouver with the emotional life of her
mother, who as an older immigrant is more resistant to the new cul-
ture. For her mother, feelings are the most authentic part of her, so
that when Eva "full of ... newly acquired American wisdom" recom-
mends "controlling" the painful ones, this strikes her as simply impos-
sible. She experiences her emotions as if they were "forces of nature"
(269). By contrast, her daughter has learned to gain some "control," a
quality she is more in need of in her adult life, daily entering a com-
petitive public arena where she must appear strong. But Hoffman is
critical of what she sees as her peers' creed of control, which deems
emotions like the Polish "tesknota"-the "nostalgic longing" for her
childhood that animates much of her memoir-immature or self-in-
dulgent.
Like Vlasopolos's mother, Hoffman felt keenly the non-equivalence
between the concept of friendship she brought with her from Europe
and the English word "friend." She writes of her "Vancouverite" class-
mate Penny:
We like each other quite well, though I'm not sure that what
is between us is "friendship"-a word which in Polish has
connotations of strong loyalty and attachment bordering on
love. At first, I try to preserve the distinction between "friends"
and "acquaintances" scrupulously, because it feels like a small
lie to say "friend" when you don't really mean it, but after a
while, I give it up. "Friend," in English, is such a good-natured,
 The Family in Exile 243
easygoing sort of term, covering all kinds of territory, and
"acquaintance" is something an uptight, snobbish kind of
person might say. My parents, however, never divest themselves
of the habit, and with an admirable resistance to linguistic
looseness, continue to call most people they know "my
acquaintance"-or, as they put it early on, "mine acquaintance."
As the word is used here, Penny is certainly a friend ... (148)
The English word "friend" exists for Eva against the background of
two Polish words: przyjaciolka and znajoma, which she translates as
Downloaded by [Florida Atlantic University] at 09:11 10 November 2014

"acquaintance." Znajoma is colloquial, whereas acquaintance, as Eva

quickly recognizes, is not. In continuing to speak of their "acquaintan-
ces" Eva's parents are translating literally from Polish. What they re-
sist only counts as verbal "looseness" in their own language. But in
this way they remain faithful to a social reality that has hitherto de-
fined them, whereas their daughter accepts what "feels like a small
lie." Her sensitivity to the new usage weakens her resistance to it.
Hoffman's gently ironic phrase, "an admirable resistance to linguistic
looseness," identifies her parents' lack of awareness of register and other
encoded expectations in English. It combines a certain wistful envy
for the limits that protected them from change with regret at how it
barred them from fuller participation in Canadian culture. The detail
that they continued to call "most" people they knew "acquaintances"
underscores the extent of their isolation.
Losing the Dead does not address the effects of cultural and linguis-
tic change on the author's family as centrally as Lost in Translation.
Lisa Appignanesi, a psychoanalytic critic, tends to rely on Freudian
models, which perhaps preclude a greater focus on the issue of lan-
guage, in analyzing her family's relationships-referring for example
to her brother's "oedipal resentment" of her as a baby (192). But she
does convey the texture of the Borensztejns' translingual exile, recall-
ing how the voices of their migrant circle "came in a babble of tongues."
She writes: ''A sentence would begin in Polish, merge into Yiddish,
migrate into French or stumbling English and go back again with no
pause for breath" (18). Reflecting on the irony of her belated interest
in her parents' lives, she observes: "I am all too aware that my parents'
past is a narrative in a foreign and forgotten language" (81). She evokes
the chasm between their nightmare memories of war and her own
"mundane, largely Canadian and largely happy childhood" (5). As a
teenager she longed to escape these war-time stories, none of which
"made any sense in our placid Montreal suburb where one house was
so much like its neighbor that my father kept mistaking the street we
lived on" (60). This contrast between an intensely dramatic remem-
bered Europe and a banal-seeming but safe "new world" is akin to
 244 alb: Auto/Biography Studies
Vlasopolos's awareness of her mother's tales of the camp as unreal to
her American friends.
One significant facet of the Borensztejns' cultural and linguistic exile
emerges when their daughter affirms that they did not think of their
experience in terms of the concept "the Holocaust": "No one ever used
the word 'survivor,' with its grim underpinnings of guilt and victimhood .
. . . Survivor was a word then reserved for those who had come out of
natural disasters. This was a man-made one, a piece of history which
had not yet acquired the political freight of the word Holocaust. Nor
Downloaded by [Florida Atlantic University] at 09:11 10 November 2014

had the current discourse of trauma and its effects yet arrived on the
scene .... My parents and their friends only talked of their great good
luck" (21). Although not explicitly referring to Polish or Yiddish, nei-
ther of which she speaks, Appignanesi suggests a cultural difference
between these refugees' ways of talking about the war and their children's
North American English, marked increasingly by psychological read-
ings of suffering as "trauma." At the same time, she brings out subtly
what nonetheless appear to be traumatic symptoms in their behavior,
for example her father's paralyzing fear of borders and uniforms.
She also delineates the ironies of her family's many name changes,
from Borensztejn via war-time "Aryan" aliases to the more Anglophone
Borenstein and, in provincial Quebec, Borens ("stein" dropped for fear
of anti-Semitism). Lisa's brother, born Sholem on the eve of war, was,
in turn, Staszek or Stanislaw in Poland, Simon in France, and Stanley
in Canada. Of her own wavering bilingual trajectory she remarks: "the
French-speaking six-year old I was grew into an English speaker. French
was battered out of me by English-speaking teachers of Quebecois who
didn't like my Parisian and must have liked my piping corrections of
their French even less .... Until my teens I dutifully failed French,
though we carried on speaking another version of it at home" (27).
Her relationship with her native language, Polish, is more ambiguous.
Able to follow but no longer to speak it, on a visit to Poland as an
adult she feels as though she were eavesdropping-reluctant to declare
her knowledge, and with it her identity: "the continual sounds of the
language, have thrust me back to a time when I was learning to speak.
... I thought the trip to Poland would help activate the language in-
side me. It didn't .... In Polish, I am as mute as an infant" (230).
In Hoffman's memoir, her mother and father are "lost" in Cana-
dian "translation" very differently from their teenage daughters. After
the initial culture-and-language shock, "Eva" and "Elaine"-as Ewa and
Alina are renamed by teachers (105)-take to school, while suffering
in more muted ways. 1 Their father teaches himself English laboriously
by reading Faulkner; their mother picks up a more idiomatic and flu-
ent version from conversation (127). Hoffman depicts poignantly her
 The Family in Exile 245
once-wily father's failure to "learn Zen on Wall St" (128), as against
his heroic strength in saving his wife and himself from the Nazis and
his skill in outwitting the system in communist Poland. His "abrupt,"
"hustling" style, authoritative in Krakow, is misadapted to Canadian
politeness. As his scrap business fails to prosper, he sinks into despair,
responding to all suggestions, "For what is the purpose?" (128). Her
mother maintains more optimism, finding "some enjoyment" in the
new situation, "soothing" the clients her husband alienates.
In Appignanesi's narrative, her mother relentlessly constructs her-
Downloaded by [Florida Atlantic University] at 09:11 10 November 2014

self in the eyes of her children as fearless during the war, their father
as "scared," a construction that brings with it a bitter "taint of shame"
for him (53). They escaped death in occupied Poland by assuming
Gentile identities, Hena effortlessly on her own account, Aron in con-
stant danger. (Hena was glamorously blonde, with a resemblance to
Marlene Dietrich.) Understandably sympathetic to her father, Appignanesi
uses somewhat reductive language to describe her mother, who at the
time of writing, she makes clear, remains a demanding presence ("the
Lady Macbeth of Highgate"-mother and daughter now both live in
London). After a visit with her children, she notes: "I have to remind
them and myself that this is the reduced voice of old age speaking, not
their grandmother" (226). Her writing shows a deeper engagement with
the figure of her taciturn father, no longer living. A reviewer's com-
ment that the book is "all the more poignant for its lack of piety" 2 is
less apt for the portrait of Hena than that of Aron, which suggests
unspoken shadows. One senses the subterranean impact of the degra-
dations he endured; captured and taken to the Gestapo headquarters
in Warsaw he was forced to explain his circumcision, surviving mi-
raculously on the whim of the examining doctor. In Canada he informs
his disbelieving grandchildren what sort of feces are edible in time of
starvation. Appignanesi's careful remembering of him is that "losing
of the dead," meant to release and honor, which she speaks of aiming
for in her narrative.
Lost in Translation and Losing the Dead show how differently chil-
dren within the same family may respond to the upheaval of migra-
tion. The glimpses we get of the authors' brother and sister suggest the
significant role played by relative experience: whether the child is the
younger or elder sibling, has been to school in the country of birth or
first attends after migrating, is old enough to have memories of people
and places left behind. Appignanesi and Hoffman each venture conjec-
tures about why and how their brother or sister came to translate them-
selves as differently from them as they did.
Appignanesi connects the belligerent figure her brother cut in his
teens to the deep disruptions of his earlier childhood. Six years older
 246 alb: Auto/Biography Studies
than she, twelve on arrival in Canada, he lived through his parents'
bewildering series of war-time disguise, giving the game away only once,
at age nine, to a Russian secret service man. The undercurrent of fear
in these years did not leave him unscathed. At boarding school in Paris,
he battled with teachers and a psychologist who considered him re-
tarded. Appignanesi comments: "There seems to have been little in-
sight into a boy's experience of displacement and war, let alone the
additional turmoil caused by separation from his parents in a strange
land and language" (12). Her own earliest sense of him was "of a com-
Downloaded by [Florida Atlantic University] at 09:11 10 November 2014

manding, indeed bullying presence. I would run into the bathroom to

get away from his booming orders and erratic blows"(25). In his rows
with their parents she attempted to act as "peacemaker," hating "the
noise and the anger and the sense of danger which always seemed to
accompany it" (26). The Montreal rabbi declared Stanley "untutorable;"
his Bar Mitzvah never took place. The author reads this early rejection
of Judaism as expressing an "ambivalence about Jewishness" that was
"one of the many legacies" of the family's war years. Later, the roles of
"problem child" and "good girl" were partially reversed when Stanley
moved to Israel, where, to his father's pride, he married a "Sabra" or
native-born Israeli, and Lisa began to rebel, throwing herself into a
Bohemian lifestyle, taking up German, and marrying the son of Italian
Catholic migrants.
On migrating to Canada, Ewa and Alina share the distress of their
displacement, as when their teacher renames them "Eva" and "Elaine":
"[we] hang our heads wordlessly under this careless baptism" (105).
Gradually, however, their immigrant selves diverge. At eleven, Alina
takes to wearing makeup and shaving her legs to her family's dismay:
"What is our Alinka turning into?"(143) Eva pleads with her not to
challenge their mother's authority, which to her seems fragile. Alina
resists her like a "forest animal in danger of being trapped" (146). As
Hoffman puts it in retrospect, "Altogether, [she] seems to be striving
for a normal American adolescence" (143).
Alina had only three years of schooling in Poland, against Ewa's six.
One might expect the older child to identify more closely with her
parents (although this is not borne out in Stanley Borenstein's relations
with Hena and Aron). Eva's own form of rebellion, ironically, comes
in her refusal to attend the synagogue in Vancouver, which her parents
go to more frequently than they did in Krakow, her reluctance partly a
matter of loyalty to the more minimal observance of her childhood.
Her mother does not insist, but says "wistfully," "In Poland I would
have known how to bring you up" (145). When Alina is sent to a He-
brew school, she "agitates for making [the] household kosher and de-
bates the merits of letting non-Jews into Vancouver's ... Jewish Com-
 The Family in Exile 247
munity Center." Eva's sense of their Jewish identity is almost diametri-
cally opposed: "Alinka's ... embrace of ethnic exclusivity rubs against
the equation I've somehow developed betweenJewishness and a kind
of secular humanism." She shouts: '"That's discrimination! It's sup-
posed to be a community center, don't forget!' 'But it's our commu-
nity center,' Alinka answers uncertainly" (144 ), looking hurt and con-
fused, so that Eva suddenly feels sorry for her and uncertain of her own
convictions. Hoffman captures here the interconnecting yet distinct
movements of their respective cultural translations.
Downloaded by [Florida Atlantic University] at 09:11 10 November 2014

A child's age at the time of migration clearly impinges on his or her

response to the host culture, sense of exile from the old, and relation-
ship to his or her parents as fellow migrants. But the texts discussed
here suggest that it need not determine in a uniform way any of these
aspects of "translated" selves. Eva Hoffman and Anca Vlasopolos emi-
grated to North America from Eastern Europe at similar ages-thir-
teen and fourteen respectively-and within a few years of each other,
in 1959 and 1962. Yet Lost in Translation explores the cross-cultural
and translingual dimensions of the author's experience in more depth
than does No Return Address, which emphasizes Vlasopolos's geo-
graphical sense of displacement rather than the extent of the cultural
change she sustained. This difference in perspective may be partly re-
lated to Eva's more exclusive investment in her first language before
her migration, against Anca's two years of European exile after leav-
ing Bucharest, and to Mimi's fluency in English and decision to forgo
Romanian in America, in contrast to Eva's parents' complete lack of
English on arrival in Canada. But the difference in "self-translation"
cannot fully be accounted for in such terms. The fact that Lisa Appignanesi
left Poland at three makes her representation of her Polish and Yid-
dish-speaking parents' exile in French and English in Canada the more
remarkable. The issue of their cultural displacement is not in the fore-
ground of Losing the Dead-her main focus is the ways they were
haunted by the Holocaust. But it is unmistakably there.
While immigrants of different ages and backgrounds share a funda-
mental dislocation, an individual's translation between languages and
cultures has something irreducibly personal and distinctive about it.
As historian Peter Read writes of refugees to Australia: "In the new
country, dead homelands remain moving shadows throughout the whole
of life ... for many exiles, the inner tensions are never resolved" (28,
36). It's for this reason that complex, searching works of life writing
like Hoffman's, Appignanesi's, and Vlasopolos's may teach us more
about the immigrant experience across generations than any other form
of cross-cultural enquiry.
Curtin University of Technology-Western Australia
 248 alb: Auto/Biography Studies
Notes
1. For example, Eva's loss of Polish as her "interior language." Cf.
Besemeres (40-41; 48-53).
2. Review of Losing the Dead by Eva Hoffman, cited on the back
cover of the Vintage edition.

Works Cited
Appignanesi, Lisa. Losing the Dead: A Family Memoir. 1999. London:
Downloaded by [Florida Atlantic University] at 09:11 10 November 2014

Vintage, 2000.
Besemeres, Mary. Translating One's Self: Language and Selfhood in
Cross-Cultural Autobiography. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002.
Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. 1989.
London: Minerva, 1991.
Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces. 1996. New York: Vintage, 1998.
Read, Peter. Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places.
Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Vlasopolos, Anca. No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement. New
York: Columbia UP, 2000.