EVA HOFFMAN'S DOUBLE EMIGRATION: CANADA AS THE SITE OF EXILE IN "LOST IN

TRANSLATION"
Author(s): SARAH PHILLIPS CASTEEL
Source: Biography, Vol. 24, No. 1, AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND CHANGING IDENTITIES (winter
2001), pp. 288-301
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
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 EVA HOFFMAN'S DOUBLE EMIGRATION:
CANADA AS THE SITE OF EXILE IN
LOST IN TRANSLATION

SARAH PHILLIPS CASTEEL

Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman's 1989 account of her family's difficult

emigration from Poland to Canada and her own subsequent immigration to
the United States, is described in the back cover blurb as "A classically Amer
ican chronicle of upward mobility and assimilation" (emphasis added).
Ignoring the fact that almost a third of Lost in Translation takes place in
Canada, critics have also tended to classify the book as American immigrant
autobiography. In the critical literature, the Canadian portions of the narra
tive are discussed as though they were continuous with the American por
tions, the term "American" applied indiscriminately to either side of the bor
der.1 Yet Hoffman herself draws a sharp distinction between the Canadian
and American periods of her life, as the book's tripartite structure makes
clear. The first section of the book, in which Hoffman lovingly reconstructs
her postwar childhood in Poland, is entitled "Paradise." The second section,
which records the 1959 immigration of Hoffman's Polish-Jewish family to
Vancouver, their struggle to establish themselves there, and the profoundly

disorienting impact of this displacement on the teenage Hoffman, is entitled

"Exile." In the third and final section, entitled "The New World," Hoffman
immigrates to the United States to attend Rice University, which is followed
by graduate studies at Harvard and a successful professional life in New York.
Thus we see that according to Hoffman's schema, Canada and America are
not at all continuous; instead, Canada is firmly excluded from the categories
of the New World—modernity, success, new beginnings—that will ulti
mately make the United States a place of possibility for her.
In my view, it is worth attending more closely to Hoffman's distinction
between Canada and the United States, not so much by way of attacking the

Biography 24.1 (Winter 2001) © Biographical Research Center

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 Casteel, Eva Hoffman's Double Emigration 289

insensitivity of American literary critics to the Canadian content of the book,

but rather for what Hoffman's treatment of Canada adds to our under
standing of this much discussed autobiography. Hoffman's treatment of
Canada will be examined here from two perspectives. First, her opaque and
troubling depiction of Vancouver will prove to be fundamentally bound up
with the problem of traumatic memory that haunts her both as an immi

grant and as a child of Holocaust survivors. Second, it will become apparent

that Hoffman's insistence on the Canada/U.S. division is tied to her search
for a narrative structure that can make sense of her past. Hoffman's often

perplexing representations of Vancouver register key tensions surrounding

the genre of immigrant autobiography and in particular the literature of
double emigrations.

CANADA AND TRAUMATIC MEMORY IN LOST IN TRANSLATION

Many have commented on the highly idealized quality of Hoffman's portrait

of her native Cracow, is filtered through the nostalgia of her child
which
hood memories, and which rests on a conception of childhood as a state of

plenitude. Little notice has been taken, however, of the peculiarities of Hoff
man's largely unsympathetic treatment of Vancouver. Hoffman describes
Canadian society as profoundly inhospitable; in her view, the rigidity and
conformism of 1960s Vancouver made it impossible for the Polish-Canadian
community to assimilate, condemning it to an empty mimicry of Canadian
social conventions. But perhaps more striking than Hoffman's attacks on the
unwelcoming and provincial character of Vancouver is her description of the
Canadian physical environment, which she consistently characterizes as a
blank, gray, and monolithic space, a "no place" and a "nowhere." From the

very first, the Canadian landscape possesses an eerie unreality. The St. Law
rence Seaway which greets Hoffman's arrival in Canada strikes her as "inef

fably and utterly different from the watery landscapes" to which she is accus
tomed {Lost 92).2 The vocabulary of absolute foreignness, of coldness and
isolation, which Hoffman establishes in the passage about the St. Lawrence,
continues to be employed in her description of the train ride from Montreal
to Vancouver and throughout her portrayal of Vancouver itself. It is as though
she has no other palette at her disposal.
While still in Poland, Hoffman's father had associated Canada with
but to her own ear Canada produced echoes
majestic wilderness and freedom,
of the Sahara: vast and vacant. Once arrived in Canada, Hoffman finds that
the urban landscape of Vancouver, with its manicured lawns and its sparse

ly populated, "relentlessly symmetrical" streets, has an "eerie quietness."

Vancouver houses lack depth and dimension. They are thin and insubstan
tial, containing flat, undifferentiated, hygienic surfaces. Even Vancouver's

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290 Biography 24.1 (Winter 2001)

celebratedphysical beauty finds no favor with her. She recoils from it, judg
ing the mountains imprisoning rather than magnificent:

It is the prevailing opinion of humankind that this is beautiful, breathtaking. But

my soul does not go out to these spectacular sights, which reject me, because I

reject them. I want my landscapes human sized and penetrable; these mountains
look like a picture postcard to me, something you look at rather than enter, and
on the many cloudy days they enclose Vancouver like gloomy walls. (Lost 134)

The intensity of Hoffman's attachment to the landscape of her Polish child

hood is thus matched by the depth of her hostility towards her new Canadi
an surroundings.
Hoffman's characterization of the Canadian landscape as harsh and
alienating conforms in many respects to a long-standing tradition of Cana
dian writing about nature. Northrop Frye could be describing Hoffman
when he writes in The Bush Garden: "I have long been impressed in Cana
dian poetry by a tone of deep terror in regard to nature. ... It is not a ter
ror of the dangers or discomforts or even the mysteries of nature, but a ter
ror of the soul at something that these things manifest" (225). Margaret
Atwood quotes this same passage from Frye to preface her discussion in Sur
vival of the tendency among Canadian writers to view nature as hostile and
indifferent. Both Frye and Atwood note that throughout Canadian litera
ture, the landscape appears unresponsive and lawless, rendering it inimical to
a Wordsworthian communion with nature, and isolating the individual who
attempts to engage in such a communion.
Hoffman's response, then, is not untypical of those who have come into
contact with the Canadian landscape. But why (at least in recollection) had
Canada held such associations for Hoffman before she had arrived, and why
had it held such different associations for her father? Furthermore, what
exactly is the "something" manifested in the Canadian that
landscape
induces in her "a terror of the soul," as Frye puts it? We not
might begin by
ing that Hoffman frequently qualifies her descriptions of the landscape with
an admission that her ability to see her is extremely limited: "I
surroundings
walk through those streets not
seeing anything clearly, as if a screen has fall
en before my eyes, a screen that obscures and blurs
everything in my field of
vision" {Lost 135). She that "Even on those days when the sun
acknowledges
comes out in full blaze and the air has the
special transparency of the north,
Vancouver is a dim world to my eyes, and I walk around it in the static of
visual confusion" {Lost 135). Yet she fails to reflect on what such admissions
might suggest about the nature of her portrait of Vancouver. One of the hall
marks of her autobiography is Hoffman's remarkable degree of self-aware
ness, her ability to interpret her own condition for us, yet rarely does she
apply this kind of rigorous self-analysis to the Canadian sections.3 While

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 Casteel, Eva Hoffman's Double Emigration 291

elsewhere in the autobiography we are conscious of a distinction between

Hoffman's mature writing self and her recollected self, in the Canadian sec
tions Hoffman seems
largely unable to distance herself from her teenaged
perceptions.4 And so we are faced with something of a conundrum: a high
ly articulate and self-reflexive autobiographer who becomes suddenly silent
and unpenetrating in the middle portion of her narrative.
In my view, Hoffman's strangely opaque treatment of Vancouver is fully
intelligible only when we read the Canadian landscape as serving a symbol
ic function as well as a representational one. In his penetrating book on land
scape, William H. New cautions us against reading images of landscape as
neutral descriptions of a physical reality; instead, we must always be con
scious that "land" and "nature" are tropes that carry particular sets of con
ventions (5-11). Representations of landscape embody attitudes and mind
sets as much as they do physical geographies, as Atwood suggests when she
notes that "landscapes in poems are often interior landscapes; they are maps
of a state of mind" (49). Indeed, Hoffman's fondness for speaking of a

"geography of emotions," an "internal geography," or an "internal land

scape" supports a symbolic reading. Such phrases point to a more subjective

spatial logic at work in the autobiography, one which recognizes psycholog
ical and emotional maps which exist alongside and often in conflict with
conventional geographies. For instance, when the family is faced with the
decision of whether to immigrate to Israel or to Canada, Hoffman notes that

according to her "internal geography," Israel is closer to Poland than is

Canada. Israel has some prior associations for her as the "real home" of the
Jews, while Canada is a word without meaning, nothing more than a blank
space in her mind.5
To an extent, Hoffman's landscape is always symbolic, but the prepon
derance of the symbolic mode in the Canadian section has to do, I would

suggest, with the fact that it is in this section that the problem of memory
becomes most acute. Each of the three sections of the book not only refers
to a different geographical space—Poland, Canada, the U.S.—but also cor
to a different commemorative mode. The Polish section, as I have
responds
noted, is suffused with nostalgia. The American section is very much taken
with the liberating possibilities of a kind of willed amnesia. The Canadian
section is where we become aware of the limits of both the nostalgic and
amnesiac modes.In the Canadian section, the traumatic memories that have
been or aside by these nostalgic and amnesiac tendencies
repressed pushed
become suddenly obtrusive and problematic.
Vancouver is the place where Hoffman experiences exile in its most raw
form, where she first suffers the humiliations and disorientations of immi
in her mind by the trauma of immi
grant life, and thus it is heavily tainted
Hoffman's portrayal of Vancouver is not so
gration. highly impressionistic

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292 Biography 24.1 (Winter 2001)

much objectivedescription as it is a projection of her own deeply troubled

psychological state, the emptiness and dejection she feels as she loses her lan
guage and her sense of rootedness. Hoffman encourages such a reading, par
ticularly in her account of a nightmare she has shortly after her arrival in
Vancouver. In her dream she is drowning, "cast adrift in incomprehensible

space," and she awakes screaming in terror {Lost 104). The dream heralds the
arrival of what she calls "the Big Fear"—the acute anxiety that accompanies
her displacement—and she soon recedes into a zombie-like state of "silent
indifference." As we have seen, Canada is filtered through Hoffman's eyes,
which are clouded over and dim. Thus for her the Canadian landscape—
whether it be the St. Lawrence or the Rocky Mountains—is banal, abstract,
and formless. The flatness and emptiness of which she accuses Vancouver
manifest her own sense that immigration has emptied her of the richness of
her internal life, so that she has become "impalpable, neutral, faceless" {Lost
147).
When Hoffman had first learned of her parents' decision to emigrate,
the prospect of moving to Canada had filled her, she writes, with a "horror
vacui." This association
of Canada with a terror of emptiness never leaves
her. In Vancouver, she is plagued by a profound awareness of loss, and she
declares her nostalgia to be an illness. She feels pregnant with
images of
Poland, and yet it is a "pregnancy without the possibility of birth." Ulti
mately, she can endure her memories of Poland only by repressing them:

After a while, I begin to push the images of memory down, away from conscious
ness, below emotion. to an internal the area of
Relegated darkness, they increase
darkness within me, and they return in the dark, in my dreams. (Lost 116)

Hoffman's account of the psychological impact of her emigration does

much to explain the unremittingly desolate quality of her
portrait of Van
couver, but it may also be linked to a deeper kind of trauma. Late in the book
Hoffman tells us of a visit she makes to Vancouver
during which her parents
recount a disturbing wartime story about a close relative whose
hiding place
was exposed by a fellow Jew. Hoffman can
hardly bear to listen to this story,
which she had not heard before, and she feels
paralyzed by the dilemma of
whether to break the silence surrounding her parents' wartime past: "Inde
cent to imagine, indecent not to
imagine. Indecent not to say anything to
my parents, indecent to say anything at all. . . . We stop, and go on to talk
about something else, in normal tones" {Lost 252). This scene casts Hoff
man's association of Canada with the "horror
vacui" in a different light.
Hoffman's of Vancouver
as a of vast
depiction place emptiness, silence, and
blankness coincides with the sense of a void that often afflicts the children of
Holocaust survivors.6 The desert-like qualities she attributes to the Canadi
an landscape are suggestive of what has been described with reference to

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 Casteel, Eva Hoffman's Double Emigration 293

Holocaust literature as a "memory hole," a painful awareness of the absence

of memory.7 Hoffman's powerful account of her repression of images of the

past, and the resultant "phantom pain," the trace of a lost memory that
weighs on her consciousness, resonates significantly with discussions of Holo
caust memory and postmemory.
Hoffman was born in 1945 to Jewish parents who had survived the war
by hiding in forest bunkers. Although she devotes little space to her parents'
story, its very absence suggests how much this legacy weighs on her. Hoff
man would appear to suffer from what Marianne Hirsch calls "postmemo

ry," a term that designates "the relationship of children of survivors of cul

tural or collectivetrauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that
they 'remember' only as the stories and images with which they grew up, but
that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own

right" ("Projected Memory" 7).

Two distinct forms of responseare typical of children of survivors: on
the one hand a powerful compulsion to remember and commemorate the
and on the other an inability to come to terms with the legacy of the
past,
Holocaust and a consequent repression of it (Fine 187-91). In Lost in Trans
lation, Hoffman's response tends more toward the latter, as she tells herself
that there is no point in "duplicating suffering." A marked silence about the
is maintained by her parents; the disconnect between her par
prewar past
ents' pre- and post-war life is so great that Hoffman describes the war as her
"second Hoffman herself perpetuates her parents'
parents' birthplace."
silence. The word "Holocaust" does not appear until 250 pages into the
book, and the Holocaust is always confined to the margins of the narrative.
Because she wants to present Poland in a positive light, she is anxious to

downplay questions of Jewishness in the Polish sections. Holocaust memory

also occupies little space in the American section of the book, where it fits ill
America
with the American-style optimism Hoffman is trying to cultivate.
of the behind, and so
signifies the possibility of self-reinvention, leaving past
is not conducive to remembrance. Vancouver, which Hoffman dubs her
"shtetl-on-the-Pacific," is where Hoffman's parents, the keepers of memory,
reside, and so no escape from memory is possible here. Thus it is Vancouver
that becomes the locus of Holocaust memory, or to be more precise the place
where the problem of this memory becomes most palpable.8 As the immedi
ate scene of exile, and more profoundly, as a signifier of Holocaust memory
and postmemory, Canada takes on a supremely negative valency.

EVA HOFFMAN AS IMMIGRANT AUTOBIOGRAPHER

Traumatic events can be defined as those which resist incorporation into

narratives (Bal viii—ix). It is therefore not coincidental that Canada, which is

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294 Biography 24.1 (Winter 2001)

doubly inscribed by traumatic memory in Lost in Translation, is also the site

where problems of narrative construction tend to surface. As an autobiogra
pher, Hoffman is exceptionally aware of the tradition of immigrant autobi
ography that precedes her, and she tends to frame her experience in terms of
autobiographies by earlier writers. She is very much concerned in Lost in
Translation to find a narrative structure that can make sense of her past and
that can aid her in her autobiographical project of producing a coherent self.
Yet she is often unable to make sense of her story: "The patterns of my life
have been so disrupted that I cannot find straight lines amid the disarray"
{Lost 158). Rewriting the past will help her to understand that past, for it is
in the act of writing that she can both construct a meaningful narrative about
her life and also construct a more unified self. But what kind of story should
she tell about herself? What
kind of map should she use? She wants desper
ately to "get the blocks of her story into the right proportions," and she
exhibits a strong desire for a sense of continuity and wholeness, but both the
disjunctive experience of her double emigration and the lingering memory
of her parents' Holocaust past ensure that her life story cannot be narrated
with smooth, clean lines.
One of the great costs of emigration for her has been the loss of a mean
ingful framework through which to understand her experience, for as she
notes, "It is only within such frames and patterns that any one moment is
intelligible. Pattern is the soil of significance; and it is surely one of the haz
ards of emigration, and exile, and extreme mobility, that one is uprooted
from that soil" {Lost 278). As an Eastern Jewish immigrant to
European
North America, she has numerous narrative models at her
disposal, and yet
none satisfies her.9 She doubts whether the available models for
immigrant
fates ever feel entirely natural to those whose lives they are meant to
repre
sent. Hoffman identifies most closely with Mary Antin's 1912
autobiogra
phy The Promised Land, a linear narrative of successful Jewish assimilation,
and yet she finds this model inadequate to her own experience of linguistic
fragmentation and cultural schizophrenia. Hoffman suffers from a kind of
belatedness as well. She arrives after the major waves of Jewish
immigrants
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which had a
produced
strong tradition of Jewish-American autobiography, and when she does
arrive, she finds herself in Vancouver rather than the Lower East Side. Thus
she is both temporally and spatially removed from the literary tradition
which best offer her a sense of
might belonging and a narrative framework.
she does not the Vancouver
Though say so, setting does not fit the genre of
Jewish-American autobiography whose practitioners she so envies, and
indeed only seems a hindrance to her of a "New York intel
goal becoming
lectual." If Alfred Kazin complained in his autobiography A Walker in the
City of having to travel the long distance from Brownsville to Manhattan to

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 Casteel, Eva Hoffman's Double Emigration 295

get to the "real America," so Hoffman's journey from Vancouver to New

York is that much farther and more arduous.
Hoffman does eventually succeed in her ambitions; like Kazin she reach
es the "real America" and takes her place in New York intellectual circles,
where she feels at home and knows all the codes. Despite the postmodern

qualities of the narrative, its fragmented and disjunctive structure, its preoc

cupation with post-structural linguistics, Lost in Translation remains very

much a story of assimilation and of "making it."10 The completion of her
autobiography is in itself a marker of her successful assimilation. Yet the
Canadian episodes provide an ironic counterpoint to the American success
narrative that dominates the later parts of her autobiography. The Canadian
narrative, which is more Malamud than Mary Antin, forms a dark underside
to the generally optimistic American narrative. Where America represents
the possibility of self-invention, of shedding the old self and beginning

again,11 Canada stands for non-assimilation, non-integration, for the irrec

oncilability of the Old World and the New. On return trips to Vancouver,
even after she has achieved success in America
and is firmly established there,
she is overcome once again with "the Big Fear." Her hard-won American
self-assurance is shattered when the old feelings of fragility and vulnerability
return: "Within hours of arrival here, I'm no longer a hybrid but an oxy
moron. My professional, self-confident, American identity recedes like an
insubstantial mirage" {Lost 248). In this way, while Hoffman's American
narrative increasingly comes to resemble those of her Jewish-American pred
ecessors in its assimilationist leanings, it is continually threatened by the
Canadian narrative of disjunction, disconnection, and failure. Yet at the
same time, the designation of Canada as the place of exile leaves the Ameri
can section free to move forward a brighter future. The narrative
towards
function of Canada is thus to unburden the American narrative of the prob
lem of exile, but the Canadian narrative also undercuts its American coun

terpart and calls into question its viability.

Canada also functions to relieve the American narrative of the much dis
cussed problem of the Holocaust and narrativization. If Hoffman is strug

gling to impose a meaningful pattern on her immigration history, she is

her parents' past (which
equally struggling to find a story she can tell about
is both uninterpretable and also inescapable). In Lost in Translation, she fails
to find such a story, the Holocaust remaining highly marginal in a book that
wants to construct Poland as idyllic and America as a land of optimism. But
in later books, particularly in her most recent work Shtetl: The Life and Death
Polish Jews, Hoffman has been able to
of a Small Town and the World of
acknowledge much more fully her dilemma of how to reconcile her Polish
and Jewish loyalties.12 In Shtetl, when Hoffman worries about a "pathology
of silence" that has surrounded the Holocaust, and when she insists that "we

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296 Biography 24.1 (Winter 2001)

need to stop splitting our own memories and perceptions in half, and push
ing away those parts which are too distressing for owning or acknowledg
ment" (257), she may have in mind her own silences in Lost in Translation.
In both Shtetl and in her second book Exit into History, Hoffman sets out to
correct some of the nostalgic tendencies that had shaded her portrait of
Poland in Lost in Translation. But in Lost in Translation, the tension gener
ated by her nostalgia for Poland on the one hand, and her duty as daughter of
Holocaust survivors to remember the past on the other, remains quite buried
and unresolved.
This tension manifests itself in the opaque
and troubling Canadian pas
sages. The
no-place to the North
provides a narrative space in which the
unnarratable can be bracketed, contained. Vancouver, which is located at the
other end of the continent from New York, is a conveniently peripheral loca
tion in which to lock away that which interferes with her ability to continue

along the trajectory she has mapped out for herself in the United States. And
yet the Holocaust remains a disturbing presence. "There's no way to get this
part of the story in proportion," Hoffman tells us, referring to her parents'
stories from the war. "It could overshadow everything else, put the light of
the world right out. I need seven-league boots to travel from this to where I
live. And yet, this is what I must do" {Lost 253). And she does, as she gets
on her airplane back to New York and quite literally distances herself from
her parents' memories. But while Canada allows Hoffman to defer the prob
lem of narrating Holocaust memory, it also periodically serves as a painful
reminder of the impossibility of narrative, of what has been pushed aside so
that her story can move forward.
A suggestive counterexample to Hoffman's projection of the past and of
Holocaust memory onto the Canadian landscape can be found in Saul Bel
low's Herzog. In Bellow's semi-autobiographical novel, whose antihero is
(like Bellow himself) an American Jew born in Montreal, the Canada-U.S.
border also functions as a divider between past and present, Old World and
New. But while Hoffman distances herself from the Old World memories
that are being preserved by the "shtetl-on-the-Pacific" in Vancouver, Bel
low's Herzog nostalgically clings to his recollections of his Montreal ghetto
childhood, which his adult and increasingly assimilated American life threat
ens to erode. For Herzog, Americanization a betrayal of his values
represents
and his immigrant Jewish roots, as his friend insists:

"So back of it all is bourgeois America. This is a crude world of finery and excre
ment. A proud, lazy civilization that worships its own boorishness. You and I were

brought up in the old poverty. I don't know how American you've become since
the old days in Canada—you've lived here a time. But I will never
long worship
the fat gods." (166)

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 Casteel, Eva Hoffman's Double Emigration 297

Thus Herzog resembles Lost in Translation in its location of the Old World
past north of the border, but shows that Canada can just as readily stand for
that which needs to be held onto as it can for that which needs to be escaped.
For Herzog, Canada is the alternative space to America and is therefore
a candidate for idealization. By contrast Hoffman, a double-emigrant, has
not two but three possible locations, as the tripartite structure she adopts and
her emphasis on the idea of triangulation remind us. This triangularity is
what is obscured by the bipolar structure (Poland vs. America) that critical
have tended to impose on the book. Bipolar readings fail to eluci
readings
date Hoffman's presentation of Canada because they disregard the double
of Cana
emigration structure that makes possible her negative construction
da. If Canada had been her final destination, it could not have been identified
so absolutely with exile—as indeed it is not for her sister who remains in
Vancouver.
We can see this pattern at work in the writings of other double-emi

grants. Bharati Mukherjee, for instance, has quite vociferously privileged the
United States (her second adoptive homeland) over Canada (her first) in a
manner similar to that of Hoffman. Michael Ondaatje, on the other hand,
has tended to favor Canada (his second adoptive homeland) as being more
invigorating than Britain (his first). In a recent interview, Salman Rushdie
enthusiastically celebrated his move from London to New York, quoting
the president of Knopf: "He said, 'You know, Salman, for
Sonny Mehta,
me, it's a very good idea at some to leave the
people like you and point
BritishEmpire.' And I think he's absolutely right"(Max 69). Here Rushdie
attributes his delight in his new home to his having finally escaped the for
mer British Empire, but he may also be expressing pleasure simply at the fact
of having arrived at an alternative destination.
This pleasure of the second arrival is not restricted to those who have
crossed two national borders. It is the chief subject of The Enigma of Arrival,
V. S. Naipaul's account of the "second childhood" he experienced upon his
move from London to the English countryside. Kazin's narrative also revolves
around a second arrival, this time within America rather than England, and
this time moving towards the city rather than away from it.13 What each of
these examples suggests is a structural principle according to which the sec
ond destination of the emigrant may take on values that are independent of
and that produce a contrasting evaluation of the first
specific circumstances,
narratives relying on an Old
destination. Bipolar readings of immigrant
World-New World binary risk overlooking these kinds of gradations in rep
resentations of the immigrant experience.

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298 Biography 24.1 (Winter 2001)

CONCLUSION

In the final scene of her autobiography, Hoffman casts herself as a new Eve
against the Edenic backdrop of a friend's New England garden, where she is
busily learning the names of the flowers. The friend declares that she is going
to make Hoffman feel at home in the New World, and indeed, Hoffman has
been reborn in America, her relationship with nature and language restored
in all its fullness:

Right now, this is the place where I'm alive. How could there be any other place?
Be here now, I think to myself in the faintly ironic tones in which the phrase is
uttered by the likes of me. Then the phrase dissolves. . . . The language of this is
sufficient.I'm here now. (Lost 280)

There is a subtle rejection of memory in this Adamic scene, in which Hoff

man tells herself that the place where she now finds herself is the only place,
complete unto itself. But looked at from the vantage point of the Canadian
narrative, this affirmative and amnesiac conclusion seems less fully resolved.
After all, it is Canada's role as the place of exile and as the receptacle of excess
memory that makes possible a scene such as this.
Hoffman has written recently of the dangers exile presents for narrative
construction, noting that the exilic perspective tends to freeze one's image of
the homeland in a mythic realm, a "space of projections and fantasies" ("The
New Nomads" 52). What we learn in Lost in Translation, however, is that
the homeland is not the only space that can be subject to such distortions.
Rather, the country of exile can also become the screen on which the psy
distress of the immigrant is projected, and this is
chological particularly the
case when the country of exile is subsequently abandoned in favor of a sec
ond destination. As we have seen, Hoffman's
privileging of America is made
possible by a double-emigration structure which distributes the experience of
exile and assimilation over the narrative space of two countries. The exam
ple of Hoffman's autobiography and its treatment of Canada suggests that
we need to adopt less binary ways of narratives so that we
reading immigrant
can become more sensitive to the
interplay between memory and geography
in representations of second arrivals and double
emigrations.

NOTES

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I would like to thank the participants in the "Autobiography and Chang
ing Identities" conference and Professor Rachel Adams of Columbia University for the
generous suggestions and insights they offered in response to earlier versions of this
paper.

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 Casteel, Eva Hoffman's Double Emigration 299

1. See for instance Fjellestad 139 and Zaborowska 229, 245. Fjellestad complains about
the homogenization of European-American literature, but then fails to distinguish
between Canadian and American cultural contexts. Zaborowska's blurring of Montreal
and New York in the following quotation is symptomatic of a broader critical tendency
to collapse together Canada and the U.S.: "The narrator's love for the country of her
childhood is the reason that Hoffman's book opens not with a view of the Statue of Lib

erty but with the acute memory of her pain of loss when the ship to Montreal sailed"

(233).
2. This passage recalls Northrop Frye's observation that "To enter the United States is a
matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by
an alien continent" (217).

3. William Proefriedt notes that "Hoffman's prescient insight into herself and the times
in which she lives undercuts, to a considerable extent, the work of interpretation. She
has done the job for us" (124).
4. An important exception is a brief passage in which she reflects on the "mercureal

changeability of all reality under the pressure of the soul" and observes that "Vancou
ver will never be the place I most love, for it was here that I fell out of the net of mean

ing into the weightlessness of chaos. But now I have eyes to see its flower-filled gardens,
and hear small kindnesses under the flat Canadian accents" {Lost 151). This passage is
too singular and marginal, however, to offset the overall effect of her treatment of
Canada.

5. Another example comes towards the end of the book, when Hoffman speaks of the
moment when the immigrant glimpses the internal map of the people among whom
she now lives—the set of cultural norms and habits of mind that governs their lives—
and realizes that she will always feel always slightly off-kilter because her internal map
does not match theirs {Lost 265).
6. See Fine 187; Felman and Laub 64-65.

7. See Sicher's discussion of the "memory hole," in which "the past is a 'trace' in the pres
ent that haunts the second with the presence of the absent memory, an
generation
amnesia in which the only memory is of not remembering anything" (30).

8. Marianne Hirsch is the only criticto my knowledge who has pointed to a connection
between Hoffman's of the legacy of the Holocaust and her treatment of
repression
Canada, but her discussion is very brief ("Pictures" 77).

9. Mark Krupnick suggests that Hoffman herself never fully overcomes this difficulty

when he insightfully remarks that her "compositional recourse to the pattern of para

dise lost, exile, and the quest for a new paradise within is as constraining as the Exodus

of enslavement and liberation in Antin" (458).

pattern
10. As William Proefriedt
notes, "Her not exclude Hoffman's
. . . does auto
perspective
from
the of the American success story. She shares with Antin a will
biography genre
to sketch out the of her climb" (124). Zaborowska disagrees, choos
ingness trajectory
to emphasize "the impossibility of completely successful assimilation and
ing instead
cultural translation" in Hoffman's work. She finds that the book "defies traditional

narrative structure.... It does not end with any kind of arrival that suggests
immigrant
and fulfillment and satis
permanence, acceptance by the dominant culture, complete
faction" (228). The between Zaborowska's and Proefriedt's readings testi
discrepancy
fies to the complexity and multivalency of Hoffman's thinking about assimilation.

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300 Biography 24.1 (Winter 2001)

Nonetheless, I find ample evidence of a progressivist narrative which exists in an uneasy

tension with Hoffman's postmodern suspicion of such narratives.

11. Her generally positive view of America is illustrated by her discussion of the riff as the

paradigmatic American literary form. The riff has no rules, no fixed destination, and its

fluidity bespeaks the possibility for self-invention: "this is America where anything is
possible, and this slip-and-slide speech, like jazz, or action painting, is the insertion of
the self into the space of borderless possibility" {Lost 219).

12. Questions of Jewishness remain

fairly marginal into History, although in Exit
she does
here clearly state her dilemma: "If I came to Eastern Europe in part to understand it as
an adult, then I find that the Polish and Jewish parts of my history, my identity—my

loyalties—refuse either to separate or to reconcile. At the very moments when my

attachment to Poland ... is strongest, I upbraid
myself for insufficient vigilance on
behalf of those who suffered here—onreally, of my parents,
behalf, who survived the
Holocaust in awful circumstances. Every time I hear Poland described reductively as an
anti-Semitic country, I bridle in revolt, for I know that the reality is far more tangled
than that" In ShtetlHoffman
(101). addresses this problem head on, but we might note
that she avoids telling her parents' story directly. Instead, she relates interviews she has
conducted with survivors whose stories parallel that of her parents. This avoidance of
direct narration suggests that she continues to struggle with the problem of Holocaust

memory.
13. Although in narratives such as Kazin's and Bellow's the protagonist only emigrates once,
the original emigration of the parents from Europe is such a strong presence for the child
that it is as though the child himself had it. It is in this sense that Kazin's
undergone
move to Manhattan or Herzog's move to the United States can be read as second emi

grations.

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