Hoffman, Eva
Entry updated 15 April 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1945- ) Polish academic and author, in Canada and the USA from the late 1950s (she is a citizen of both countries), but for many years in the UK. Hoffman is best known as a memoirist and as a historian of Jewish life and death during World War Two, her nonfiction titles including Exit Into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe (1993), Stetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (1997) and After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004). Her sf novel, The Secret: A Fable for Our Time (2001), is set in a high-tech Near Future America where a young woman discovers that she is a Clone of her mother, which teaches her the lesson that "the more you know someone, the more mysterious they become". The tale clearly enters upon issues of Identity that resonate both with Hoffman's complex life and her nonfiction work, in particular with her first book, the nonfiction Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), which introduces Linguistic issues into an interrogation of the nature of identity in a fractured world full of aliens. [JC]
Eva Wydra Hoffman
born Kraków, Poland: 1 July 1945
works
- The Secret: A Fable for Our Time (London: Secker and Warburg, 2001) [hb/Pavěl Banka]
nonfiction works (highly selected)
- Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (New York: E P Dutton, 1989) [nonfiction: hb/David Gatti]
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