SOURCE: Casteel, Sarah Phillips. “Eva Hoffman's Double Emigration: Canada as the Site of Exile in Lost in Translation.” Biography 25, no. 1 (winter 2001): 288-301.

In the following essay, Casteel evaluates how Hoffman portrays the social and physical landscapes of Canada in Lost in Translation.

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 American 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 narrative are discussed as though they were continuous with the American portions, the term “American” applied indiscriminately to either side of the border.¹ Yet Hoffman herself draws...