SOURCE: Stuttaford, Genevieve. Review of Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, by Eva Hoffman. Publishers Weekly 234, no. 24 (9 December 1988): 54.

In the following review, Stuttaford notes that an immigrant's assimilation into a new culture is the dominant theme in Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language.

Daughter of Holocaust survivors, the author [Eva Hoffman], a New York Times Book Review editor, lost her sense of place and belonging when she emigrated with her family from Poland to Vancouver in 1959 at the age of 13. Although she works within a familiar genre in Lost in Translation, Hoffman's is a penetrating, lyrical memoir that casts a wide net as it joins vivid anecdotes and vigorous philosophical insights on Old World Cracow and Ivy League America; Polish anti-Semitism; the degradations suffered by immigrants; Hoffman's cultural nostalgia, self-analysis and intellectual passion; and the atrophy of her Polish from disuse...