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Now in paperback: Eva Hoffman's "extraordinarily clear-eyed and unsentimental meditation" on our relationship to the Holocaust ( New York Times Book Review) As the Holocaust recedes from us in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the next generation. How should they, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors, and the second-generation's responsibilities to its received memories? In this meditation on the long aftermath of atrocity, Eva Hoffman-a child of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust with the help of neighbors, but whose entire families perished-probes these questions through personal reflections, and through broader explorations of the historical, psychological, and moral implication of the second-generation experience. As she guides us through the poignant juncture at which living memory must be relinquished, she asks what insights can be carried from the past to the newly problematic present, and urges us to transform potent family narratives into a fully informed understanding of a forbidding history. A New York Times Notable Book 2003...
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This remarkable book is Eva Hoffman's personal story of her experiences as an emigre who loses and remakes her identity in a new land and translates her sense of self into a new culture and a different language....
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Novelist, cultural commentator, memoirist, and historian Eva Hoffman examines our ever-changing perception of time in this inspired addition to the BIG IDEAS/small books series Time has always been the great given, the element that establishes the governing facts of human fate that cannot be circumvented, deconstructed, or wished away. But these days we are tampering with time in ways that affect how we live, the textures of our experience, and our very sense of what it is to be human. What is the nature of time in our time? Why is it that even as we live longer than ever before, we feel that we have ever less of this basic good? What effects do the hyperfast technologies--computers, video games, instant communications--have on our inner lives and even our bodies? And as we examine biology and mind on evermore microscopic levels, what are we learning about the process and parameters of human time? Hoffman regards our relationship to time--from jet lag to aging, sleep to cryogenic freezing--in this broad, eye-opening meditation on life’s essential medium and its contemporary challenges. Eva Hoffman is the author of Lost in Translation: A Life In A New Language, Shtetl, and The Secret. Her essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, and other publications. Time has always been the great given, the element that establishes the governing facts of human fate that cannot be circumvented, deconstructed, or wished away. More every day, time can be tampered with in ways that affect how we live, the textures of experience, and the sense of what it is to be human. What is the nature of time in this time? Why is it that even as humans live longer than ever before, it seems as though we have ever less of this basic good? What effects do the hyperfast technologies—computers, video games, instant communications—have on our inner lives and bodies? By examining biology and mind on evermore microscopic levels, what are we learning about the process and parameters of human time? Hoffman regards our relationship to time—from jet lag to aging, sleep to cryogenic freezing—in this broad, eye-opening meditation on life’s essential medium and its contemporary challenges. “Hoffman examines this philosophically fraught subject in unpretentious, clear chapters: asking how time affects our bodies, our minds, our cultures, and, finally, how time has accelerated and changed with the advent of the concept of 'immediacy'—or, as she puts it, 'what pace and density of stimulus we need in order to feel that something ‘interesting’ is happening.'”—Benjamin Moser, Harper’s “Hoffman examines this philosophically fraught subject in unpretentious, clear chapters: asking how time affects our bodies, our minds, our cultures, and, finally, how time has accelerated and changed with the advent of the concept of 'immediacy'—or, as she puts it, 'what pace and density of stimulus we need in order to feel that something ‘interesting’ is happening.'”—Benjamin Moser, Harper’s
“Hoffman deftly tackles this complex topic in a highly readable and entertaining way . . . This is a book for readers interested in exploring the world around them or hoping to see their surroundings in a new light. A fascinating and easy-to-read meditation on a deceptively simple concept."—Library Journal
"Time may be life's implacable constant, but it has undergone drastic and troubling revision in the modern age, argues this penetrating essay. Novelist and historian Hoffman analyzes the simultaneous surfeit and famine of time that faces contemporary society. Our lives, she argues, have grown longer, but we cram ever more work and activity into each multitasking moment. Meanwhile, she contends, technology has chopped up the flow of time into a succession of disjointed nanoseconds, while banishing the natural rhythms of diurnal and seasonal time and depositing us in a frenetic 24/7. Hoffman places the derangement of time at the root of many of modernity's discontents: it underlies the ethos of conspicuous exertion that tyrannizes our work lives, she writes, and perhaps induces our growing epidemic of attention deficit disorder, whose symptoms mimic the pattern of contemporary digital time. Hoffman's exploration ranges lucidly across neuroscience, psychoanalysis and modernist literature to plumb time's mysteries. Her approach is smart and informed, but also pensive and a bit melancholy, wary of what's lost in trying to manage and optimize time; even time's ravages of decay and death, she warns, are inextricably tied up with the meaning of life."—Publisher's Weekly ...
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Selected as one of Oprah.com’s 20 Tantalizing Beach Reads
Selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Isabel Merton is a renowned concert pianist, whose performances are marked by a rare responsiveness to the complexities of her art, and its intensities of feeling. At the height of her career, she feels increasingly torn between the compelling musical realm she deeply inhabits, and her fragmented itinerant artist’s life, with its frequent flights, anonymous hotels, and brief, arbitrary encounters. Away from her New York home on a European tour, Isabel meets a political exile from a war-torn country, a man driven by a rankling sense of injustice and a powerful desire to vindicate his cause and avenge his people. As their paths cross in several cities, they are drawn to each other both by their differences and their seemingly parallel passions–until a menacing incident throws her into a creative crisis, and forces her to reevaluate his actions, and her own motives. In this story of contemporary love and conflict, Hoffman illuminates the currents and undercurrents of our time, as she explores the luminous and dark faces of romanticism, and those perennial human yearnings, frustrations, and moral choices that can lead to destructiveness, or the richest art. ...
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