The Impacts of Western and Polish Cultures in Eva Hoffmans Writings - Research Paper Example

 Influences of a Cross-cultural Life: A Study on the impacts of Western and Polish cultures in Eva Hoffman’s Writings. In Poland alone, 3 million jews were massacred in Natzi concentration camps. Hertz and Dobroszycki (1988, p.34) have in a book, bluntly put this situation as, “There are no Jews in Poland now. The remaining handful is but a reminder of the community of many millions who lived in Poland before the war. That community was eradicated and will never return.” Eva Hoffman was a Jew and the daughter of parents who survived the holocaust. She had grown up assimilating fragments of her identity from both Jewish and Polish cultures and was not very much aware of the socio-political questions related to her Jewishness in her childhood. Eva Hoffman, born in Cracow, Poland, had immigrated to Canada with her family. Her parents had hid in Ukraine to escape the persecution of Jews. It was in 1959 that this family arrived in Vancouver, US. (Hoffman,1989,p.3) Bukowczyk (2006, p.159) has categorized the exodus form Poland to other countries into two major groups. He has written that “some fled Natzi oppression; others the Soviet “iron curtain””(Bukowczyk, 2006, p.159). Eva Hoffman was one of those thousands of refugees. Remembering the the life of a refugee in a new land, she (Hoffman, 1989, p.160) has said that “I am a quantum particle, trying to locate myself in a swirl of atoms,” in her famous book, ‘Lost in Translation’. The book opens with a very pessimistic note. She writes, “I am thirteen years old and we are emigrating. It’s a notion of such crushing definitive finality that to me it might as well mean the end of the world. “ (Hoffman, p.3) But it was not the end of the world. Hoffman grew up to become a renownedwriter. Hoffman’s writings have as a common thread, the dilemma of a person who is torn apart between two cultures. She studied in Harvard and took her PhD in English and American literature and was an editor at the New York Times. The fine line between fiction and non fiction gets blurred in her writing just as Eva starts feeling it difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction in her life, caused by the uprooting from Poland and forced to grow roots in an alien land. Hoffman’s major works include, ‘Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language’, ‘Exit Into History: A Journey through the New Eastern Europe’, ‘Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews’, ‘After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust’, and also one novel, ‘The Secret’. ‘Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language’ was written in 1989. ‘Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews’ came out in 1997. These two books provide the readers great insights into the dilemmas of homeless refugees and how Eva Hoffman overcomes this crisis through assimilation into the new culture and language. In Hoffman’s childhood, Poland was a backward industrial country with Poles and Jews, who once lived in harmony there, made aliens to each other by the interventions of Hitler and the Soviets. If we look into the social life of that period, observations like those given below come to light: It is worth mentioning a certain particularity of Polish family law that supported the family. In Western countries all family property passed into the hands of one heir, most often the first-born son. …(but) according to Polish law, whose beginnings are to be sought in pre-Christian times, family property belonged to all its members, rather than it to just one heir. ….A sense of family and a related sense of justice clearly predominated (and)…. family ties remained tight. (http://www.crvp.org/book/Series04/IVA-19/contents.htm) But in Canada, Hoffman found a social system in which there was not much support from the family and every one was on her own. Life in post war Cracow was past its worst Stalinist period, when they left but the cold war was raging at its peak. Poland was at that time a country devastated and impoverished by war. The old renaissance Cracow buildings had a classical aura around them. The place was remote and calm. North America, on the other hand was the centre of the world. Eva had her roots equally immersed in Polish and Jewish cultures. North American culture of late sixties and seventies were in no way similar to both. This made her (Hoffman, 1989, p.110) say that, “when I am with my peers, who come by crinolines, lipstick, cars and self confidence naturally, my gestures show that I am here provisionally, by their grace, that I don’t rightfully belong.” It took several years for to feel that sense of belonging that she was talking about. Distant memories of war and suffering that kept on resurfacing in her mind were in stark contrast to the idiosyncrasies of the West. Even insignificant incidents like a foot ball match made her think about the difference of the culture in which she had landed without her will. She (1989) wrote, I witness rituals as arcane as Aztec ceremonies - elaborate ceremonies of floodlit cheerleading, collective genuflections to a large stuffed owl, which is the university's mascot, and once a near riot which starts up when an umpire's decision provokes streams of boys from both warring camps to run down the bleachers with the full intention of attacking each other - only to be stopped dead when the Rice band strikes up the national anthem. It is their respect for the law which astonishes me as much as all their bloodlust. (p.173) She also wrote, she often failed to get through with Polish jokes with her American friends (Hoffman, 1989, p.119). Language was the strongest presence in Polish culture and it was carried by Hoffman across the seas to the new land that her parents chose to go. And for her, there started a long voyage in search of one’s complicated self that is essentially created by language. This mental state is reflected in the below statement of Eva Hoffman(1989): ‘River’ in Polish was a vital sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being immersed in rivers. ‘River’ in English is cold-a word without an aura. It has no accumulated associations for me. It does not give off the radiating haze of connotation” (p.106) So Hoffman decided to redeem her lost culture in a new form through language itself and she called it “translation therapy.” (Hoffman, 1989, p.271). She soon fell in love with English language and was greatly influenced by it (Hoffman, 1989, p.121). The notions of man-woman relationship were totally different in both countries. Hoffman often felt split between the two cultures whenever she had to take her life’s decisions. She wrote in her book, “I would like to dance with that boy again…I want so much to throw myself into sex, into pleasure. But instead, I feel that small movement of prim disapproval. This is ‘unnatural’, I decide- a new word of opprobrium in my vocabulary, and one that I find myself applying to any number of situations I encounter” (Hoffman, 1989, p.130). When talking about dating, she describes it as a semiotic practice that she is unable to decode in a clear way (Hoffman, 1989, p.149). But soon she assimilated the new culture and she did not hesitate when she had to get a divorce from her husband. She says that “an incompatible marriage is unacceptable” is “an American notion” (Hoffman, 1989, p.231). Then again, she admits that in Poland,“you wouldn’t even be thinking about getting divorced. You would be staying married, happily or unhappily, it wouldn’t matter much” (Hoffman, 1989, p.230) and adds that “if you were in Poland, you would be making a sensible accommodation to your situation” (Hoffman, 1989, p.231). Growing up in Canada, the post-cold war era and its global repercussions decided the socio-political nature of Eva Hoffman’s writings. In the preamble to an interview given by Hoffman to Robert Birnbaum, in 2005, Birnbaum quotes her as saying the followed: I think every immigrant becomes a kind of amateur anthropologist—you do notice things about the culture or the world that you come into that people who grow up in it, who are very embedded in it, simply don't notice. I think we all know it from going to a foreign place. (Values in the Polish Cultural tradition, Polish Philosophical Studies.) In her other book, ‘Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews’ (Hoffman, 1997), the reader gets a more clear picture of why Hoffman had to put her whole life to the stocktaking of the two cultures in which she lived and why she was torn between two worlds. She remembered, in Poland, “the day, the week, and the year were shaped and parsed by ritual signposts…Each part of life, from food to sex to marriage and personal hygiene was governed by a highly elaborate and precise body of religious principles and rules.” (Hoffman, 1998, 97). The Jewish social life and values were totally different. “An important distinguishing feature of the Jewish community was an ethic of care…. Financial or material support for the poor was central to this ethic of care. The poor of one’s own community took precedence over other Jews… contribution was a social and religious obligation arising from functional necessity” (Smith, 2000, p.89) The loneliness that we encounter in Hoffman’s writings must have emerged from the psychological depths which missed this culture of care. Music had great importance in Polish culture. Hoffman was learning to be a pianist when she had to leave Poland. In Canada, though initially she tried to continue with her Piano lessons, soon she found that it was irrelevant in the new context and quit. America opened before her a new world full of opportunities. This reflected in her writing when she said, “the claustrophobia of no choice” that she might have encountered in Poland was replaced by “the agoraphobia of open options” (Hoffman, 1989, p.231). The America that Hoffman sees is “ a launching pad for individual ambition” (Hoffman, 1989, p.159). She rhetorically put this situation as being “paralysed by choice” and “the blessings and terrors of multiplicity” (Hoffman, 1989, p.164). This multiplicity was another experience which was totally new to her. Living in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of North America had its own effects on her writing and she gradually grew into an American social critic who had the stature to authentically write about the world affairs, particularly about the Jewish Holocaust from an observer’s angle and of course, about the American society. She says, “I am being remade, fragment by fragment, like a patchwork quilt. (Hoffman, 1989, p.220) There is not much direct reference to the Jewish holocaust throughout the book, ‘Lost in Translation’. But when on one instance, she briefly talks about her mother’s sister dying in a gas chamber, the whole loaded past sweeps past in a flash of memory. (Hoffman, 1989, p.6). In ‘Lost in Translation’, she (1989, p. 5) reminisced that “ she grew up in a lumpen apartment in Cracow, squeezed into three rudimentary rooms with four other people, surrounded by squabbles, dark political rumblings, memories of wartime suffering, and daily struggle for existence”. This ambience incorporated in her a socio-political outlook, which always searched for the possibility of co-existence among different groups of the society. In the book, ‘Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews’, Hoffman refers to the real meaning of the word, Shtetl, as a village where Poles and Jews co-existed. She says that in Brask, Poles took part in cantor’s concerts and Jewish musicians used to play at Polish weddings. (Hoffman,1997, p.174). This side of the Polish culture was which influenced her most. And this was the way of life that she assimilated in another way by living in America. References Hertz, Aleksander, Dobroszycki, Lucjan, 1988, The Jews in Polish Culture, Northwestern University Press. Bukowczyk, John.J., Polish Americans and Their History: Community, Culture and Politics, University of Pittsburgh Press. Hoffman, Eva, 1989, Lost in Translation: A life in a new language, E.P.Dutton. Hoffman, Eva, 1997, Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews, Houghton Mifflin. Smith, David Marshall, 2000, Moral geographies: Ethics in a world of difference, Edinburgh University Press. Values in the Polish Cultural tradition, Polish Philosophical Studies, III, edited by Leon Dyczewski, Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change, SERIES IVA, Eastern and Central Europe Vol. 19, http://www.crvp.org/book/Series04/IVA-19/chapter_ii.htm, viewed on November 20, 2009. Read More