Eva Hoffman was born Ewa Wydra in Krakow, Poland in 1945, just two months after the end of World War II. Her parents were Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust by escaping to Ukraine and hiding in a forest bunker, later being hidden for another year in an "unheated barn" by a "mute peasant." At the time Eva was born, Krakow was still ravaged from the war and trying to recover in its aftermath.
At age 13, Hoffman moved from Krakow to Vancouver with her parents and her younger sister. Lost in Translation is a memoir that expresses the "uprootedness and exile" Hoffman felt as a result of their emigration and as a result of having to adapt to speaking English. Hoffman's father had trouble adapting to life in Vancouver, but she and her sister managed to "find their balance."
Hoffman ended up giving up her goal of becoming a concert pianist and instead moved to the U.S. to study English literature at Rice University in Houston. She also studied at Yale School of Music and Harvard, and eventually earned her Ph.D. in English and American literature at the latter.
Hoffman eventually moved to New York and worked as a professor at institutions such as Columbia University and CUNY Hunter College. Lost in Translation was published in 1989, while she was working at the New York Times as an editor and writer and serving as senior editor of "The Book Review." Because Communism had slowed the pace of change in Krakow, Hoffman was able to visit her hometown in Poland and find things mostly the same, which inspired her to write the memoir.
