Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman
I just finished this book which I up at a local used book store (Sefer v’Sefel) on a whim. Once I started it, I couldn’t put it down and finished it in a week. It’s the first memoir I’ve ever read - as far as I can recall.
Bottom line, this is an amazing, wonderful book. I was and still am just floored by the sublime writing and the sharp insights that the author beautifully wielded to produce this work.
This passage is about her childhood perception of her mother, a holocaust survivor:
My own sister is named after this person who exists like an almost concrete shadow in our lives - Alina - and my mother often feels a strange compassion for her younger daughter, as if with the name, she had bestowed on her some of fate’s terrible burden. “Sometimes my heart aches for her,” she tells me, “I don’t know why. I’m afraid for her.” I inherit some of this fear, and look on my sister as a fragile, vulnerable creature who needs all my love and protection. But then, my mother too seems breakable to me, as if she had been snatched from death only provisionally, and might be claimed by it at any moment. The ocean of death is so enormous, and life such a tenuous continent. Everyone I know has lost some relatives during the war, and almost none of my friends have grandparents…”
Another about how the war affected her parents:
In some ways, my parents will always retain something pre-urban in their attitudes, something that escapes the categories of the industrial world. But at the same time, the war - their second birthplace - has thrust them, in one enormous leap across the abyss, into modernity. Most of their obedient preconceptions and beliefs have been corroded away by the lye of extreme suffering, and have been replaced by a perfectly modernist nihilism. They have little respect for law, politics, ideology. They have been divested of religious faith, and the residues of both Victorian and Orthodox prudishness. They are, in a way, unshockable; they’ve lost the innocence of an inherited, unquestioned morality. The only thing they’re left with is a deep skepticism about human motives, and a homegrown version of existentialism - a philosophy born of the War, after all - with its gamble that since everything is absurd, you might as well try to squeeze the juice out of every moment. They want happiness fervently, and they implore their children to be happy no matter what. It turns out, in the long run, to be a terribly paradoxical recipe.”
Those passages are just two that I found striking, and they’re just in the first 16 pages! I don’t want to misrepresent the book though - while those passages may seem somewhat non-storylike, it really is a great read, very personal and very storylike, peppered with bits of introspection. Bottom line, I highly recommend this book!