What's it like to leave your life behind? Ewa Hoffman is a Polish Jew who left Krakow with her parents as a child, to seek a new life in Canada. In this, her most highly acclaimed book, nothing to do with the later American movie, she looks back with nostalgia on her Polish years.

In English, words have not penetrated to those layers of my psyche from which a private conversation could proceed. This interval before sleep used to be the time when my mind became both receptive and alert, when images and words rose up to consciousness, reiterating what had happened during the day, adding the day's experiences to those already stored there, spinning out the thread of my personal story.

That’s a short passage from Lost in Translation – a life in a new language (1989) by Ewa Hoffman, one of the best-known autobiographical works to deal with memory, loss and the world as constructed by language.

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