Exit into History - Hardcover

Eva Hoffman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0434344265 ISBN 13: 9780434344260

Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd

Synopsis

Shortly after the dramatic events of 1989, Eva Hoffman spent several months travelling through her native Poland and four other Eastern European countries which had just undergone an historic transformation. This is the personal narrative of that journey and a portrayal of a social landscape in the midst of change. While making her way from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Hoffman ranged from capital cities to wayside villages and sleepy provincial towns; she visited shipyards, museums, homes and coffee-houses of the intelligentsia; and she talked with a great variety of people, many of them struggling with the transition from an unwanted past to an uncertain future. Most of all, she uses her bi-cultural perspective to enter deeply into Eastern European minds and sensibilities and to convey what the larger social shifts mean to particular people: to former dissidents wielding political power, deposed apparatchiks turned successful entrepreneurs, artists and technocrats, literate ex-censors, Polish aristocrats, Hungarian gypsies and Bulgarian Turks.

About this title

About the Author:

Eva Hoffman was born in Krakow, Poland, and emigrated to America in her teens. She is the author of Lost in Translation, Exit Into History, Shtetl, The Secret, and After Such Knowledge. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award, and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Hoffman lives in London.

From Kirkus Reviews:

In a superb successor to her impressive personal memoir, Lost in Translation (1988), Hoffman chronicles two trips taken a year apart to de-Sovietized East Europe--touring her native Poland, as well as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. In each place, Hoffman talks to people (with the weight perhaps shifted inescapably to literati, political sophisticates, high achievers) and takes a remarkably humane measure of the confusions, hopes, and lavish soulfulness born of unsentimental realism that's Mitteleuropa's greatest resource. She reliably detects nuance because, in a sense, she expects to find it (``History is a process of double-ledger accounting''). Sociology never overtly jogs her focus, yet she avails herself of large, thoughtful revelations: ``It may be that just as tonality recurs in music and realism in painting, so the idea of liberalism recurs in politics--though each time in a different vein. Eastern European liberalism seems not so much born again as refined in the crucible of successive skepticisms. It has seen the dangers of fanaticism, dogmatism, and cynicism; the dangers of too much belief and none at all.'' The people she talks to seem to be master self-modulators: victims but not eternal victims, needy but never without humor, aware of nationhood the way no Western patriot quite manages to be. And the book's easily as good just as sheer travel-writing. Hoffman stays open to the physical gorgeousness of Prague, the high civilization of Budapest hotel baths, the odd survival of the Transylvanian Gypsy nonculture--and she falls in love with Bulgaria (for the Bulgarians' innate poise and lack of spiritual turmoil), just as poor Romania, plaything of a madman, seems the most cursed nation of all after the spasms of 1989. From each land Hoffman is able to generalize only when it seems called for, and to refrain from generalizing when the broad view might only obscure: a rare thing. A remarkable book. (One map) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd
• ISBN 10: 0434344265
• ISBN 13: 9780434344260
• Binding: Hardcover