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Background Eva, welcome to Berkeley. Thank you. Tell us about your parents' immigration to Canada when you were thirteen. How did it impact your life? I would say this was the formative experience of my life, from which much of my writing and other things followed. First of all, I should say that the immigration took place at a particular time and in particular political circumstances. It was in 1959, so not in the worst Stalinist years, but still during the Cold War years. So the assumption was that we would never go back. To Poland? To Poland. It was not my decision to emigrate. I was having what I considered a happy and satisfactory childhood and young adolescence. So for me there was a great sense of rupture about it. And, also, at that time, the differences between Eastern Europe and the West, the differences between Cracow, where I grew up, and Vancouver, where we came to, were enormous, so the sense of culture shock was enormous. There was a real sense of shock and perhaps something like a cultural trauma in those first stages of immigration. You write a lot about your parents. I'm curious as to how they shaped your character. In asking that question, I want to quote something you say in your book, Exit Into History: "Parents often pass on to their offspring not what they are but how ideally they imagine themselves." When I was born my parents had just emerged from the war and from the Holocaust, and there was a double sense, within their character but also within Poland as a whole, of a very recent tragedy. At the same time, there was a sense that my parents had a tremendous will to live, a tremendous life energy and joie de vivre, which I imbibed from them. They were also largely self-educated but great readers. They certainly passed on a very natural, very intimate love of books, of reading, to me. As for their ideal sense, I don't know whether they had an ideal sense of themselves, and that, in itself, was interesting. They did not have what the English call any "side" to them. They did not have any sort of affectation. I felt that I saw human nature in a very intimate way in them and in its many facets, including the life energy that I talked about and also the sense of suffering that was a very powerful pull on them after the war. So I can say I never had a strong sense of a generation gap that I found [in others] when I came to America. I felt there was a great deal of intimacy and that they didn't camouflage certain things or have Puritanical ideas of selfhood that I needed to rebel against later. It's important to tell our audience here that you and your parents were both Polish and Jewish. Yes. Your family was emigrating because of the hostility to Jews emerging during this phase of Communist rule in Poland. Did they leave Poland with a greater ambivalence than you about the Polish part of their identity? Yes. They had a much stronger sense of Jewish identity than I did. They came from a small town, from a shtetl, in the Ukraine, in the part of the Ukraine which was Polish before the war and then reverted to Soviet hands. My parents had a very strong sense of Jewish identity and a sense of Polish anti-Semitism. In 1956 the ban on emigration for Jews from Poland was lifted. This was quite exceptional. Poland had been a country from which you could not emigrate, so this was an exceptional moment. Much of the Jewish population took the opportunity of that moment to leave. It should be said that a lot of other people might have wanted to emigrate. Poland at that point was a war-ravaged, impoverished country. So I would say that the reasons for emigration were various and certainly this sense that there were strong strains of anti-Semitism were among those reasons. I was very much formed within Polish culture. You mentioned the importance of reading in your family, and one of the many beautiful passages in your book is a description of the visits of you and your mother to the library to check out books. So very early, the world of books and writing became very important to you. Absolutely, yes. We were not a household which had its own library. But, indeed, my mother took me to the libraries regularly. And this particular library was a little bit like a magic cave. It was in one of the old Renaissance Cracow buildings and went inward through a long darkening corridor. I had a sense that these wonderful, magical objects were being brought out for me, and I would take them home and read them quite voraciously. Music also was important to you, and one of the formative mentors that you had as a young person was a piano teacher. Tell us about her and why you speak of the moral education provided by your music teacher. She herself was a wonderful, very gentle, very thoughtful person, who taught me in the most gentle of ways. And her name was? Mrs. Witeszczak. First of all, playing requires a great honesty of craft. It is not something in which you can get away with fudging things. So there is a basic honesty of skill and craft that you learn. But also what I learned from music was that it required a kind of emotional integrity. That if I did not feel [the emotions] the music was trying to express, it would not come out well. Playing music required a kind of emotional self-examination, or at least knowing exactly what your internal life is in relation to the music. That was a valuable moral education. Also in the sense of discipline. Music just requires a great deal of discipline. In your book, the virtues that you ascribe in addition to discipline are physical strength -- the strength of the fingers -- and total devotion. And you speak of the Polish word, polot -- inspiration and flying. So all of these came together in that music. Yes, all of them came together in the music. Music, I think, really is the most expressive of the arts. And it was very much valued in the Polish culture also, I should say. So that was a kind of great encouragement as well. But, yes, polot was very important. Polot: this sense of spark and inspiration, of flight -- a kind of disciplined spontaneity, and an expression of the wholeness of personality. And the wholeness of the repertory of feeling which is so possible in music. Becoming a Writer In choosing the path that you took, you clearly had two choices: one was to become a musician, and the other was to become a writer. Ultimately you chose writing over music. What do you think went into that very important decision? After all, music and writing are very similar, as you describe them. Emigration affected me very importantly. First of all, the Vancouver to which I came did not have a very rich musical life. I did have a wonderful music teacher -- actually, two wonderful music teachers there -- but there wasn't a fertile soil for that. It seemed from our immigrant point of view that going to Juilliard might have been nearly impossible. That possibly becoming a pianist would have been very impractical. All of that had a great impact on the decision. I must say that in retrospect I don't regret the decision, although initially I did. And one of the reasons I don't regret it is because there are so many peerless, fantastic pianists in the world and the repertory has been recorded over and over so fabulously. I'm not sure I could have contributed anything really new. And I think one has a chance to bring one's own voice to [writing]. Writing for someone for whom English was a second language poses a particular set of problems. One of the beautiful insights in your book Lost in Translation is your description of coming to terms with the English language and finding a voice in that language. You write in that book: "Like so many children who read a lot, I began to declare rather early that I wanted to be a writer." Then you go on to say, "I love words insofar as they correspond to the world, insofar as they give it to me in a heightened form. The more words I have, the more distinct, precise, my perceptions become. And such lucidity is a form of joy. Sometimes when I find a new expression, I roll it on the tongue, as if shaping it in my mouth gave birth to a new shape in the world. Nothing fully exists until it is articulated." So what we're hearing here as you chose writing and became a truly great writer is that same devotion to the craft that you had found in music. The main impact of immigration for me was my sense of the enormous importance of language. I think that for a while I was, in effect, without language, because Polish lost its relevance to this new world and there were very few people with whom I could speak Polish, and I hadn't yet come into English. And I understood that to be without language is to live in a very dim world, a very dim external world and a very dim interior world. Language is not only something that we use instrumentally, but it is something that truly shapes us, and that truly shapes our perceptions of the world. I always did love language as I was growing up. I loved books. I loved language as much as music. But that sense of losing language was a very, very powerful and potent lesson in the importance of language. And so, indeed from then on, my struggle was for English to inhabit me and to acquire enough command of it so that it would articulate the world and so that it would express the world -- both exterior and interior. Let me quote Eva Hoffman to Eva Hoffman. You're describing this condition of not having that primordial familiarity with English in the way that you did with Polish. "The signifier" -- you're talking about a new language -- "The signifier has become severed from the signified. A word like 'river' has no accumulated associations for me and it does not give off the radiating haze of connotation. It does not evoke." So here you are, a teenager, and all that involves -- the set of tasks that that involves for any young woman -- but at the same time you're trying to come to grips with all that you've lost. Now, you're given a diary. And this, in a way, is a critical early decision. What was the decision and what did you decide? Well, I did decide to write it in English. And I decided to write it in English precisely because I knew that this was the language in which I would need to live from now on. That Polish was still the language of interiority, but that I wanted to make English the language of interiority. I was not quite 14, so I was young enough to make this transition. And it was a fairly deliberate decision to make the transition. To make English totally mine. You say, "I will learn English through writing" as you begin using the diary, "and in turn, writing gives me a written self." Yes, it is true. Of course, writing at some point does begin to shape you and define you and to speak back to you, so to speak. And so, in a sense, I started, yes, I started constructing myself, as we say. Shaping myself, creating myself through these exercises in writing in English. Caught between two worlds -- the world of Poland and the new world of Canada -- this process was, as writers say, a way of finding your voice? Yes. Early on I wouldn't have put it that way. I was just trying to find any voice at all, a voice in which I could speak. There was a literal sense of a loss of a physical voice that I had for awhile. English was still an alien form of expression. But I guess, yes, these were the earliest of attempts to be able to initially speak in English from within, and then write in English from within. When you were still young, before you went to college, were you writing more than your diary or did that all come later? Was I writing more than my diary? Yes. Oh, I would occasionally write pieces of poetry and this and that. But mostly, mostly the writing came later. Being a Displaced Person In your book you talk a lot about finding the inner guide to locate yourself. You're in class and you're looking at the map with your fellow classmates, and you suddenly realize that you're pointing at Poland, which is outside of you or becoming outside of you in the way that the students are looking at it. And you say somewhere, "The reference points inside my head are beginning to do a flickering dance. I suppose this is the most palpable meaning of displacement. I have been dislocated from my own center of the world and the world has been shifted away from my center. There is no longer a straight axis anchoring my imagination. It begins to oscillate and I rotate around it unsteadily." Yes, the sense of geographical topsy-turviness was the most concrete expression of displacement. Of course when I was growing up in Poland, I thought that Poland was the very center of the world, as we all do when we grow up in a place. And that the world existed in relation to it. All of a sudden, I was in Vancouver, and Canada, North America, was the center of the world and Poland was on the periphery and very far away. And that of course, corresponded, [was] a kind of objective correlative, the most concrete symbol of the many cultural displacements that went along with it, the many sorts of cultural values that changed as I went from Poland to Canada. Our cultural values, both on the largest and on the smallest scale in the sense of, say, political outlook or world view or the social set-up; too, notions of human intimacy or beauty or the distances at which we stand from each other, etc., etc. -- every cultural value sort of did a flip or sort of moved. So you had to become a navigator. In one place you compare yourself indirectly to an anthropologist, especially the fact that the goal of every anthropologist is to get into the minds of the people that are being studied. Yes. Yes, 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. And at first you notice the surface things, the surface differences. And gradually you start noticing the deeper differences. And very gradually you start with understanding the inner life of the culture, the life of those both large and very intimate values. It was a surprisingly long process is what I can say. Being Polish and Jewish Time passes and you decide on the kinds of things that you're going to write. One of the central concerns that you have in your work is the dichotomy between your identity as a Polish person and your identity as a Jewish person -- the problem of reconciling those two identities. Talk a little about that and how you distanced yourself from your parents in this regard. I grew up in postwar Poland. I went to Polish schools. I grew up in a Poland in which the Jewish culture had been decimated, although there was a Jewish community in Cracow still. And certainly this was one of the gifts that my parents gave me, that they taught me never to camouflage or hide the fact of my Jewishness and, in fact, to claim it with a sense of pride. So I certainly fully identified as a Jewish person, a secular Jewish person, but fully a Jewish person. At the same time, I was going to Polish schools. I was being formed by Polish culture. I had Polish friends. I lived in Poland. In a sense, it did not seem so difficult to synthesize the two when I was there. What I sometimes say when people ask me, "Are you Polish or are you Jewish?" is what a great Polish-Jewish interwar poet kept saying, Alexander Wat (who, in fact, lived in California for quite a few years of his life). He was a great interwar poet, writing in Polish; Jewish. And when people kept asking him, "Are you Polish or are you Jewish?" his answer was, "I'm Polish-Polish and Jewish-Jewish." And, you know, this seemed entirely possible when I was growing up in Poland. It probably would have become a lot more problematized later as the political situation changed and there was an expulsion of Jews in 1968, but it was not so difficult to do. There were many other people in my situation, and I think we rather easily felt ourselves to be Polish and Jewish. To some extent, my parents already did, too, although their sense of Jewishness had much more primacy. For me, they were perhaps about equal. I think the split comes much more in immigration and from a distance. You write in your book, "I find that the Polish and Jewish parts of my history, my identity, my loyalties refuse either to separate or to reconcile. At the very moments my attachment to Poland, my admiration for all that is powerful in its culture is strongest, I upbraid myself for insufficient vigilance on behalf of those who suffered here, on behalf, really, of my parents who survived the Holocaust and awful circumstances. Every time I hear Poland described reductively as an anti-Semitic country, I bridle in revolt, for that I know that reality is far more tangled than that." Yes. As I say, the split, the division between these two parts of my and many other people's identity became exacerbated when I came to Canada and to the States, where the two are assumed to be very separate and very irreconcilable. So that very often I have found myself in a situation of wanting to defend Poland and Polishness, and then feeling a bit guilty that I was not, in fact, upholding the legacy of Jewishness enough. I think for Polish Jews who are still in Poland, the conversation is a little bit different and the understanding of the very inextricable complexity of it is much more taken for granted. One of the things you've been talking about while you're here at Berkeley is this problem of memory and history. You wrote recently in the New York Review of Books of "disentangling the easy pieties of memory from history's difficult and complex truths." In Shtetl, which is the story of the relationship of the Jews and the Poles living side by side in Poland, you write in the introduction: "From memory, to be part of a process of growth and maturation, there must be active understanding." You go on elsewhere to speak of the need "to remember strenuously, to explore, decode, and deepen the terrain of memory." With that vision, what did you try to achieve in that book, and why was that book so important to you? It was important to me precisely because I felt that the understanding of Polish-Jewish history and of the Polish-Jewish relationship has become so reductive in the West. From the distance, it is so much easier to see it in stark and very reductive terms. And I thought that this was very unjust to that history and to the richness of that history. It was a long and very fascinating and a very rich relationship, which I could talk about at length. But the notion that Poland is kind of a quintessentially anti-Semitic country was one of the most deeply entrenched sorts of stereotypes and prejudices, and somehow a stereotype which was allowed to remain in its very unrevised form. We should remind our audience that in the Holocaust many of the people were killed in Poland. It is that history and the memory of those events that I think you're saying in your book obscures a long history of different relations between Poles and Jews. Yes. ... where the relationships took very different forms. But it's really that burden of the Holocaust that distorts this long view. Yes. Our vision of the longer history. Yes, absolutely. Poland was occupied. Nazi-occupied Poland was the very center of the catastrophe, because most of the world's Jewish population was in Poland. It should be remembered that this did not happen for accidental reasons. Most of the world's Jewish population was in Poland because Poland, over various periods, was very hospitable to Jews. But then this great destruction, this great catastrophe came, and, of course understandably, the shadow of that overwhelmed our perceptions of the longer history. But we need now to start to excavate and to understand that previous very long period of coexistence. This is a history going back hundreds of years, in which the Jewish community enjoyed some of the most secure autonomy and rights that they ever found anywhere in the world in the diaspora. Yes. It was an absolutely fascinating sort of cross-ethnic, cross-religious relationship, because, yes, the Jews were given a great deal of autonomy. They were not pressed to assimilate. And at the same time they were not threatened with expulsion, ever. And this was actually very exceptional in European history. [The Poles] had allowed a great Jewish culture to develop and thrive there. In the book Shtetl, you focus on the history of one town. Bransk. What surprised you the most in doing that research and telling the story? I think what surprised me was the degree of cultural and spiritual separation which obtained in these little towns, in these shtetls, between the Poles and the Jews, until the interwar period. A spiritual and cultural separation which coexisted with daily human contact, daily commercial contact. The degree of that separation, I suppose, surprised me. As I say, it was breaking down in the interwar period. During the period of the war, there was a great spectrum of behavior. And I was, of course, very disturbed by the instances of very virulent anti-Semitism. On the other hand, there were instances, equally numerous, of very heroic behavior, of rescuing Jews. You tell the story of a young Polish woman who was a pharmacist who was presented with a situation where the previous pharmacist, a Jewish fellow, brought his family there after the Nazis had occupied the town, and she hid them. Yes. And saved their lives. Tell us that story and what you found in her courage. What was the basis for her taking this courageous act? In her case, the decision to take in these Jewish people and to shelter them, which, you know, carried enormous risks -- the penalty for helping Jews at that point was death; people were executed in the town of Bransk, Polish people, for helping Jews -- in her case, the decision was very much a reflex. She was young; she perhaps didn't have a full consciousness of the risks, although she had some. It was a reflex; it was a kind of human reflex, and it was a reflex in her case actually informed by her Christian religiousness. You know: one helps people in those situations. One simply helps people. And so she took them in and then, with the help of a local priest, found them a safer shelter. So that was that particular instance. There were other people who took these kinds of risks with a much fuller cognizance of the enormous hazards that they carried. They took them over a longer period -- people who sheltered Jewish people for a year or two or longer. But in her case, it was just a sense that this is what one does. One does not turn away a person in danger. We interviewed Philip Gourevitch here, and he found similar cases in the Rwandan situation. Yes, I'm sure. One particular case, a hotel manager who began acting in the same kind of courageous way that you're describing. Now, your parents were the beneficiaries of such human kindnesses when they fled from the Holocaust ... Yes. ... and were in hiding. When they were in hiding, yes. I think my initial sense of the great complexity of this situation came from knowing their stories during the war, which I will come back to in a minute, but also from growing up in the war-ravaged Poland, in which it should be said three million Poles lost their lives as well, so I had a palpable sense of a very encompassing tragedy, a tragedy which included Poles as well as Jews. But, yes, indeed, my parents survived those years in their own shtetl, which was in the Ukraine, as I said, in the Polish part of the Ukraine in which the population was very much divided between Polish Jews and Ukrainians. I think perhaps almost equally. And they were saved and sheltered particularly by two Ukrainian families, and helped by others as well. They felt endangered by other people. But, yes, they were sheltered. In the case of one family, initially, they gave them a few things. I mean, there was a kind of payment for this. Eventually they ran out of things to give them, but by that time the family simply got very attached to them. And, again, at the risk of enormous danger to their lives, kept them until the end of the war. What do you think is the key ingredient for our common survival in this world of multi-ethnic tensions? What lessons do you draw? At one point, when you're visiting Eastern Europe after the fall of the Wall, you say, "treating others with affection, but without sentimentality, because they are all equally subject to certain common expectations, to certain ideas of what is required from themselves and each other. Perhaps it is some sense of a shared dignity." Again and again you seem to be saying that in acquiring your own dignity, you respect the dignity of others. Is that one of the key ingredients here of avoiding the kinds of Yugoslav situations which we're seeing all over the world now? I think so. I very much think so. I think that if you think of your history or yourself only defensively and only in victimological terms, then you're very likely to project onto others a certain sense of threat. Of course, it goes in the other direction as well. If you adduce to yourself too much of a sense of power and centrality and triumphalism and normativeness, you also project onto others a sense of their insufficient humanity. But I think one very much needs a sense of one's dignity as an agent in the world. And also, I think we very much need common political spheres on which we can meet in an honest dialogue, because that honest dialogue and having these spheres, these forums, in which we can talk across differences and across barriers lessens the possibility of this projection, of somehow attributing qualities to others which are so radically different from yours. In your book on the shtetl, you're walking us through this history of relations which are surprising at two levels. One is the way the Poles and the Jews existed side by side. But the second thing that's really surprising is the extent to which this earlier period is not in our consciousness. One cause for the breakdown seems to be the change in the economic situation. Yes. And the other seems to be a breakdown in the physical security of Poland, as one Great Power after another intervenes, which then leads the principals, the Jews in particular, to sometimes side with the outsider. Yes, yes. So, in a way, history enters here, right? Yes. In understanding this broader framework in which you get the breakdown.... Absolutely, yes. There are circumstances in which conflicts become exacerbated, because it should be said that for many decades or for many centuries the coexistence between Poles and Jews was perfectly peaceable. There were moments when, yes, the Poles themselves started feeling much more defensive and when there were real conflicts of loyalties and interests, as at the beginning of the war, when the Jews of Eastern Poland, for very understandable reasons for their own part, sided with the invading Soviets, who were, of course, Poland's traditional enemy. So, of course, there was an exacerbation of conflict. And I think, indeed, that if there had been more shared political Polish-Jewish forums, perhaps this could have been avoided to some extent. But I don't want to stress only the separateness, either. The cultural and spiritual separateness did exist in the shtetls, combined with completely peaceable and tolerant coexistence for long, long periods of time. Even in the shtetls that was changing in the inter-war period. But in the big cities, aside from the parts of the population which were separate, there was also a lot of inter-cultural interaction. There were very interesting episodes in which there were Jewish legions which participated in Polish uprisings against the Russians in the nineteenth century. Something that is very much forgotten, that there were Jewish legions and Jewish generals, and Polish leaders would make rousing speeches in which they would refer to ancient Jewish uprisings against the Romans, for example, as prototypes for their own uprisings against the Russians. So there were moments and spheres of great cooperation. Finding a Voice: History and Memory It is clear from your book that others, both Polish and Jewish, have found it important to get the story right. On the one hand, you quote from a book of Jewish memories, a Yizkor book, that the Jewish community had created in this shtetl telling their story. And then you encounter a Polish historian ... Yes. ... who has worked conscientiously to tell the story, get the facts. What is it about memory and history that leads individuals to take on this burden of getting the story right? I think that for this young man who grew up after the war in a town which had no more Jews, but the Jewish population had been a large part of his town, there was simply a sense of a very poignant absence. And also a sense that this was a part of his history. That in order to understand himself, in order to understand Polishness, he needed to understand the Jewish part of that history. I think there is simply a great impulse in us to know the truth and to know the truth of the past. What is striking about the book Shtetl is that in this beautifully written text, you're finding a voice as a writer, but at the same time dealing with personal feelings about the memory of Poland and of Jews in your family's consciousness. Tell us about the struggles of navigating that terrain: ultimately it leads to a kind of reconciliation and fulfillment in your own psyche, doesn't it? It does. It was very important for me to integrate these two parts of the psyche which were equally formative, equally important in my growing up. In my writing, especially in Lost in Translation, there was an attempt to integrate, in a sense, the Polish and the American parts of the self; in Shtetl, the Polish and Jewish parts of the self. Because for me, for my generation, for many people, it is the division and the distillation of one part of identity which is artificial and the synthesis and reconciliation which is not. Were there particular challenges in doing this kind of writing? Was it a particularly intense struggle that required control of your own emotions? As I look at these works, I'm reminded of what you had to say about music, that your education as a musician was about mastering your own emotions, understanding your inner life, to find expression. That seems to be what's going on in this entirely different medium. Is that fair? Well, it's very interesting. I suppose, yes, that music is an inclusive medium. Music is a medium in which many things can be held together in the full picture and in the full pattern. And I suppose that subliminally, as I write, there's a very important notion to me not to be artificially eliminative. To try to somehow talk about the whole. It is something that music can do wonderfully, and that is a kind of subliminal criterion and standard for me as I write. I think that's right. How do you write? Is it hard for you to write? What is the craft of writing for you? It very much differs from piece to piece. In a way, shorter pieces are more labor-intensive, oddly enough, because they're like the short story as opposed to a novel. Everything is very exposed. In the longer books it is a question of finding a voice and finding a form. And once that happens -- of course, you can take a long time to arrive at that and it's difficult to say exactly how one does arrive at it -- but once I arrive at that, the writing tends to flow a bit more easily. When I was writing Lost in Translation, the crucial moment for me was deciding, finding, the present tense. Until then I was sort of writing things out in the more conventional narrative form, in the past tense. And then all of a sudden the present tense came to me. I arrived at it. And it very much liberated me to start writing. What would be your advice to students who look at your works, are inspired, and want to become writers? How should they prepare and what should they know about what it involves? It involves a lot of hard labor and discipline. It really does. Sometimes I think about the metaphor of marathon runners and hitting the wall and going on beyond it, and I think one has to make great efforts in order to find that point at which the writing begins to flow. It's a great deal of discipline. But I think, also, writing emerges from thinking and feeling. And one has to think hard and feel truthfully before one begins to write. I think every piece of writing demands its own form. And I think finding a form depends very much on figuring out what you feel about the subject, and what it is really that you want to say from yourself. What is involved also is courage, because for you in particular, telling these stories about, for example, these two peoples who are both very important to you, in a way you had to distance yourself even from your parents in interviews on some of these matters. Tell us about that. Where did you get the courage? Well, actually I got the courage from my parents. That is very much their legacy. My father had a kind of physical courage which allowed him and both of them to survive physically, and a kind of courage and the ability to see the situation, which allowed them to survive. But they very much had the courage of their integrity. They were not people who camouflaged things or who tried to accommodate themselves to the world in their opinions. They had a great deal of integrity. So I think I owe it to them a lot. If I enter into a dialogue in my actual opinions with them, that is, in fact, what happens across the generations. When we complete the circle in this trilogy of nonfiction that you've written, in retrospect, being an immigrant was something of a blessing in the work of finding your voice as a writer. Is that correct? I think that's very much true, yes. I don't know whether I would have started writing had I not emigrated. Yes. First of all, the fact that it was an experience which in a sense shook me to my foundations and led me to examine a lot of things. And secondly, that emigration and exile is something that forces you to examine and think about many things, but also gives you a very strong vantage point, a kind of oblique angle, both on the world that you come into and the world that you have left behind. And I think especially for a writer that can be a great bonus, yes. You write "To some extent one has to rewrite the past in order to understand it. I have to see Cracow" -- where you came from -- "in the dimensions it has to my adult eye in order to perceive that my story has been only a story. That none of its events has been so big or so scary. It is the price of immigration, as of any radical discontinuity, that it makes such reviews in re-reading difficult. Being cut off from part of one's story is apt to veil it in the haze of nostalgia, which is an ineffectual relationship to the past, and the haze of alienation, which is an ineffectual relationship to the present." So, in the end the story comes full circle, but it has to be told in its entirety. It has to be told in its entirety, yes. I think that's very true. And I think that was very integrative and synthesizing, yes, indeed. Eva, thank you very much for joining us in for this Conversation with History. Thank you. And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with Eva Hoffman. © Copyright 2000, Regents of the University of California