Eva Hoffman – författare

In 1959 13-year-old Eva Hoffman left her home in Cracow, Poland for a new life in America. This memoir evokes with deep feeling the sense of uprootendess and exile created by this disruption, something which has been the experience of tens of thousands of people this century.Her autobiography is profoundly personal but also tells one of the most universal and important narratives of twentieth century history: the story of Jewish post-war experience and the tragedies and discoveries born of cultural displacement.

The sub-title is important: The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World. The small town is Bransk, in eastern Poland. Before World War II, Bransk was a shtetl whose population was equally divided between Poles and Jews. Today there are no Jews.In Shtetl, Eva Hoffman reconstructs the lost world of East European Jewry She explores the rich culture and institutions of Polish Jews, and looks at the forms of multicultural coexistence during several centuries, the shades of prejudice and tolerance and the phases of conflict and comity. By probing the deep ambivalence that coloured relations between Poles and Jews on the eve of World War II, Shtetl throws new light on motives which influenced Christian villagers' decisions to rescue or betray their Jewish neighbours when the Nazis invaded.'Charting the ebbs and flows of repression and tolerance, uprisings and occupation, migration and assimilation of Poland's history, Shtetl provides a rare and valuable analysis of the troubled relationship between Poles and Jews over the centuries. For the Jews, Poland is the symbol of murder where the Nazis set up their killing fields and where the Polish post-war response was further brutality, followed by amnesia: for the Poles, there remains a feeling of unfairness that their own wartime sufferings are overlooked. Hoffman's interest lies in rescuing the past from the evasions, concealments and half-truths demanded by post-war politics and national pride - as well as from the additions of the imagination, which all memory to some extent invokes.' Caroline Moorehead, Daily Telegraph 'A luminous and deeply engrossing social history' Lisa Appignanesi, Independent'This is a subtle, fair, scrupuously even-handed piece of work. It begs moral questions of us all ... Hoffman gives no answers, but she asks the questions, and observes the moral hazards with a rare sensitivity.' Julia Neuberger, Irish Times

'A book that takes you on an intimate journey through Eastern Europe at a time when the dust was still settling from the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Eva Hoffman travels from the Baltic to the Black Sea, building a compelling portrait of a region uncertain about its future.' IndependentShortly after the epochal events of 1989 Eva Hoffman spent several months in her native Poland and four other countries: the then-Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. She visited capital cities, wayside villages and provincial towns; stopped at shipyards, museums, and the coffee-houses of the intelligentsia; and talked to a great variety of people about the tumult they had lived through. Exit into History was the result: a portrait of the mosaic of the new Eastern Europe, a reconstruction of the turbulent post-war decades, and a meditation on the uses and misuses of historical memory.

A compelling personal introduction to the life and work of Nobel Prize–winning writer Czesław Miłosz from his fellow Polish exile and acclaimed writer Eva HoffmanCzesław Miłosz (1911–2004) was a giant of twentieth-century literature, not least because he lived through and wrote about many of the most extreme events of that extreme century, from the world wars and the Holocaust to the Cold War. Over a seven-decade career, he produced an important body of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including classics such as The Captive Mind, a reflection on the hypnotic power of ideology, and Native Realm, a memoir. In this book, Eva Hoffman, like Miłosz a Polish-born writer who immigrated to the West, presents an eloquent personal portrait of the life and work of her illustrious fellow exile.Miłosz experienced the horrors of World War II in Warsaw—the very epicenter of the inferno—and witnessed the unfolding of the Holocaust from up close. After the war, he lived as a permanent exile—from Poland, communism, and mainstream American culture. Hoffman explores how exile, historical disasters, and Miłosz’s origins in Eastern Europe shaped his vision, and she occasionally compares her own postwar trajectory with Miłosz’s to show how the question of “the Other Europe” is still with us today. She also examines his later turn to the poetry of memory and loss, driven by the need to remember and honor his many friends and others killed in the Holocaust.Combining incisive personal and critical insights, On Czesław Miłosz captures the essence of the life and work of a great poet and writer.

Awakening intrinsic motivation in young people is the most important key to securing them a meaningful and successful life. No matter how much we know about how to learn, no lasting learning is likely to take place unless we want to learn; unless we are convinced of the reasons and have the confidence and resilience to achieve our goals.Motivating the Teenage Mind is a unique, comprehensive, practical, activity-based motivational programme for secondary students. It will give every student an opportunity to recognise their strengths, awaken their aspirations and become aware of the reasons for learning, and show them how to confidently create a vision for their future lives.The programme provides educators with seven key aspects of motivation: making and giving choices; awakening curiosity and interest; nurturing dreams and setting goals; making learning relevant; raising confidence; strengthening resilience; and rewarding achievement. Aimed primarily at 11-16 year old secondary pupils, this resource is also suitable for 16-18 year old college students.

This is a must-have book to study, learn and revise using various innovative techniques, including mind mapping. Teaching is often delivered in a way that best suits the learning style of those teaching rather than the recipient. This book provides a first step to understanding your own unique and most effective learning strategies. It includes illustrations on how to use and PowerPoint training tools. Easy to understand, comprehensive and rigorously tested. Includes: how to discover how you learn best; the importance of mind mapping - a powerful learning tool; and How to boost memory. The author introduces a range of strategies to achieve the goal of becoming a more effective learner, for example steps: select strategies and tips that appeal to you; try out each one, ideally a few times; evaluate their effectiveness (see whether they work); practise the ones that work; and savour your success! Part one of the book deals with understanding that each person is unique and it is important therefore to understand that learner styles will differ, but all are valid. It provides methods to examine and understand personal and emotional strengths and then apply that to identifying study skill strengths. There are activities that identify learning preferences and how to maximise on this discovery. Clearly understanding yourself is the first step to working out the very best way to work. How to use the mind-mapping tool to good effect is explored in detail with many examples and clear illustrations. The second part of the book explores how to apply this new found knowledge and challenges the reader to really examine their attitude to themselves and to learning; how to use this knowledge in a positive way to improve and really enjoy the learning experience. Activities for motivation, attention, creating a suitable learning environment, avoiding distraction and removing stress. This unique book focuses exclusively on learners and their learning. It includes a range of activities especially designed to empower the learner with knowledge about the variety of ways in which people learn, taking the reader on a positive and rewarding journey of self-discovery.

Lethargic inactivity can be debilitating and depressing; but for those living in the modern world, the pendulum has swung far in the other direction. We live in a hectic, hyperactive, over-stimulated age. Excessive busyness and overfilled schedules are the norm, as are their effects on our mental and emotional lives. How might we address and counter such problems, for the sake of experiencing our lives more fully?In How to Be Bored, Eva Hoffman explores the importance we place on success, high level function, effectiveness and alertness in today's competitive society. In a world where it is almost impossible to be idle, she draws upon lessons from history, literature and psychotherapy to help us embrace boredom and find meaning in doing nothing - to appreciate real reflection and enjoy the richness of our inner and external lives.

As the Holocaust recedes in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the next generation. How should they, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors? And what are the second-generation's responsibilities to its received memories? In this meditation on the long aftermath of atrocity, Eva Hoffman- a child of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust with the help of neighbours, but whose entire families perished- probes these questions through personal reflections, and through broader explorations of the historical, psychological, and moral implications of the second-generation experience. She examines the subterranean processes through which private memories of suffering are transmitted, and the more willful stratagems of collective memory. She traces the "second generation's" trajectory from childhood intimations of horror, through its struggles between allegiance and autonomy, and its complex transactions with children of perpetrators. As she guides us through the poignant juncture at which living memory must be relinquished, she asks what insights can be carried from the past to the newly problematic present, and urges us to transform potent family stories into a fully informed understanding of a forbidding history.

In Shtetl (Yiddish for "small town"), critically-acclaimed author Eva Hoffman brings the lost world of Eastern European Jews back to vivid life, depicting its complex institutions and vibrant culture, its beliefs, social distinctions, and customs. Through the small town of Braƒsk, she looks at the fascinating experiments in multicultural coexistence,still relevant to us today, attempted in the eight centuries of Polish-Jewish history, and describes the forces which influenced Christian villagers' decisions to conceal or betray their Jewish neighbours in the dark period of the Holocaust.

Time has always been the great Given, a fact of existence which cannot be denied or wished away; but the character of lived time is changing dramatically. Medical advances extend our longevity, while digital devices compress time into ever briefer units. We can now exist in several time-zones simultaneously, but we suffer from endemic shortages of time. We are working longer hours and blurring the distinctions between labour and leisure. For many, in an inversion of the old adage, time has become more valuable than money.In this look at life's most ineffable element, spanning fields from biology and culture to psychoanalysis and neuroscience, Eva Hoffman asks: are we coming to the end of time as we know it?