Lost in Translation

In April 1959, 13-year-old Eva stood at the railing of the ship Batory as it pulled away from the Polish port of Gdynia, watching her homeland recede. Her younger sister, Alina, clutched her hand without comprehending what was happening. Their parents had just endured a body search by customs police, a final gesture of anti-Jewish harassment, though the officials failed to check the girls, who carried forbidden silverware hidden under their sweaters. Eva experienced her first severe attack of tęsknota, a Polish word that adds tonalities of sadness and longing to nostalgia. Of Canada, their destination, she knew almost nothing.

The memoir traces Eva's life from childhood in postwar Cracow through emigration to Vancouver, Canada, and her eventual emergence as a writer and intellectual in New York. It is at once a story of immigration and a meditation on language, identity, and what is lost and gained when a person is uprooted from one culture and transplanted into another.

Eva reconstructs her early years in Cracow with sensory richness. Born about two months after World War II ended, she was the daughter of Jewish survivors. Her father, a short, powerfully built man, saved her parents' lives through repeated daring: He escaped a transport bound for a concentration camp, overpowered captors on a bridge, and jumped from an attic window during a German search. Her mother's younger sister was killed in a gas chamber; Eva's own sister was named Alina after this murdered aunt. These wartime stories formed the bedrock of Eva's origin, though as a child she grasped them only partially.

Despite the cramped apartment and the shadow of suffering, Eva's childhood was one of dense fullness. She describes lying in bed at age four, savoring consciousness itself. She read voraciously, devouring historical novels, Anne of Green Gables, and eventually War and Peace, which she experienced not as a book but as life. Words and perceptions were fused: New expressions gave birth to new shapes in the world. At eight, she began piano lessons and discovered a passionate connection to music. Her teacher Pani Witeszczak provided what Eva later recognizes as a moral education, teaching that tone cannot lie and that expressive freedom requires rigorous discipline.

Jewish identity permeated the household, though her parents were secular. Her mother told her at age seven to stop crossing herself in front of churches. Anti-Semitism surfaced regularly: Her father got into a fistfight after someone praised Hitler's elimination of Jews, and a classmate's father singled Eva out as "You little Jew." When prayers were introduced in Polish schools in 1957, Eva stood silently during the Lord's Prayer and was once attacked by children shouting "Out with the Yids!" Yet her friends defended her, and her trust remained intact.

The political atmosphere of 1950s Poland shaped her developing consciousness. She instinctively refused to cry at a staged school assembly mourning Stalin's death. In 1956, upheaval followed the death of President Bierut: Portraits of Lenin and Stalin were torn down, and rumors of civil war terrified the children. Meanwhile, the Jewish exodus accelerated after emigration restrictions were lifted in 1957. Friends departed one by one. Marek, Eva's closest friend and childhood love, left for Israel with his family. On his last day, he told Eva's father she was supposed to be his wife. Eva's parents, however, chose Canada after receiving a sponsorship letter from Mr. Rosenberg, a prewar acquaintance in Vancouver.

The memoir chronicles the trauma of arrival in Vancouver. At school, Ewa became "Eva" and Alina became "Elaine," a renaming that opened a gap between self and identity. More devastating was the severing of language from meaning: "River" in Polish had been a vital sound infused with the essence of riverhood; in English it was cold, without associations. At night, the most painful loss occurred: The spontaneous inner monologue that had been Eva's way of processing experience went silent. Polish had atrophied from disuse, and English had not yet penetrated the deeper layers of her psyche.

Mr. Rosenberg demanded repayment for the family's train tickets and told them to leave his house within a week. Eva's father, who had thrived on outwitting the Communist system, could not find his footing in Vancouver's polite environment; without an enemy to outsmart, he sank into despair. Eva developed what she calls "the Big Fear," a driving anxiety born from knowledge of how unprotected her family had become. She navigated adolescent social life with painful self-consciousness, devising strategies of survival: cultivating detachment, writing her diary in English to fashion a written self, and accelerating through high school in three years to deliver a valedictory address.

At Rice University in Houston, her linguistic handicap proved paradoxically useful. Her mind, deprived of verbal texture, had become an instrument of abstraction suited to close literary analysis. She read American literature from an oblique angle, noticing what was invisible to her classmates. She fell in love with a fair-haired Texan, and they talked strenuously, trying to translate themselves for each other, but never achieved intuitive recognition. An internal dialogue staged in two languages dramatizes her decision to abandon the piano for literature: The Polish voice resisted while the English voice argued for pragmatism.

At Harvard, she walked Cambridge's streets tentatively trying on a new home. A breakthrough came when, preparing to teach T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," she suddenly heard the inner music of English poetry: its understated melancholy and civilized restraint. Words became beautiful things again. She married, drawn by her husband's eloquence, but could not fully read the language of his feelings. The marriage ended.

Seventeen years after their parting, Marek called from New York, and Eva flew to meet him. They exchanged childhood memories with the intensity of people who are each other's only witnesses, but they could not beat their way back through accumulated time. Years later, Eva's parents told her Marek had died by suicide in the Israeli desert. Eva reflects on children like themselves, overshadowed by their parents' wartime histories, who could not make sufficient sense of the several worlds they grew up in.

A 1977 return to Poland released her to move forward. She visited Pani Witeszczak, who calmly absolved her of guilt about abandoning music. She walked the Planty, the tree-lined park encircling Cracow's old city, and paused at a chestnut tree where she had once experienced an epiphany of wholeness. When her childhood friend Danuta Dombarska asked if she ever regretted not staying, Eva could not answer: The person who would have lived that hypothetical life was unknowable.

In New York, Eva developed what she calls "immigrant rage," eruptions at friends over cultural assumptions she perceived as invisible tyrannies. She began therapy, describing it as "translation therapy": a project of retelling her whole story in one language so that a unified self could emerge. A dream arrived entirely in English, signaling that the language had entered her unconscious. Polish and English now modified each other, making each other relative.

The memoir closes with Eva in a Cambridge garden, learning the names of flowers from Miriam, a close friend of nearly 20 years. She experiences them as fully real, without Polish counterparts requiring comparison. Beneath all her acquired voices, she has found what she calls a white blank center, a ground of silence from which a true voice can emerge. Dislocation, she concludes, is the norm of contemporary awareness, and an immigrant's restlessness is both the residue of loss and a form of hard-won freedom.