Eva Hoffman (1) (1945–)

Eva Hoffman, née Ewa Wydra, was born in Kracow, Poland, to Jewish Holocaust survivors. In 1959, during a wave of Polish anti-Semitism, the family emigrated to Canada. She originally trained to be a concert pianist but instead became a writer and academic. She moved to the USA at age 19 to attend Rice University in Texas, and then earned a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard. She became a professor of literature and creative writing at several institutions, including Columbia, the University of Minnesota, and Tufts. She has worked as an editor and writer at The New York Times, including as a senior editor of the Book Review in 1987–1990. She has written several critically acclaimed nonfiction works, among them Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), Exit Into History (1993), Stetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (1997), and After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004). She has also produced two novels. She divides her time between London and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a visiting professor at MIT.