The excerpt I liked most of the ones we had to read was "Lost in Translation" by Eva Hoffman. Out of all four excerpts I felt I could most relate to this one. Ms. Hoffman writes about her immigration to Canada and the struggles she went through assimilating. The largest battle she faced was a language barrier. She had a hard time learning English and had a hard time trying to express what she felt in a new language. Ms. Hoffman distinguished the differences between expressing something such as river in english and how it has a completely different connotation than in Polish. She dealt with issues of class and culture. She was taken under the wing of another Polish immigrant family but they were of higher wealth. She wrote about how much she missed her home and how she had a lot of rage and anger being in this foreign country. She has a similar rage to Anne Moody in "Coming of Age in Mississippi". She just wants to get away from where she is. She is fed up of her surroundings. She longed for home, but she knew that she had to make this her new home. Her home in Poland was no longer her home anymore.
I can relate a lot to Ms. Hoffman's account. I left all my friends at home and I am now in a new school with all new people. Given, I don't have a language barrier there are still certain terms and phrases I use that people here do not understand at all. Like Ms. Hoffman, I am starting to come to grips that this is not just a vacation, this is now my home. Ms. Hoffman talked about how wierd the girls were that she went out with and how out of her element she felt. I have the same feelings here. I'm not used to having different cultures of people and their personalities. Coming from a 97% Irish Catholic neighborhood, I feel very much out of my element here. It seems everyone here is wierd or just kind of backwards. Ms. Hoffman says how she writes a letter to her friend in Poland and tells her how great everything but inside she hates it. I have had all too many of those experiences. What dissappointed me about this excerpt was that it gave no light at the end of the tunnel. At the end of the passage Ms. Hoffman was still unhappy about where she was. This does not give me too much hope.
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I'm glad that you could personally connect with Hoffman's text (though I'm sorry to read about the fact that you are having trouble "assimilating" to life at GW). You might think about how some of these ideas that struck you about Hoffman's text are apparent in the other autobiographies that we read. Do other authors express similar feelings of being out of place? And how do they deal with those feelings? These might be some thoughts to consider as you set out to write your paper.
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