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...

"The School of Life is dedicated to making our lives clearer, less puzzling and more enjoyable - by studying the big themes of life with the help of culture." Alain de BottonLethargic 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...

Selected as one of Oprah.com’s 20 Tantalizing Beach ReadsSelected as a New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceIsabel Merton is a renowned concert pianist, whose performances are marked by a rare responsiveness to the complexities of her art, and its intensities of feeling. At the height of her career, she feels increasingly torn between the compelling musical realm she deeply inhabits, and her fragmented itinerant artist’s life, with its frequent...

Gisella Perl’s memoir is the extraordinarily candid account of women’s extreme efforts to survive Auschwitz. With writing as powerful as that of Charlotte Delbo and Ruth Kluger, her story individualizes and therefore humanizes a victim of mass dehumanization. Perl accomplished this by representing her life before imprisonment, in Auschwitz and other camps, and in the struggle to remake her life. It is also the first memoir by a woman Holocaust survivor and establishes the model for underst...

Novelist, cultural commentator, memoirist, and historian Eva Hoffman examines our ever-changing perception of time in this inspired addition to the BIG IDEAS/small books seriesTime has always been the great given, the element that establishes the governing facts of human fate that cannot be circumvented, deconstructed, or wished away. But these days we are tampering with time in ways that affect how we live, the textures of our experience, and our very sense of wha...

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...

"Of course, I've always had a secret. Have I always known it? I suppose I did, in a way - in the way that children know such things. That is, I knew and didn't know." In this novel Eva Hoffman explores various kinds and strata of secrets: intimate secrets, and secrets of family past; the kinds of secrets that can be decoded from clues, and the kind that themselves seem to offer tantalizing clues to the fundamental mysteries of the human selfhood. This is a story about a peculiarly powerful...

An inventive blend of memoir and family history that ponders those who didn't flee their German town in time: "Powerfully reclaimed—and imagined—reality." — The Jewish ChronicleWinner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and TranslationFor about eighty years, the Jonas family of Osnabrück were part of a small but vibrant Jewish community in this mid-size city of Lower Saxony. After the war, Osnabrück counted not a single Jew. M...

In the latest installment of the acclaimed School of Life series, learn how to make peace with your down time—and even benefit from it.Lethargic inactivity can be debilitating and depressing, but in the modern world the pendulum has swung far in the other direction. We live in a hyperactive, over-stimulated age. Uninterrupted activity can seem exciting, but it can also leave us emotionally disorientated and mentally depleted. How can we recover a sense of balance a...

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 stud...

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 Brafsk, 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...

As the Holocaust recedes from us in time, the guardianship of its legacy is being passed on from its survivors and witnesses to the generation after. How should we, in turn, convey its knowledge to others? What are the effects of a traumatic past on its inheritors, and the second generation's responsibilities to its received memories?Eva Hoffman probes these questions through personal reflections and through broader explorations of the historical, psychological and moral implicatio...