Exit into History

Shortly after the dramatic events of 1989, Eva Hoffman, a Polish-born American, spent several months travelling through Poland and four other Eastern European countries which had just undergone an historic transformation. This is her narrative of those travels, and a portrait of a social landscape in the midst of change. While making her way from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Hoffman passed through capital cities, wayside villages and sleepy provincial towns; she visited shipyards, museums, homes, and coffee-houses of the intelligentsia; and she talked with a great variety of people, many of them struggling with the transition from an unwanted past to an uncertain future. Most of all, she uses her bicultural perspective to enter into Eastern European minds and sensibilities and convey what the larger social shifts mean to particular people: to former dissidents wielding political power, deposed apparatchiks turned successful entrepreneurs, artists and technocrats, literate ex-censors, Polish aristocrats, Hungarian gypsies and Bulgarian Turks. Hoffman is the author of "Lost in Translation", an autobiography.