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The Self in Nonfiction: Eva Hoffman's autobiographical project

Abstract Edward Said described the perspective of the exile as doubled, and thus privileged:‘Because the exile sees things both in terms of what has been left behind and what is actual here and now, there is a double perspective that never sees things in isolation’ (Said 1993, 60).Thus, the exile possesses a unique capability as an observer, which lends itself particularly well to autoethnography, a genre that attempts to describe a culture while telling the story of an individual's life. In this article, I examine the work of Eva Hoffman and the way in which she first constructs this observer's perspective in Lost in Translation and then employs it in her subsequent publications. I conclude by arguing that Hoffman's exilic perspective leads her to write texts that are not only ethnographic but are also concerned with collective memory and provide a model for examining the past. I focus on a reading of Hoffman's third book, Shtetl, examining the observing consciousness in the text and the way that the autobiographical act becomes a narrative for a collective voice.