When asked for a 60-second idea to change the world, Eva Hoffman did not hesitate. Contributing to a BBC World Service podcast, she proposed that philosophy should be taught to 10 year-olds. “We need to teach it from very early on: philosophy that delves into ethics, which are not based on particular identities but on human consciousness. Philosophy that develops our sense of other minds, and how to understand other people.”
While the need to develop our powers of critical enquiry seems particularly pressing at the moment, it is what this London-based, Polish-born author has always advocated, whether in historical and philosophical essays, memoir, novels, radio documentaries, or in a new departure, a play called The Ceremony, which recently received a rehearsed reading in London, directed by Braham Murray.
Butler's work is steeped in a certain idea of humanism, and a very finely tuned sense of moral judgment
In all her writing, Hoffman advocates a comparative, cross-cultural perspective, an acknowledgment of the degrees of projection and prejudice on both sides of political and ethnic conflicts and the need to relinquish “tribal attachments and received ideas”.
This perspective makes her a very fitting choice to deliver the Hubert Butler Annual Lecture at Kilkenny Arts Festival on Saturday, August 12th. The event, established in 2007, honours the Kilkenny essayist and historian, whose work she admires enormously. “Butler’s work is steeped in a certain idea of humanism, and a very finely tuned sense of moral judgment.”
Diversity and cohesion
When we speak on Skype, her lecture is still a work-in-progress, but she has begun to map its themes. “I want to touch on very contemporary problems, on contemporary democracies and the dangerous state in which they find themselves. I want to focus on diversity and how to combine diversity and cohesion. To ask what real dialogue between cultures and between various groups would look like; what dialogue between moral equals would look like. To stress the need for a culture of democracy that would include everyone and be a culture of citizenship rather than of identities.”
Also under wraps, for now, is a novel that she has just started writing
Laughing, she adds, "I probably shouldn't say too much more, you know, as it is not finished." Also under wraps, for now, is a novel that she has just started writing. Asked whether she always knows what form a new work will take – non-fiction or fiction – she says that with both her previous novels, The Secret (not to be confused with Rhonda Byrne's ubiquitous self-help book) and Illuminations, she knew that they demanded the novel form.
"I am very driven by the subject. I start with an idea or a question, so in some cases the form is very clear. But the question of form was most problematic for my first book, Lost in Translation."
Early years
In this crystalline memoir, published in 1989, Hoffman described her early childhood years in Krakow, before her family emigrated to Canada in the 1950s. Focusing on the profound personal impact of exile and the loss of her native language, it also presented a series of rigorous reflections on how language, culture and society shape the individual’s sense of identity.
“For some time, I did not know that I would make it my own story. I don’t have a very confessional temperament, so I arrived at that gradually. I began to feel that I needed a case study, and the only case study I had was myself.”
It's a very important impetus, to feel that you are speaking not only for yourself, or about yourself
When writing it, she sometimes worried that she was describing such an idiosyncratic experience that nobody would understand what she talking about. Instead, she was astonished – “in a good way” – that it found an enormously responsive international readership; that through her inner excavation she had expressed something universal about the condition of deracination. “What kept me going when I was writing it was that I wanted to write it on behalf of others. It’s a very important impetus, to feel that you are speaking not only for yourself, or about yourself.”
Subsequent books, Shtetl, and Exit Into History explored historic Polish-Jewish relations, and the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution in Eastern Europe. Then came After Such Knowledge, an extended essay on the legacy of the Holocaust and the transmission of cultural memory. In a fusion of autobiography and moral essay, this work distilled her own formative experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors and those of many of her contemporaries, and is a lucid and clear-sighted synthesis drawn from history, literature, philosophy, sociology, ethics and psychoanalysis.
This is what disturbs me about politics altogether at the moment; it just seems so regressive
By creating an elegant interplay between the personal and the abstract in her work, she places high demands on herself as a writer. “Yes, except that this is the way I have come to think. This is the mould of my thought: the great and formative lesson of my emigration is that the self is constructed by language and by culture, and that it is not only your private self, your psyche. We are constructed by our world, by politics, by scientific knowledge, by all kinds of things. This interaction of context and the individual self is what always interests me.”
In this, she has been in dialogue, sometimes in argument, with psychoanalysis, a discipline which she studied intensively and has influenced her thinking. "When I was writing Lost In Translation, it was very informative to think both from and against psychoanalysis. I felt precisely that this question of culture was not taken into account enough."
Anti-Semitism
Having lived in London since moving from the US in the early 1990s, Hoffman is confident that, despite the uncertainty surrounding Brexit, the city will remain her home.
“I find myself very committed to this country, for better or worse. I came here later in life and it was my chosen immigration – as opposed to the other ones. I felt that I had found a decent society, which is not to be taken for granted. I always joke that London is the mid-point between Manhattan and Krakow. It is the global city; it’s incredibly diverse and will remain so no matter what.”
I wrote my book <em>Shtetl</em> partly in order to put paid to the idea that Poland was the great black hole in the world for anti-Semitism, and was defined by nothing but that
London also has the advantage of being within easy reach of Poland, where she keeps in touch with friends and a close eye on what is happening politically, being heartened by the recent mass protests against proposed government bills to control the judiciary. Commenting on the rise of anti-Semitism there, she says,
"This makes me so, so sad. I wrote my book Shtetl partly in order to put paid to the idea that Poland was the great black hole in the world for anti-Semitism, and was defined by nothing but that. Instead it was a long and complex history, with a rich multicultural story. And since 1989 the Poles have done a fantastic amount of reckoning and conscience searching, and there has been an enormous revival of interest in Jewish history and cultural festivals."
“But there is now permission for anti-Semitic discourse. This is the crucial thing: whether it is permitted or not, whether it’s considered perfectly all right. As for what is happening in Hungary, I hardly know how to think about it. I don’t think it is going to explode into anything terrible, but it is the return of something so utterly unpalatable and so retrograde. This is what disturbs me about politics altogether at the moment; it just seems so regressive.”
She continues to be drawn to large, if not daunting, themes, publishing a work on the subject of time for the series Big Ideas/Small Books.
"I proposed this, it was extremely reckless of me," she says, followed by How To Be Bored – "a jeu d'esprit" – that also relates to our perceptions of time, exploring ways of being reflective in the age of digital hyperactivity and speed.
One way to do so, for her, is to play the piano, something she still does for pleasure, having relinquished her childhood ambition of being a concert pianist. The intense evocations of the experience of performing at piano recitals in her novel, Illuminations, prompt me to ask whether she has ever considered composing music.
“Ah. I don’t dare”. Something about the slight pause and laugh suggests that it might not be out of the question.
The 2017 Hubert Butler Annual Lecture, delivered by Eva Hoffman, will be introduced by broadcaster and author Olivia O'Leary at St Canice's Cathedral, Kilkenny, Saturday August 12th, at 6pm. kilkennyarts.ie
