Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language by Eva Hoffman

Author:Eva Hoffman [Hoffman, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
Published: 2011-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

In fact, while the men go to their businesses, most of the women in this room have mighty little connection with the world outside their houses. None of them thinks about taking a job; leisure – something different from rest, which comes after labor – is the apotheosis toward which they have always striven, an important sign of having made it, and their husbands’ ambitions, not to speak of their own, wouldn’t allow them to work for a salary. Their husbands’ ambitions, however, do not always extend to making their wives happy, and stories of marital meanness are passed on regularly. One woman’s husband specializes in insulting her publicly and apparently does not refrain from hitting her when in private; another is so jealous that he won’t let his wife visit her women friends alone, and once, in a fit of truly delusional rage – she hardly goes out of the house – he fires a bullet into her arm and wounds her badly. Neither of these women does anything to defend herself: they’re not used to crossing their husbands, and they’re hardly surprised by outbursts of male temper. That’s how men are, and, of course, they’ve never even glimpsed ideas of ideological self-reformation or “working on a relationship.” Still, in Poland they might have had the pressures of neighborly gossip and censure on their side; here, for all their fancy dresses, they are more helpless, more alone with their troubles. They live too far apart from each other to maintain an unashamed ease of daily intercourse, and without being fully incorporated into a different system of social rules, they do not get the benefit of the local code of civility.

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