Books: An ancient mariner in New York

Eva Hoffman is a Jewish Polish-American living in London. Steve Crawshaw meets the woman who never melted in the pot

By rights, she should seem as American as apple pie. She is an American passport-holder. Every glitterati corner of Manhattan is familiar to her. She is the author of an acclaimed autobiography, much of which deals with her life in the USA.

Until a few years ago, Eva Hoffman had lived in New York for all her adult life. She has not lived in Poland since 1959, when she was 13, and she now feels wary of writing in her native language. Only recently has she reached the point that she could "almost entertain the thought of writing something short and simple in Polish". Her writing in English, by contrast, has a serenity that most native speakers can only dream of.

It is startling, therefore, to discover - over coffee in her Swiss Cottage apartment, where north London blurs into central Europe - that her voice is still thick with the chocolate-cake sound of Mitteleuropa. Hoffman, full of a neat, contained energy, accompanied by an old-fashioned European courtesy, might almost have arrived from Poland last week. As she explains: "At some point, one's accent becomes part of one's identity."

Identity is something that Hoffman understands better than anybody. Her first, magically brilliant book, Lost in Translation, dissected her overlapping lives - childhood in the old Polish city of Cracow, adolescence in Canada, adulthood in the United States. It is a work of luminous beauty: sad and funny by turns, and extraordinarily moving. In many respects, this "deep and lovely book" (in Josef Skvorecky's phrase) was a one-off. The subject matter - losing an old identity, while never quite finding a new one - was an unrepeatable voyage of discovery. And yet, some of the contradictions that Hoffman explored so powerfully there are an important theme in her latest book, Shtetl, an exploration of Polish and Jewish identities, published in paperback this month. On the one hand, Shtetl is a condensed history of the "little town" that has come to seem the very embodiment of Jewish eastern Europe. On the other hand, Shtetl is a delicate dissection of Polish-Jewish relations. In that respect, a brave endeavour.

Hoffman, whose Polish and Jewish identities are equally important to her, is ideally placed to write such a book, with all its inherent difficulties. She is immune to all dogmatism. Every observation is followed by a "yes, but" observation. Thus, one thread in Lost in Translation is the casual anti- Semitism of her native country. On the very first page, Hoffman talks of anti-Jewish harassment by Polish officials when she and her family are leaving for Canada. And yet the affection for her native country remains strong: "The absoluteness of those loves can never be recaptured: no geometry of the landscape, no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes that we saw as the first, and to which we gave ourselves wholly, without reservations."

In Shtetl, Hoffman talks at length about Polish anti-Semitism, including some grim encounters in Bransk, the little town in north-east Poland that is the focus of the book. Commenting on one anti-Semitic tirade, Hoffman is "throttled by fury and disbelief". Nonetheless, she is explicit about one of her main aims: "To counter the notion that ordinary Poles were naturally inclined, by virtue of their congenital anti-Semitism, to participate in the genocide and that Poles even today must be viewed with extreme suspicion or condemned as guilty for the fate of Jews in their country."

Anybody who writes anything on the subject of Poland and Jews is guaranteed to receive an abusive mailbag. On the one hand, you are accused of letting Poles off the hook: Poles are anti-Semitism personified, everybody knows that. On the other hand - sometimes, in response to the same piece - you are accused of being part of a lobby organised by international Jewry: Jews will do everything possible to besmirch Poland's good name, everybody knows that.

Those denials are themselves sometimes contradictory. Shortly after the end of Communist rule, I wrote a partly upbeat piece which suggested that things were getting better at last; I praised the most popular Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, for encouraging a new openness about the traditional anti-Semitism in the country. A letter-writer attacked my lies, arguing: a) that there has never been any anti-Semitism in Poland, and b) that Gazeta Wyborcza's comments on anti-Semitism were not to be taken seriously, because: "The editor is a Jew."

Hoffman - Pole, Jew, American, Londoner - is all too aware of the difficulties. As she points out, defensiveness in Bransk was "the first note struck before I have even asked any questions." Meanwhile, however, she has been attacked by some American critics for "whitewashing the Poles". Her attempt to be even-handed thus itself becomes a stick to beat her with. She says now: "I am criticised from the vantage point that I am trying to address." Even-handedness, in short, is not a good crowd-pleaser.

For Hoffman herself, the nagging questions of identity are not just Polish versus Jewish, but include the contradictions between continents. In Lost in Translation, she seems gradually to become Americanised - by the end, she is a books editor at the New York Times, a Manhattanite through and through. The dedication reads: "To my friends, who have taught me how to appreciate the New World after all."

Now, however, she says that she does not intend to live again in the United States. It was the old unresolved questions of identity that brought her back across the Atlantic. She talks of herself as "an ancient mariner" in America: "East European opinions were discounted." The criticisms of Shtetl are a reflection of what triggered that move five years ago: she talks of her frustration at "the American and perhaps Western understanding that came out of a vast ignorance - accompanied by very vehement opinions". In short: she never quite melted in the pot.

Those questions of identity look set to continue to come under Hoffman's literary spotlight. In the corner of her living room stands a Bechstein grand, which enjoys a starring role not just in her own life, but also in her next work. "It's a novel about a contemporary woman pianist who lives a contemporary woman's life, as well as living in the world of 19th-century music. It's about the conflict between the two." More echoes of divided identity, as reflected in her own life? (Hoffman studied at a music school in Cracow, and later studied music at Harvard.) Hoffman is cautious: "The book isn't autobiographical. But something of one's experience always filters through."

`Shtetl' is published in paperback on 21 January (Vintage pounds 7.99)