
Shortly after the dramatic events of 1989, Eva Hoffman spent several months travelling through her native Poland & four other Eastern European countries which had just undergone an historic transformation. This is the personal narrative of that journey & a portrayal of a social landscape in the midst of change. While making her way from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Hoffman ranged from capital cities to wayside villages & sleepy provincial towns; she visited shipyards, museums, homes & coffee-houses of the intelligentsia; & 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 bi-cultural perspective to enter deeply into Eastern European minds & sensibilities & to convey what the larger social shifts mean to particular people: to former dissidents wielding political power, deposed apparatchiks turned successful entrepreneurs, artists & technocrats, literate ex-censors, Polish aristocrats, Hungarian gypsies & Bulgarian Turks.