It’s a problem of identity. Many of my American friends feel they don’t have enough of it.

It’s a problem of identity. Many of my American friends feel they don’t have enough of it. They often feel worthless, or they don’t know how they feel. Identity is the number-one national problem here. There seems to be a shortage of it in the land, a dearth of selfhood amidst other plenty—maybe because there are so many individual egos trying to outdo each other and enlarge themselves.

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A culture talks most about what most bothers it: the Poles talk compulsively about the Russians and the most minute shifts of political strategy. Americans worry about who they are.

E. Hoffman, Lost in Translation (1989), 262 & 264

You’ve seen people live perfectly happily within their less than perfect unions

Wouldn’t your unhappiness be just the same as here? No, it wouldn’t. It would exist within the claustrophobia of no choice, rather than the agoraphobia of open options. It would have different dimensions, different weight. But surely an incompatible marriage is unacceptable. An American notion. A universal notion. Women in Bengal rebel against bad marriages, for God’s sake. Women in Bengal don’t rebel against emotional incompatibility. They wouldn’t understand what you mean. But I’m not in Bengal! If you were in Poland, you’d be making a sensible accommodation to your situation. You’ve seen people live perfectly happily within their less than perfect unions.

E. Hoffman, Lost in Translation (1989), 230

The conservatives of the sentiments believe that recovering their own forgotten history is an antidote to shallowness

In our highly ideological times, even nostalgia has its politics. The conservatives of the sentiments believe that recovering their own forgotten history is an antidote to shallowness. The ideologues of the future see attachment to the past as that most awful of all monsters, the agent of reaction. It is to be extracted from the human soul with no quarter or self-pity, for it obstructs the inevitable march of events into the next Utopia. Only certain Eastern European writers, forced to march into the future too often, know the regressive dangers of both forgetfulness and clinging to the past. But then, they are among our world’s experts of mourning, having lost not an archaeological but a living history.

E. Hoffman, Lost in Translation (1989), 115

So they could remain within their old nationality even at the cost of leaving home

They made this journey on a rattling truck filled with potato sacks and other people trying as quickly as possible to cross the new borders so they could remain within their old nationality even at the cost of leaving home.

E. Hoffman, Lost in Translation (1989), 8