A poem begins with a lump in your throat ~~ Robert Frost

PRAISE FOR MEMORY & COMPLICITY

In Eve Hoffman on August 1, 2018 at 4:30 PM

You tell the story of my childhood and early adulthood even though you are talking Georgia and I was in Wisconsin. You are brave and so generous in sharing the story and its intimacies of your life experience.

~Ruth Ackerman, Santa Barbara, CA

 

VI. "colored" rest stop Library of Congress.jpg Library of Congress Collection, Photographer: Esther Bubley

 

Eve Hoffman’s book of memories arrives at a conflicted time in American life and culture, and provides much needed insight into the paths that led us here and possibilities for going forward. Her voice provides a rare window into complicated issues of identity, community, social evil and moral possibilities. I hope that you will peer into this unsettling mirror, invited by her lyrical  gifts, and begin the process of reflection, dialogue and action to repair a broken world.  

~Robert M Franklin, PhD, President Emeritus, Morehouse College

 

Memory & Complicity leaves me with the feeling that this polarizing destruction of our country can only begin to be healed by recognizing and fostering similarly shared emotional experience. How is the question?

~Anne Palms Chalmers, Newton, MA

 

The poems in Eve Hoffman’s Memory & Complicity are rich with the details that comprise one woman’s extraordinary life. Starting with her childhood in rural Georgia, Hoffman describes “a girl of eight or ten on a dairy farm bordered/by a winding river with an Indian name I couldn’t spell.” This awareness of her surroundings expands to include the realities of racism (this is the South in the 1950’s and 1960’s) and anti-Semitism (Eve Hoffman is Jewish), while lovingly describing a “barefoot child on summer days/picking blue cornflowers beside the ditch.” The balance between personal anecdotes and the social and political realities impacting the sweep of her life, is maintained throughout with emotional honesty that is sometimes painful, but always beautiful.

~Marjory Wentworth, South Carolina Poet Laureate

 

Eve Hoffman is a born storyteller and sixth generation Southerner with deep roots in north Georgia’s red clay. Her poetry is a story of time and of family that called her home after sojourns in Massachusetts, Africa and California—but she, and it, had also changed. Here are stories of becoming, inseparable from those rays of self-awareness that mark the stages of personal life interwoven with historical currents. And here is a vision of a South still aborning, like herself. Her poetry brings us home to where the heart lives. In the end, her work stands as a testimonial to a love that lives both in the ordinariness and in the trials, losses, struggles of our lives—if we but look.  

     ~ Jamil Zainaldin, President, Georgia Humanities Council

 

 

 

Books available at Amazon.com,  MercerUniversityPress.com, BarnesandNoble.com or evehoffman@bellsouth.net.

  

 

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MEMORY & COMPLICITY

In Eve Hoffman on May 31, 2018 at 3:16 PM

Hoffman-Memory-CVR.jpg

 

In Memory & Complicity, we feel skirts of summer dust as Eve Hoffman rides on dirt roads barefoot on a bike or clings to a runaway horse. We walk with her though an exhibit of one hundred and fifty postcards of lynchings. We see a girl in a yellow dress at the synagogue her great-grandparents founded—the synagogue bombed four hours later by white racists. We see black-faced jockeys in front yards. We listen to lullabies written in the Nazi concentration camps played on her mother’s piano—and the realization her mother was pregnant with her as they were being written. We taste sweet-potato pies and feel the wooden pews of churches turning their backs as gay men die. We watch giggling children dive from the top of the refrigerator into their father’s arms. We accompany a widow rebuilding her life, catching fireflies with her grandchildren, dancing with them in the rain.

 

Memory & Complicity available at Amazon.com, Mercer University Press.com, Barnes & Noble.com or evehoffman@bellsouth.net

 

 

Eve Hoffman confronts our moral sensibilities. Being a white, Jewish girl (and then woman) of privilege in the South over the last half century was fraught with contradictions and challenge. Eve reveals not being taught of the 1906 Atlanta race riot, or of her great-grandmother’s involvement in the Georgia Women’s Suffrage movement. She recalls black field hands not being invited to sit at a common table, and of learning the startling truth that lynchings were not the furtive acts of rednecks but public displays of racial power where tickets were sometimes sold. She shares the experience of living on a farm where cows were shot and hung by their legs to be butchered. In her honest, unembellished way, Eve’s unsettling glimpses of her own past are a moral challenge to our to our own willful ignorances and the difficult truths of our own life history.

~ Paul Root Wolpe, Director, Emory University Center for Ethics from Forward to Memory & Complicity

 

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CALENDAR

In Eve Hoffman on May 1, 2018 at 8:00 AM

We find our own stories in Eve Hoffman’s poetry—affirming, bearing witness both intimate and epic in the time flow of the second half of the twentieth century.

~Paul Root Wolpe , Director, Center for Ethics, Emory University

IV. Cows in pasture
PLEASE JOIN EVE HOFFMAN

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, all events are virtual. Email us to schedule an event via Zoom or Google Meets for readings and discussion of her newly released book Memory & Complicity from Mercer University Press. Books available for purchase.

EVENTS AFTER COVID-19

Contact us to coordinate a book discussion/reading with Eve Hoffman. Eve will read for 20-30 minutes from Memory & Complicity tailored to audience. Reading followed by discussion and conversation.

This list will be updated as dates and information is confirmed. Contact Eve Hoffman (evehoffmanassistant@gmail.com) to schedule a reading/event.

Contact: evehoffmanassistant@gmail.com

 

All welcome!

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