In 1959 13-year-old Eva Hoffman made a voyage that took her from the familiar, loved country of her childhood to the unknown New World. Her life was irrevocably divided in two. In this personal memoir, she evokes the landscapes of postwar Poland - recently war-torn, suffering oppression, yet also the land of friends, first love, first home. She then sets out to convey the shock of the disruption of exile from that home and the struggle to comprehend a suddenly alien world, in which she experienced hardships among the well-manicured lawns of suburban Vancouver. The view of an adolescent thrust into a new world with no familiar references is offered via comments on a succession of American landscapes - college education in Texas; counterculture at Harvard; the literary milieu of New York.