Recommended Reads: What Language Do I Dream In? By Elena Lappin

I love to read about multilingualism. It’s not so much the academic side, which intrigues me the most, but the personal account of the experience. What impact does living one's life in multiple languages have on a person's sense of self, on their relationships with others? What rewards and difficulties do people face as a consequence of moving within several cultures? Under what circumstances did they acquire their languages, and how do they keep them alive and vibrant?

Yesterday I finished reading What Language Do I dream In, by Elena Lappin, who speaks six languages (or more, I may have miscounted), five of which are central to her life. As a serial immigrant, she has lived in seven countries and currently resides in London.

Lappin speaks to her parents in Russian, to her brother (who's a German writer) in Czech and to her children in English and Hebrew. Her early attempts to raise her first son in Czech, which she had long considered “her” language because she spent a good chunk of her formative years in Czechoslovakia, failed, since family ties with the country had eroded over time. A mother tongue spoken only by the mother, it seems, is not enough to make it take firm root in a child.

In this evocative memoir, besides tracing her convoluted family history, the author describes her inner struggle with choosing the language she could finally realise her dream in: becoming a writer. In fact, which language to write in, rather than dream, becomes a personal as well as a professional quest.

Counter-intuitively, Lappin choses neither her first language and mother tongue, which is Russian, nor her beloved Czech, in which she says she has always felt truly at home, but English, the last language she learned to speak competently when she was already an adult. And although her story is as different from my own as could possibly be, I can very much relate to this part.

As an aside, the author represents someone I’ve referred to as a “Silver Spoon Multilingual” in a previous post. Funnily enough, one of the chapters of the book is entitled “Silver Spoon”. Her silver spoon, though, doesn't have much to do with her multilingualism, but concerns an actual silver spoon with an engraved name that she does not recognise at first sight, but which turns out to be a Russian version of her own name. 

My rating: 9/10.

I think this is a fantastic read for everyone who's fascinated by the multifaceted reality of multilingual living, including its emotional dimension. The only part, which I perhaps didn't relish quite as much as the rest of the book was the last four chapters, in which the author goes into minute detail about her efforts to disentangle her complex family history. She doesn't manage to get me to care about these ancestral characters as much as she does about the still-living members of her family. On the other hand, her profound need to investigate her roots is precisely what gave rise to this great book in the first place, so fair dues.

Lost For Words - Why My German Sucks

My mother just can't help herself. She had to slip in another comment about the frightful gaps in my  vocabulary. We were having coffee at her friend Maria’s house yesterday when, recounting an anecdote, Maria mentioned the German word for ‘fairground ride’, and I remarked that I couldn’t remember having heard that term before. There was guffawing and stares of disbelief. How can you not know that?! Last week, there was a similar incident on the train with Mum berating me for failing to recall the word for (railway) sleeper.

My pointing out that, in fact, I do know what things are called, but... in English, does nothing to mellow maternal consternation. 

I guess it’s hard for her to understand my predicament. It’s just one of those things you don’t really get unless it happens to you.

Mum spent all of her 65 years immersed in the language of her native country, listening to German, reading in German, thinking in German, speaking nothing but German. I’ve had less than a third of that time to assimilate my mother tongue. Much of the passive vocab, which I once possessed as a teenager, has slipped into oblivion during the past quarter of a century of living abroad.

I also made the fatal mistake of not reading any books in German for two decades, which must sound paradoxical to anyone who knows how much of a bookworm I am. Since moving to Spain five years ago, I have been trying to remedy this sad state of affairs, and I have the Kindle archives to prove it.

I do know where my mother is coming from. I, too, took my German for granted for far too many years, never making an effort to maintain, expand and update it, believing that it would always be there for me, held in suspension, pristinely preserved, like a pickled marsupial in a museum display cabinet. But nope. It’s very much a case of “use it or lose it”.