Why Learn a Language? II

Here's another story about learning languages. I spent two years in high school and four years in college studying Russian. It was never as good as my French or even my German but it helped me get a place at Bradford University in Modern Languages. As a minor language, I only had to get a minimum pass in Russian in order to get my degree, but according to one of my professors even that was in doubt. All of this is to say that I was not a great Russian student in college, and for the next thirty years had almost no opportunity to speak it.

However, only six months ago while in Israel, we found out that Gerry’s mother had been born in Ukraine and that her mother must have spoken fluent Russian as well as Yiddish, as did all of her family. At the same time we learned that a relative of hers who had stayed in Ukraine after she and her immediate family left, had recently immigrated to the U.S. and was living in New York City. Having found out these amazing facts, we then went on in May/June 2002 to actually visit Ukraine in search of her native village, Narodichi.

That brought me for the first time in my life into a Russian-speaking area. Although Ukrainian is the national language of Ukraine, Russian has been used here since before the Revolution and in the capital Kiev in particular is spoken at least as much as Ukrainian. Our first few days in Ukraine were rather hard on my ego as I realized how dreadful my knowledge of Russian was. But I was in a more or less total immersion environment and it didn’t take long for well-hidden memories to start to resurface. Very quickly I remembered the rhythm and sound of the language, then little by little the vocabulary started to come back. Now and again, words I didn’t even know I knew would just pop out of my mouth. Quite a strange feeling! And then the grammar started to re-emerge as I remembered cases and aspects and declensions. That is not to say that I became a fluent Russian speaker. But I went from 5% to maybe 30% fluency in a matter of weeks. That progress was helped along by two days spent in and around Gerry’s mother’s village, Narodichi. There we met people who shared his grandmother’s maiden name, Stotland, and who spoke only Russian. It was my job to try and translate the dozens of questions that Gerry had about the village and its history and particularly what it was like in the first few decades of this century. I had to explain who we were, why we had come, and what we were looking for then understand and translate back the responses. Quite a herculean effort that left me exhausted both physically and mentally afterwards.

After that visit, I expected that I would be able to retire my Russian for the foreseeable future. But it was not to be. Here we are now in New York City and have made contact with Gerry’s mother’s cousin Iosif, 88 years old and recently immigrated to the US. He speaks only Russian and a little bit of Yiddish and is as hungry as we are for information about the wider Stotland family, now scattered around the USA and Israel. His children speak only a little English and so there is lots of opportunity for me to practice my new-found, new-practiced, language skills. And the moral of the story is that you never know when you might need them.