When Elijah started speaking, he spoke Russian. Strange, because he spent about 6 hours a day in an English-language daycare, but there it was. Random words, not even common or often used, would come out – ‘slon’ (elephant), ‘dyadya’ (man), ‘dai’ (give me).
This caused confusion: ’Dyadya’ sounds like ‘Daddy’ to an American ear. If you are Russian, these two words sound nothing alike at all. But if you’ve spoken English your entire life, you can’t make the phonemes apart, and no one wants their son to call strange men ‘Daddy’. ’Dai’ in Russian sounds like ‘die’ in English, which prompted the daycare teachers to ask me if ‘die’, by any chance, means something else in the language my son is speaking. ”He does speak another language, right?” the daycare teacher asked me, with eyes full of hope that the 15-month-old was not actually saying “die”. Funny. Then, may be, not so much.
I decided that this was confusing to my son, and not fair to him and may be also not fair to others and I started using English with him more. He grew and learned and spoke, and before I knew it, his words were all English. And then he started using grammar. The English one. And then he started making complex sentences with five-syllable words in them, and he was off and running, and he became a chatterbox, and things were great. Then he no longer answered in Russian when I asked him something. And then came a day when I asked him something in Russian and he said “I don’t understand what you are saying”, and there we were – him looking up at me with a confused and annoyed face, and me staring back, stunned. I had been trying to find any excuse to avoid thinking what he just went ahead and said outright.
Nothing about this should have surprised me. For the last 10 years, I’ve only used Russian about 4 times a year. My vocabulary is terrible. It takes me a moment to remember how to write. For a few years now, my answer to the ridiculous “Do you think of yourself as Russian or American?” question has been a tongue-in-cheek “I’m a Russian child and an American adult”.
When we left Russia, I was fifteen and I had decided to leave my childhood there. I did it on purpose. I did it in an attempt to stay whole, to not become confused and torn between two countries and their two states of mind. It seemed easier to draw a clear line between the two, and to leave Russia behind, let it stay in the past and fade away. After all, everyone’s childhood stays in the past and fades away; mine would just do it in a different country.
My wariness of clinging to the past turned into a philosophy in college. One day I went to a meeting of the Cornell Russian Club, because when you are a new freshman, you go to everything. During the meeting, they served food, played music and showed a movie. It struck me that everything – songs, jokes, film – was exactly what my parents listened to and watched. Everything was about 30 years old. That’s when it hit me – their parents had raised them with their old cultural markers, from the seventies. These college kids were frozen in time. Their parents best intentions had turned the children into walking anachronisms. They were taught to look down on American culture and to see themselves as outsiders, as “Russians”. At the same time, they seemed to have no clue what contemporary Russian culture was like – they’ve been living in the States their entire lives. If you took them to Russia and put them in a group of Russian 20-year-olds, the meeting would sound like the 50s-meets-80s scene in Back to the Future. Stuck between two cultures and raised with memes of a country that no longer existed, they belonged nowhere. I walked away from that meeting and I knew I would never return, and neither would anyone who came after me. And that was fine.
I went on happily being very American. I never missed having Russian friends, or any elements of Russian culture. I had succeeded in my plan – I was whole and clear on who I was. I made sense to me. I even made a plan for what I would like my kids to become: as long as they could string a couple of words together in Russian and have a basic understanding of it, that would be fine. I had assumed my kids would pick up the language by osmosis, as long as I said a word or two in it from time to time. The exposure to Russian, however limited, would provide the kids with enough foreign language foundation to give them cognitive benefits. They would get no Russian culture, and thank goodness for that! (The culture can at times be, shall we say, um, overbearing).
Then I had the kids.
And something happened, something so strange – my line, my clear line of break between two cultures and two countries and two times zones and two languages began to blur. The childhood, long ago pushed back into a shoebox of neat memories and timelines and snapshots, has broken out of those boxes and now lives with me each day. Each time I look at my kids, it’s back – the way ‘eskimo’ ice cream bars would melt on my hand, the taste of coffee gum, my footprints on a freshly painted floor, the pink dress my Mom made for a school dance, the snow crunching under my dog’s paws, my music school, an old babysitter with a german shepherd, fish in a restaurant fountain, a vacation by the sea. These things have flooded back, and together to me they mean childhood, and they stay inside my head. They are the past, and the language is the only connection I still have to them because the time, the place, the people and everything else that they are made of are long gone.
I had no idea how intertwined your idea of self is with the language that you use. Your language molds not just what you can say, but the way you think. If you have an idea that you can not express in words, we do not call it a thought – it’s intuition, an inkling, a gut feeling, but it’s not a thought. And this is important because – weird as it sounds – I do not know how to be a kid in English. It didn’t occur to me when I was leaving Russia that not only was my childhood staying behind, it also wouldn’t translate. I say the things my Mom said to me when I was little – suddenly, those words are back – and when Elijah looks back in confusion, I feel a panicked, startling jerk. I’m speaking childhood; why does he not understand it?
There are some things you expect when you leave a country without planning to return. If you are close to the beginning of your adult life, as I was, you understand that some things you expected to have in your life were now never going to pass. I was not going to graduate together with my friends. I was never going to study in St. Petersburg. I was never going to have the college experiences of my parents’. When I closed the door to our apartment and got into the van that took us to the airport, I left all of those expectations there too. They were not coming. I knew. But I did not realize that I had left some things behind without noticing.
You certainly expect that when you have children one day, they will speak. In that expectation is an implicit sound of the same words you as a child said to your own parents; phrases and weird words of your own dialect. This expectation is so basic that you do not think of it daily; you barely think of it at all. You do not think of it when you move countries. But when your child starts to speak and never says the things you thought he would, you are suddenly back at the door of that old apartment in the old country, and you have to leave behind even more stuff than you already had, and it’s too much. Now it’s too much.
All of this, really, I suppose, is a long apology letter to my kids for sending them to Russian school. What a selfish thing to do, forcing a child to learn a language because of your own personal issues. I only have two things in my defense. One is, as all studies show, that being fluent in more than one language is great for preventing Alzheimers and other mental disorders later in life. Not my primary motivator, but hey – still good to use as an official excuse! At least what I’m forcing you to do does not CAUSE mental disorders, kids, no matter how it might feel right now! The second one is not scientific but might be just as important – being Russian is more that just wearing fancy clothes to the store (don’t ask) and eating caviar on the regular basis. With being Russian comes a weird state of mind, an introspective tendency (which, I think, is what creates so many brilliant thinkers and simultaneously never allows the country to get out of its rut). I suspect at least one of the kids has inherited it, and so in English he has no way of understanding not only me, but himself. There may come a time when he will feel distinctly un-American, foreign feelings of melancholy and yearning for something he can not name. And should this happen, Russian will give him comfort, because only it has words that think through those feelings, and it will help him find himself again. Which, after all, is what I was trying to do at fifteen, when I put my childhood in a box and drew the line.
