In Between Two Languages

Although my father eventually spoke fluent English, he never lost his Berlin accent. His speech was peppered with Yorkshire expressions and his verbs invariably landed at the end of his sentences. Inside our home he lapsed into German; also Yiddish words were embedded in his stories, connecting him with his grandparents’ lives. He immediately became more vivid, more humorous, more himself. We were raised between two languages. We accessed two cultures. Our parents inhabited an in-between world – tales and troubles, joy and sorrow – in both languages. We heard our parents moving from a phrase in one language to a sentence in another. As a child I never knew which language was which. My syntax still betrays my German background. We slipped from one language to the other effortlessly; it didn’t matter if it came out wrong. Our endeavour was encouraged and applauded. Mistakes were overlooked on the tacit understanding that we would eventually absorb a correct way. We heard it around us and understood. Eventually we spoke. There was no careful puzzling over verb conjugation or learning lists of vocabulary. My brother Johnny and I picked out words that sounded funny and turned them into nonsense language, a code between the two of us. German is the language of my nursery rhymes. It has seeped through my skin. I speak it with an English accent; I soften the harsh guttural sounds; I lose the diminutives; I keep the cadences and the phrases. This second language has made me more attentive to my first. I search for words with different nuances. I notice the space between words. It’s a different quality of listening. We had often been amazed when one word could mean two entirely different things. Zug means train but it also means draught. ‘I’m sitting in the train,’ my father would remark if he wanted me to close the door. I discovered that we could be having a conversation entirely meaning the opposite to each other. We could both be right and be making a mistake at the same time. There’s no clear right or wrong way, I learned as a little girl – turn the kaleidoscope and there are infinite ways of looking at the world. We were driven through Europe, where we realised there were other languages – not just English, German and Hebrew in prayer books. French, Italian, Spanish … where should we start? My dad kept saying ‘You must have at least one more language.’ ‘Why?’ ‘You never know when you might need it. You don’t know when you might have to go, to settle somewhere else, you need to earn your living wherever you are.’ So we learned French in school, properly structured, reciting prepositions and negatives. But we never spoke it the same: it came from our head, neatly packaged and ordered somewhere inside our brains. German rested in our hearts, absorbed through our pores, through cuddles and smiles, through shouting, through sorrow and happiness. I had another language to play with as a child, wrapped around me like a blanket: the language of favourite stories, the language used to lift me up to hug and kiss me, the diminutive reminding me I was the littlest, the sweetest and the hope of the next generation. I still carry that language inside me, a jewel which suddenly sparkles as words and phrases learnt long ago jump into the light, illuminating my way through Europe. My parents patiently explained the meaning of words, phrases, puns. My brother and I were weaving their stories of a German life together with our own English stories. The Continental characters of our childhood used language theatrically and we turned them into cartoon characters. We mimicked their exaggerated expressions: entzückend (enchanting), grossartig (brilliant), grausam (grotesque). They often implored and exclaimed to God: Ach du lieber Gott, Gott im Himmel, Mein Gott, echoing a more fervent religious past when blessings of gratitude were constantly being uttered. Then they had been part of a community, their individual dreams and desires subsumed in the rules and rituals of orthodox Jewish life. They had escaped Nazi Germany; each individual had a separate story of survival. Here they found themselves without their old ties and community, a random collection of lost souls from somewhere east of Calais, in the direction of Mitteleuropa. Johnny and I copied these exclamations in loud theatrical voices in our shared conversations. We were the threads that tied them all together; our existence gave them a future. We teased them whilst they struggled with the idiosyncrasies of English and the impossibility of pronouncing words correctly. Aunty Frieda talked of ‘pluffing a field’, bemused at our hysterical laughter. My father talked of finding a ‘sheep pension’. From the back of the car one of our voices would call out: ‘Daddy, will there be sheep staying at the pension?’ The other voice: ‘Do EWE know when we’ll get there?’ Their mistakes in English, their pronunciation, my father looking for a ‘sheep pension’, would evoke jokes and more helpless giggling. We’d snort and chuckle at German signs as we were driven through Europe: Ausfahrt, Einfahrt, Überfahrt, Unterfahrt and, above all, Himmelfahrt – farting all the way up to heaven! Our relationship to German words was a secret language, a melange of these exclamations. Our own brand of foreignness bubbled over as it curled round the edges of our emerging English selves. We lived in no man’s land, England outside and somewhere else inside, partly Germany, partly an idiosyncratic émigré country invented in our own heads through listening to our parents’ descriptions of life before. I projected myself into their European world through the images and anecdotes they gave me, through the furniture they brought with them, the music they danced to, the 1930s paste jewellery they pinned to their clothes. Everything from the thirties became exotic and unattainable to me. It became the focus of my aspirations. Carry Gorney