I seem to have had a peculiar loyalty to the German language from about as early as a child can have articulate views. I was told by my parents that when they urged me as a three-year-old to learn Turkish, so that I might communicate more effectively with my playmates in Istanbul, where we had come in our flight from Hitler, I would have none of it. Let them learn German, I supposedly said; Turkish 'ist eine häßliche Sprache', an ugly language. German was my mother tongue, partly in the usual sense - my first language was German - but also because I spoke it almost exclusively with my mother, my grandmother and their women friends. Only certain words and phrases are spoken by or to men in my linguistic fantasy life. German is almost entirely a family language for me, but it is also the language of a world - real, remembered and misremembered - that my parents lost, a world that now exists almost entirely in my imagination, but which I maintain as a way of mourning them.

LRB 4 December 2003 | PDF Download