The Multilingual Self

An Inquiry Into Language Learning

Natasha Lvovich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136494994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book relates the author's stories about how languages have integrated her being, and defined and formed her sense of self. The idea of writing autobiographical stories of her multilingual life came from her long-term commitment to foreign language teaching and from a recent, extremely rich and valuable experience teaching English to immigrants in the U.S. While reading and studying various aspects of second-language-related-theory -- linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and sociolinguistics literature -- the author realized how estranged language learners are from all the research, speculations, hypotheses, and achievements of scholarship. A Russian immigrant, the author tells stories to her ESL students to help them understand why and at what price successful language acquisition and acculturation is realistic. Not only can students learn from her stories which encourage discoveries about their own behaviors or problems, but they might want to respond and tell about their own struggles with a foreign language. By becoming writers and interpreters of her text and by making it their own, students can construct their own virtual texts. The stories told throughout are those of a language learner, who is also a linguist and language teacher. As such, they can bridge the gap between second language research and practical teaching and learning. Moreover, this book can help initiate language learners along with their teachers into scholarship. Second language teachers and graduate students preparing for a teaching career might see this book as an illustration and validation of the studied theory and an inner voice of their students at the same time. Multidisciplinary by nature, it can also be used in several college courses such as cultural anthropology, anthropo- and socio-linguistics, sociology, multicultural education, ethnography, bilingualism, and the study of immigrant experience. There are numerous applications of the book in the educational field at various levels of adult learning programs which might be determined by the objectives and by the instructor's vision of it in the curriculum. It is also intended as a message to the general public and to all thinking individuals in search of identity. It will popularize the idea of the importance of foreign language learning, language education, linguistic literacy, and metalinguistic awareness, of illuminating self-discovery through the treasure of multilingual experience, capable of giving birth to a new, sophisticated, spiritually complex and enriched multicultural identity.

Chapter 1

My French Self

In January 1988, when I arrived at the platform of the Paris train station La Gare du Nord, I saw a small crowd of people waving their hands. They were my French friends, all of them Russian language and literature professionals, teachers, scholars, and translators who had spent many years working in Russia and who had brought real France to my apartment at Lenin Avenue. When I was getting off the train, they were all crying: My visit to France was a symbol of the opening up of Russia, of the up-lifted iron curtain, of the historic change of the world that had started with Gorbachev’s perestroika, after decades of dictators’ prison. Before that time, ordinary people, especially Jews, were not allowed by the Soviet government to travel abroad: Soviet citizens were all doomed to the Soviet happiness because they did not know how unhappy they really were. I always knew, however—through my friends from France, England, America, and through books—and I was unhappy. For many years I was teaching, learning, reading, translating, and writing in French—yet I could never travel to the country of my dreams to work, study, develop professionally, or see people who were dear to me. I knew from a very early age that I was being denied a number of human rights, and this knowledge grew from hatred and bitterness into a surrogate of intrinsic freedom—an aphrodisiac identity of the foreign culture and language—my France. Nobody could ever take this right from me, deprive me of this artificial world—my France—expropriate its richness and glory, repeatedly humiliate me as a person and as a professional. I constructed the walls of my fortress, and my beloved France was inside, the untouchable jewel of my creation. And because I was the center of that universe, I had to learn to do everything a French person does: speak with a Parisian accent, joke about domestic politics, sing children’s songs, read and enjoy grotesque detective stories in argot as well as the most sophisticated literature, write in French in any style, curse, gesticulate, give speeches, count mentally, and dip the imagined croissant into coffee. I had to know how the French make their beds, talk on the phone, write business letters, and cook meals from different provinces. By instinct of survival, without even being aware of it, but just loving it, I made living and functioning in French my primary goal. But I never left the Soviet Union and that is the reason my friends cried when they finally saw me in Paris. The story of my fluency in French is the story of building a language identity. It was generated by my love of French culture, traditional historical ties between the two countries, but most of all by my personal way of dealing with the political regime and the sociocultural bias it created. Becoming an émigré de l’intérieur as the only spiritual and moral salvation made a foreign language belong to me: It was my Dasein, my being-in-the-world. The tragic situation of the Jewish intelligentsia in the Soviet Union, many of whom were deprived of professional careers and formal education, stimulated their learning beyond the official norms and frames, creating various unique ways for the reconstruction of self-esteem. Some became political dissidents and took enormous risks; some went insane; some turned to their religion or converted to another one. I became French.

It all started when I was 5 or 6 years old. No, before I was born, with the turn of the century generation, before and after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, during my grandparents’ generation. This is how their stories, viewed from the end of the 20th century in America, are interwoven with mine.

My grandmother, Yulia (my father’s mother) together with her sister Lisa, received an excellent education before the revolution under the czar in the European-style classical gymnasium. It was a rare opportunity for the Russian Jews, who, according to the law, had to live inside the Jewish pale, now the territory of Bielarus, Ukraine, West Ukraine, and Lithuania. Without education they could make their livings as peasants, artisans, and small business owners. They were confined to little towns, called shtetls, and lived a community life well described by Shalom Aleichem and other Jewish writers. Only the most fortunate and the wealthiest, who by some miracle could make it to school in a city, would become professionals-of course only according to an official list of occupations favored by the authorities for the Jews. If needed and successful, they received the legal right to live in the big cities.

My grandmother’s father was a charcoal mine engineer, an extremely respected man in his town. For his work and community reputation he was granted the governmental honor of a “legal, hereditary, and honored citizen of Russia” (with the Jewish pale stamp in his passport). These benefits and his income made it possible for him to send his children to school. Gymnasia would admit a very small number of qualified Jewish children, so my grandmother and her sister were probably well-prepared. After the equivalent of secondary school, both sisters studied in the conservatory. When the Bolshevik revolution broke out, it robbed their family, declared them bourgeois, and left them with nothing but their educational background, nobility, and good spirit. In addition to their native Russian and Yiddish, both women could speak, read, and write in French, English, and German, miraculously keeping the knowledge and skills they acquired in their gymnasium years until their death. Their knowledge, understanding, and taste for European literature, music, and art were remarkable, and their memories of everything they ever read or knew was extraordinary. I understand now that their exposure, from an early age, to intellectual and artistic discoveries, an atmosphere of learning encouraged by their parents, themselves well-educated people, must have contributed to their open-minded and liberal spirit, so difficult to retain under the Soviet terror.

I do not remember any sense of hatred or violence being expressed by or emanating from my grandmother, even though these feelings certainly would be quite legitimate due to her life situation. During the 1911 pogroms in Ukraine, Yulia’s husband, my grandfather Yakov, fled to France. There he studied law at La Sorbonne, à la Faculté de Droit. After his return to communist Russia, he spent the rest of his life in Stalin’s labor camps, in exile, and then in labor camps and exile again, for his “bourgeois past,” for his “connections with the S-R” (Socialist-Revolutionaries party, suppressed by the Bolsheviks), for the project to bomb the Kremlin-and God knows for what else. I never knew him because he perished in the camps, but the memory of him as a noble, well-educated, honest, and hard-working man has always been present in my family and has survived in my heart. As a child, I used to dream about this grandfather who could have been everything I ever needed.

The French connection, the traditional and historical link between Russia and France since Peter the Great, could not be erased, even by the Soviet system, and was particularly important to my family, to my grandmother, to my father: It represented somehow what my grandfather Yakov had started to achieve, what my grandmother had learned and read about, and what my mother’s family had dreamed about for their children and grandchildren. The noble, aristocratic spirit associated French culture became the unconscious aspiration of my maternal ancestors: provincial, poor, and striving for a better life. Their background is entirely different from the other half of my family but is not less important to reconstruct in order to understand why I became a successful language learner and linguist.

Before the Bolshevik revolution my mother’s parents lived in a small Jewish shtetl in Bielarus and were very poor. My grandfather’s mother, an early widow, had four children and a cow with which to feed them; my grandmother’s mother owned a small housewares store that was financially ruining the family, leaving it always in debt. The children could not go to school, except for the elementary school—the Jewish cheder, and had to help their families to survive. Heartbreaking stories about my 11-year-old grandmother’s babysitting her younger sister and brother, cooking for the family, carrying water from the river, cleaning and washing—all without electricity, home appliances, disposable diapers, or TV dinners—picture the isolation and despair of their reality, an impasse that was suddenly opened into a highway by the October 1917 revolution. For them it meant liberation, possible equal rights, education, and career—all the things that had been suppressed by centuries of Jewish segregation and apartheid in Russia. Sleeping Jewish ambitions awoke to acclaim, lead, and participate in the Bolshevik uprising, turning Judaism into communism, creating another God without a human face—only for Jews to realize later that they had been deceived, discriminated against, killed in “car accidents” and wars, and even executed for betrayal. Most of them were convinced, faithful communists; some of them were intelligent enough to understand that the new regime would finally make them enter the mainstream, after centuries of social isolation and spiritual solitude.

All over Europe, during the first three decades of the century, communism was taking hold of Jewish minds like a contagious disease, an epidemic of liberation. My grandfather, his sisters and brothers, and many other relatives who had been doomed to poverty were attracted by the communist opportunities, went to colleges and became professionals, political activists (usually one had to be a combination of both in order to succeed); some of them took high positions in the new society, and after they and their families were settled, they started to question what this society was about or, as they usually put it, what it “was turning into.” They did not have much time to think, however, because Stalin’s purges started and continued all the way into the 1950s. There was also World War II, in which they defended “Mother Russia.” My grandfather Yefim ended his career as the president of one of the most important Soviet colleges, as professor of economics. He miraculously escaped Stalinist purges by leaving Moscow and retiring—”out of sight, out of mind.” His brothers and sisters, cousins and relatives were not as fortunate, and many of them suffered from the regime they themselves had created. In the 1960s and 1970s when I was a child, my grandparents, with whom I shared the same Moscow apartment, along with my parents and my aunt’s family, were perfectly aware of the horrors, hypocrisy, and ugliness of the Soviet system, and they never tried to hide it from me. Moreover, they rediscovered their Jewishness, as a response to growing antisemitism, and searched for their identity once lost in the ruins of communism, by celebrating Passover on May 1, the official Soviet holiday of solidarity of workers.

I remember feeling confused about being Jewish when I was in school (where I was supposed to hide it as a shameful thing) and at my grandparents’ dinner table where, among stories from the Torah, there were stories about Trotsky, Mikhoels, Shalom Aleichem, Einstein, Maya Plissetskaya, and other outstanding Jews. There were stories from the clandestine Samizdat about the Holocaust, Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar, The Diary of Anne Frank carefully hidden at the back of the bookshelf, The History of Antisemitism in Russia—the forbidden topics about the forbidden Jews; there were remembrances of the relatives lost during the war, and of course of my grandfather’s liberating Auschwitz and my father’s war exploits on Katyushas. I sensed and understood that there was something unique about these stories and that they were addressed to the children as a message—but a message about what? I could not decipher it and the only thing I desperately wanted was to be like everybody else—Russian—and not to know, and not to belong to the weird tribe of the killed, perished, forbidden, persecuted, tortured, executed, exiled, deprived, and caged. After all, what did it mean—Jewish? Religion? Language? Culture? I was not sure, I was torn. Did it mean to be different, to carry this differentness in the form of a stigma in the passport, of the shape of my mother’s nose, of my grandparents’ conversation in Yiddish, which I did not want to understand nor to reproduce? I was told at home that my Jewishness meant that I had to be the best because we are seen as the worst, that the only way to compensate for this inherited trouble was to work hard—harder than everyone else in my class or in school because my chances to succeed were minimized by my blood. As a little child I was ashamed—and who wouldn’t be?—to belong to a second-rate race, and despite my family’s efforts to create a good life for me, I suffered all the effects of anti-semitism in Soviet Russia, the officially proclaimed “country of ethnic harmony. “ The revolution swept away the orderly legal antisemitism of czarist Russia, under which the Jewish culture, language, and traditions were segregated but legal and had a right to exist. Instead it brought about the hypocritical freedom for everybody to be the same—Russian—and Jewish culture was the first to perish. There is no people without its own culture and language, and making people feel ashamed of those things was the perfect foundation for the extermination of ethnic and cultural identity. As with any differentness, it could eventually get dangerous. And it did.

In Moscow of the 1960s and 1970s, there was one synagogue, where the rabbi was most likely a KGB colonel: How could it survive otherwise? The Jews were not admitted to colleges, especially “ideological” ones like schools for foreign languages or international relations; could never travel abroad; were not hired for “good jobs.”

My confusion was growing: Could “young pioneers,” “Lenin’s grandchildren,” be Jewish? Could I tell the secret of my Jewishness to friends? Would they reject me once they found out? Would their parents tell them to call me a “dirty Jew” ? What would I do with this part of myself? Painful childhood encounters with anti-semitism grew into a resistance to consider myself Russian: I gradually accepted my differentness. Yes, my culture in the outside world was Russian culture, literature, poetry, music, ballet, and art, but I also had something else, coming from the inside. Was it my connection to the Holocaust? To Einstein and Kissinger?

Trying to figure out who I really was, I also considered my “Sovietness.” But how could I be “Soviet” with my grandfather Yakov’s terrifying destiny, with the truth about what was really going on in the country being revealed to me, little by little, by my parents and grandparents? Brainwashed in school and struggling for some order, I was very resistant to accept this. With time, I could not help but see with my own eyes lies everywhere around me: in every slogan in the street, in the school textbooks or on the TV screen, and injustice everywhere. My reality was definitely not the one pictured by mass media as a “happy socialist society,” and the seeds of alienation and protest were planted and growing in my mind. I could not believe in, identify with, and belong to something like that; I did not know yet all the monstrosities, but I smelled something ugly—which was not mine. The Soviet ideology, with its hypocritical culture, was not intrinsically mine.

At 5, I already knew some French words and children’s songs from my grandmother Yulia, who, surprisingly enough for her well-advanced age, was fully functional in French, even though she had not practiced it since gymnasium. It went without saying that I was to go to a school that specialized in French, where it was taught from the first grade. These specialized language schools for the gifted and talented required entry examinations: good verbal skills, basic reading and writing at the age of 6, and some general intelligence level. If I passed the test, my father promised me ice cream at the café on Gorki Street, which was very popular at that time. Even now I can remember its taste.

In addition to daily classes in French and numerous after-school French-oriented activities, the general level of education here was higher than in the average Moscow school, because the students were selected by tests and interviews. This type of school attracted a rather elite population: Soviet intelligentsia sent their children there. And some Jews did, too.

The school had strong traditions of involving children in French culture, despite all ideological restrictions, and the teachers and administration had to maneuver in the realm of the forbidden here and there in order to give us access to it. We had a famous French theater, directed by a real theater producer, with real costumes and real scenery, once even shown on Moscow television. I was in love with that theater, with my roles, rehearsals, teachers who helped with the French text, all that theater life and socialization in the ambience of French literature. Later, during junior high and high school years (in Russia, all three stages of the secondary education are called “middle school,” which unifies them in one building, one administration, one philosophy), there were thematic school parties around French poetry, French songs, literary translation; there were competitions and festivals of French language and literature whose laureate I became. There were groups of French youth studying Russian, received by the school, where the students were responsible for their guests’ tours, leisure, and parties. All this was possible thanks to the strength and enthusiasm of the teachers, some of whom were outstanding pedagogues, educators, and organizers. Breaking through numerous ideological regulations and restrictions, maneuvering among them was a heroic task. As many Soviet writers, who refused to adjust their creation to ideological norms, were forced to become translators to make a living—and doing so created masterpieces of literary translation—some teachers too, denied access to other, more promising careers, research, and professional or scholarly futures, found themselves in secondary schools where they could save themselves by being what they were: creative. Taking advantage of the by-product of the injustice created a positive effect for the students: We had good teachers! The system also worked in the reverse direction, placing poor professionals in higher positions. Misplacing and displacing people in the system, paying them symbolic wages, and keeping them busy with everyday problems like food shortage or lack of housing, the regime created an effect of permanent struggle for survival, of a war during peace time, and of fatalism. It was made clear to all that they were unable to control, guide, be masters of their life, that this higher responsibility belonged to higher authorities. And that this religious stance was unquestionable, indisputable, inescapable.

But this is a separate story: about these people who brought the world to me.

At home, Grandma Yulia was a recipient and simultaneously a facilitator of all my French life, information, impressions, and emotions. Because we read entire French books since the first years of studies, new vocabulary was overwhelming: Grandma used to help me with that. She also spent hours and hours with the dictionary, writing words down for me. There was a lot of memorization: dialogues, poems, whole original texts, and much retelling to do at home—so she listened and checked that, not to me...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Sarah Benesch
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1 My French Self
• CHAPTER 2 Confessions of a Synesthete
• CHAPTER 3 “Magister of the Game”
• CHAPTER 4 Messengers and Mediators
• CHAPTER 5 French Connection
• CHAPTER 6 Language Acquisition by Stomach
• CHAPTER 7 My Italian Self
• CHAPTER 8 American Diary
• CHAPTER 9 Healing
• CHAPTER 10 French Disease
• CHAPTER 11 Driver’s License
• CHAPTER 12 Frank or Pete?
• CHAPTER 13 Interculture
• CHAPTER 14 Russian as a Second Language
• References