Languages

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I want to record this as a separate post because my mom suddenly remembered that something like that happened at some point and started to tell everyone. I do not remember the episode itself because the conversation happened without me :), but I remember who my mom described it to me many years ago. What she told me back then makes sense, while what she is saying now does not make any sense at all.

I should start with mentioning that my paternal grandmother’s side of the family were polyglots. Living in the pale of settlement, they had to speak four languages to get around, plus Hebrew, just because you should know, plus foreign languages taught in the gymnasium, plus some Greek and Latin. So it was only natural that when I started to talk (which, as I already mentioned, was very early – I recited first nursery rhymes at the age of 14 months), my great-grandmother started to introduce some Yiddish, her first language. She started casually saying to me, “And in Yiddish, this is called so and so.” When my mom overheard that, she said: “Gustava Markovna (my great grandma’s Russified name), let her learn how to speak Russian first!” For which my great grandma replied: “I never expected you to be such an antisemit!” For which my mom got very upset and ran out of the room, and my great ant Fania followed her and tried to console her saying that “nobody meant anything.” My great grandmother never apologized because she was not a type of a person who ever apologies, but the question of Yiddish was never raised again. (And it has nothing to do with my mom teaching me English later)

My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.

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Published by Hettie D.

My name is Henrietta (Hettie) Dombrovskaya. I was born in Saint-Petersburg, Russian (actually, back then – Leningrad, USSR) in 1963, and immigrated to the United States in 1996. I love Saint Petersburg, the city I was born and raised in, and I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. Similarly (but differently) I love Chicago, and can’t imagine myself moving somewhere else in the observable future. I have three children, Igor, Vlad and Anna, all adults living on their own, and one (so far) granddaughter Nadia. I also believe that my children are the best thing that happened in my life. As for my professional life, I am working in the field of Information Technologies. When I was twenty, I’ve declared that the databases are the coolest thing invented and that I want to do them for the rest of my life. Thirty plus years later, I still believe it’s true, and still, believe that the databases are the best. These two statements together imply that I think a person can have it all, and indeed, I think so! Keep reading my journals to find out how I did it.

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2 thoughts on “Languages”

  1. I will assume that some of these four were closely related languages. which of course does not diminish the abilities. but I can be wrong. People living on the borders of several languages ​​simply need to know them, this is natural selection)

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  2. 100%, that was absolutely natural. I am just saying that the idea of introducing another language from the start was not-out-of-the-ordinary (Yiddish being one of the four :)) And I am mentioning it here because my mom forgot the actual story and started to tell everyone that my great-grandmother accused her of antisemitism when she started to teach me English

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