Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
My first language was German. I was born in Germany after the war, and I emigrated to the
United States when I was three years old. According to my parents, I spoke German flu-
ently when we reached America, but I stopped speaking it very shortly after we arrived. In
fact, one of my earliest memories is of playing with the neighborhood kids on Peshine Av-
enue in Newark and having them laugh at me whenever I tried speaking to them. The more
I asked them, in German, what was so funny, the more they laughed. My mother claimed
that after a few weeks I refused to speak German any more. While my parents spoke to me
in German, it seems that I insisted on responding to them in English.
My parents were Polish Jews, and they spoke Polish to each other since that was the
primary language of their school years and early adult lives. Yiddish, meanwhile, was the
language they had heard their parents speaking to each other as they were growing up.
Later, they learned German of necessity during their period of captivity and torment dur-
ing the war; and they had ample time to learn more of it during the long, post-war years of
waiting for permission to emigrate to America.
My uncle Max was from Czechoslovakia and had never learned much Polish except for
swear words, so he spoke to the family in German for years until everyone became reas-
onably fluent in English. My mother's brother, Moshe, who went to Israel after the war,
left his kibbutz and came to America with his family when I was 10 years old. He and his
wife communicated in Polish, but spoke to their children in Hebrew. The dinner table con-
versation when the family gathered on Sundays was a bit like the U.N. General Assembly
without the simultaneous translation.
Some of our neighbors in the Bronx and later in Newark were most comfortable speaking
Yiddish, and my parents were able to hold their own in Yiddish conversation with the old-
timersintheneighborhood.TheonlytimeIrememberhearingYiddishspokeninourhome,
however, was during the Saturday night card games that my father hosted over a period of
several years. For some reason, Old World card games like Sixty-Six were always played
entirely in Yiddish, including the kibbitzing, the scoring and the arguments.
During my grammar school years I attended Hebrew school twice a week in preparation
for my Bar Mitzvah, and I learned to read and write a fair bit of Hebrew in the process. I
thoroughly enjoyed it and was one of the teacher's pets. When I got to High School, I first
tackled Russian, then added Hebrew my sophomore year, and French in my junior year. I
was lucky enough to attend Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1960s
when it was still in its glory days. Philip Roth was our most illustrious alumnus in the liter-
ary world; Alan Ginsburg's aunt, Hannah Litzky, had been my senior honors English teach-
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