[Cz-L] Re: Malvina's letter and all the other wonderful language letters.

Miriam (Mimi) Taylor <mirtaylo_at_indiana.edu>

During the 2006 Czernowitz Reunion I spent some time,
wandering around town on my own. At one point I lost my way.
My Ukrainian is worse than nonexistent, so I slowed down
every time I saw a couple or a group speaking and listened
as I passed by, to what language they were speaking.
It did not take long, before I heard Romanian and was able
to ask for directions. Another time, I was looking for the steep street
on which we used to go tobogganing. A teen-age girl was coming
in my direction, I asked her whether she spoke English. She did, and not
only did she give me directions to the street I was looking for,
I asked her if she had time to converse and since she did, I told her
about Czernowitz as it used to be and asked about current Chernivtsi.
In particular, I wanted to know, how the current inhabitants viewed
themselves and their city. It turns out that they are just as
"eingebildet" snooty and snobbish as we were.

Let me add another observation about the languages spoken in Czernowitz:
Possibly because they had to learn so many languages,
the Esperanto movement in Czernowitz attracted quite a number of adherents.
I have some photographs of their outings.

Mimi

> My mother came from a Bukovina village, but in '36 married a Romanian
> where she went to live, survived the war and where I was born.
>
> All her life, my mother and I spoke German with each other, but with my
> father, she and I always spoke Yiddish. By the time I started Romanian
> school, my mother had already taught me also English in which she was
> fluent. Many of the wealthy land-owners had English governesses for
> their children, from whom she learned and with whom she was always
> conversing in English.
>
> I started in a Jewish primary school after the Russians liberated us in
> our Romanian town and I learned to read and write in Yiddish, Hebrew and
> French. Before finally settling in Australia in '49, I spent 18months in
> Italy with Italian and Latin languages in the Jewish school in Milano.
>
> Whenever we travelled in Europe, between my husband's Czech background
> and mine, we cover most languages,- the latin and slavic ones. Sadly,
> English has overtaken most languages internationally and our children
> find no need for any other language. As we are about to embark on a
> return to Romania and to my mother's Bukovina, now Ukraine, with our son
> and daughter next May, I think Ukrainian will have us stumped! Hopefully
> even there, English will get us by, as I doubt that anyone still speaks
> either German or Romanian,- or do they?
>
> Malvina Malinek
> Melbourne, Australia.
>
-snip-
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Received on 2008-01-08 15:39:29