Book given me by Molly…

Ogulnick, Karen (Ed.), 2000. Language Crossings: Negotiating the Self in a Multicultural World. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

No Language To Die In by Greta Hofmann Nemiroff

p 15: On being first a speaker of German, then English, then French on Quebec:

“I have spoken English almost as long as I have spoken German… How is it, then, that I do not feel a profound or truly affectionate bond with the language? It slides in and out of me with fluency and style, but it is detached from my deepest affective life.

“If German inhabits my body, English clothes me in a well-tailored and somewhat elegant costume…”

(Living in Quebec, she is also fluent in French.)

The answer to her question is that German, with its association with her most profound and earliest memories, and her grandma, is the language of her heart, even though English is what she speaks now all the time, and rarely German. Of English: “… I dare not get too attached to it, since I [as an Austrian Jew in Quebec] have been constructed as an ‘other’ both within and because of it.”

p 19: I have wondered in which language I should utter my last pained requests. I know that if I were to use German, I would have great difficulty [because though it’s her first language, it’s rusty]… I can acquit myself honorably in English… Some years ago, after an automobile accident, the ambulance attendant… congratulated me on the fluency of my French. I had not realized I was speaking French.

“While it might be comforting to die in my most deeply felt language, I have no choice… The language of heart and the language of expediency will have to work separately at this crucial defining moment.”