A memoir that seems to revolve around reinvention through languages. Lappin has a somewhat unusual family history. Late in life, she received an anonymous phone call informing her that her father was not her biological father. The book sees her tackling this fact and tracks her new relationship with the previously unknown original father. It also traces the many movements of her family. They move from country to country, adopting a new language every couple of years, ending up with as she herself says ”five languages in search of an author”. These are (in order of appearance): Russian, Czech, German, English, French. She is also surrounded at various points in life by Armenian, Hebrew and Welsh. The title refers to a question this often leads to as she recounts all the languages the commands: what language does she dreams in? No language at all, is the disappointing response… with a reference to fellow polyglot auto-reinventor Vladimir Nabokov. She also manages to mention her stint as editor for the London-based magazine Jewish Quarterly and her ambulatory life married to a research linguist. She is very straight-forward in the telling of her story, with lots of run-of-the-mill detail, but it manages to engage throughout. Her parents died shortly after this book was published. I was drawn to Lappin’s book because of its purported focus on multilinguality and identity, because I am a polyglot myself. I soon found that the book was not really that much about languages at all, and I need to keep looking for a worthy example of the elusive ”language memoir” (some candidates: Eva Hoffman, Heinz Wissmann, Nathalie Sarraute). Lappin also writes a little about her younger brother, infamous German novelist Maxim Biller.
My language chain starts with Hungarian, Romanian, Hebrew, German (the languages spoken by my grandparents (my grandfather also learned Polish in the camps, but died before ever getting to use it)). My own linguistic journey is marked, just as for Lappin, by different periods living in different countries. Swedish, English, French. Norwegian. I studied Latin as well. Icelandic. Later I picked up German, some Spanish. I studied Russian, dabbled in Italian, Polish. Ah, so many languages, but the proficiency varies greatly.
Kinship of all Species 