French Lessons: A Memoir Read Free Page A

sounds of the Sholom
Home that disturbed me: they were familiar, although I
couldn't understand a word.
    Nanny didn't sit with the others. She sat in her room on
her Victorian chair from Fremont Avenue, rocking and
wringing her fleshy hands. A fuse had blown in her head,
making it impossible for her to control which language she
was speaking. The languages from her past-Russian from
the school she had attended in Lithuania, Yiddish from
home, Hebrew from the synagogue-came up like bile. She had gotten a prayer book as a gift from the Sholom Home
administration. She wore it around her neck on a chord. She
picked it up and closed her eyes, started in on a prayer,
looked up at me, and "recognized" me. "Oh my, I don't
know what I'm saying, Ruthie" (Ruthie was my aunt); then
she stiffened and went silent. The next words she spoke
were in Yiddish. The mode of each language was in place:
her Hebrew sounded incantatory, ritualistic; Yiddish was
conversational, emotional. The change from one language
to another, from ritual to conversation, was all the communication she could produce.

    I had never heard my grandmother speak more than a
sentence or two in a foreign language until she lost her
mind. She had kept those past lives tight inside her, until
they came out all jumbled up at the end. I would give anything to have heard her when she was ten or twenty or
thirty-five, when her other languages worked. I imagine my
Nanny in the czar's school. She's an ace at Russian in my fantasy. Even though it's the language of evil men, she picks it
up right away. It protects her from them. I invent a scene: a
wooden desk, a smock, Cyrillic letters on slate, pens and
inkwells.
    Today I am a French teacher. I think about my Nanny, sliding from Hebrew to English to Yiddish. Sliding and pushing
away bad memories. Nanny had a surfeit of memories, but
there was no connection between one memory and the
next. "Il n'y avait pas de suite dans ses idees": "There was no
connection between her ideas." Why does that sentence
come to me in French, out of the blue? It flies into my head.
No other sentence will do. I wonder why I switch like thatwhy I suddenly need to think in French. It's not like my grandmother's switching, but it feels disturbed, like hers.
French, for me, is not just an accomplishment. It's a need. I
wonder if I could end up like her?

    The Last Summer at Wildhurst Road
    Until I was eight, we spent every summer at our lake
house on Wildhurst Road, Lake Minnetonka. We stayed
there from Memorial Day until Labor Day. It was a square,
white stucco, two-story house built by my grandfather Max
Kaplan before he lost his money in the Depression. A stone
wall along the lakefront had fallen into disrepair but the
dock my parents put up got more elaborate every year. By
the time I was seven, the dock was grand: you walked out
thirty feet or more to a generous square that you could lie
on, fish off, or dive off. The important rooms of the house
faced the lake. Downstairs there was a square room the
whole length of the house on the lake side, where you
could watch the sun set. Upstairs there was a sleeping porch
with windows on three sides where my parents slept. It was
a romantic, peaceful room with a view of Lake Minnetonka
through elm trees and a constant warm breeze. In town my
parents slept in twin beds but at the lake house they slept
together in my grandmother's mahogany bed, looking out
at the lake. At the lake we lived in closer quarters than in
town. My room was connected to my parents' sleeping
porch by a glass door, with a curtain for privacy. There was no hallway separating us. I looked out the windows of my
room onto the next-door neighbors' house. I could hear the
sound of the lake lapping against the shore coming in
through my parents' sleeping porch. Daylight savings meant
that dusk didn't come until 9 P.M. I heard too many interesting noises to want to sleep: crickets, waves