Sometimes, I wonder how my mom and dad felt about my sister and I losing our grasp on Russian as we grew up. This was (is) our first language—the only one either of us heard or spoke the first few years of our lives. My sister for longer than I, given that any extended English exposure didn’t come until after she’d accompanied my parents from the former Soviet Union to America at age 5, while mine began at Miss Catherine’s Creative Learning Center in Gunbarrel, Colorado around age 3.
That was a fun sentence to write.
I think about my heritage a lot, but probably more frequently over the past few years as Covid and then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine wiped out the fantasy of family return I’d built up in my head over the first 30 years of my life. I even do so out loud, in conversation with family, friends, and myself on this here newsletter/website. Sometimes it’s in the context of sad topics like former Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death or American journalist Evan Gershkovich’s ongoing imprisonment. Sometimes it’s in the context of Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, the other major conflict flooding American headlines that has some bearing on my identity. Neither Ukraine nor Israel’s predicaments have anything to do with me, not directly—I’m thousands of miles away, a diaspora Jew in the country whose ideals, but not necessarily always its people, have made it the safest harbor for families like mine over the last century. And yet, from 3 of 4 grandparents’ origin in Ukraine, to my parents’ upbringing in Russia, to a fork in the road between the U.S. and Israel, to Miss Catherine’s Creative Learning Center in Gunbarrel, Colorado, to today, of course I feel the ripples of those wars from across the gap of distance and time. Acutely.
So despite the comfort and safety, it’s strange and at times even painful to feel a slow evaporation of culture best embodied through my own limitations in the Russian language as an adult. I was reminded of this while reading an opinion piece in The New York Times yesterday: Speaking Russian in America. The author Sasha Vasilyuk details her experience as an immigrant from both Ukraine and Russia trying to raise her son to speak Russian. She writes:
“When I became a parent, my one, obsessive goal — as a mother raising a child in America with a man who spoke only English — was to teach my son Russian. It wasn’t about his future résumé; it was because Russian forms such a deep-rooted part of my immigrant identity that I couldn’t imagine talking to my child in another language.”
The trajectory is familiar: for three years, his Russian was better than his English. Then he made English friends, started inserting an English word in his speech here and there, and came back from a visit with his American grandmother speaking English in full sentences. Vasilyuk panicked, decided on a need for full immersion, and began to plan a visit to the countries of her youth. A month later, Putin directed his army to invade Ukraine.
This is standard practice for immigrants. My cousin has a three-year-old that only speaks Russian now and inevitably will encounter some version of the same trajectory both Vasilyuk’s son and I are on, he a couple years ahead and I a few decades. Some people really make a concerted effort to practice and maintain their native tongue, and succeed in doing so to the point where they can teach it to their offspring. Currently, I know I’m not at that point. I understand Russian very well, speak it in a stilted, limited fashion with a thick American accent, and read and write in it like an elementary school student. Perhaps worse. And yet, I’ve never taken the steps to really boost it back to total fluency.
Why not? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because I don’t really have any practical use for Russian beyond speaking it to my parents, my grandmother, my aunts and uncles and cousins. And I do that just fine, switching over to English when I get frustrated with an inability to express myself fully. Everyone understands and no one gets mad when this happens. It’s what it is—an immigrant trajectory. A tradeoff well worth accepting.
Besides, if I really wanted to know how my parents felt about it, I wouldn’t have to enter a Russian immersion program for three months before finding out. I could just call them and ask. Or better yet, double text the family thread on top of the Sasha Vasilyuk piece I sent with a “have you guys read this yet? what do you think???”
ответьте мне! (answer me!)
It does not seem like you lost your “mother tongue” at all which is especially impressive since you left at such an early age. More important than verbalizing the mother tongue perhaps is the fuller part of you that seems very much to still be found (not lost) as evidenced by you thinking about it, writing about it and being about it, or really about it being an indivisible and permanent part of you.
It seems that chances to have a somewhat full immersion in Russian in foreseeable future may be higher by visiting Ukraine then this war is over rather than Russia . Although they understandably suspicious of Russian speakers these days but maybe not the ones coming from US to visit their ancestor’s places ..