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Claudio Lomnitz Examines Inherited Languages and Family Histories
March 1, 2021
My mother arrived in Tuluá, Colombia, from Europe in 1936. She was four years old then, and at that point she stopped speaking altogether. Larissa had spent her first two years in Paris, and the following two in Nova Sulitza, Bessarabia, which was then part of Romania. During her early childhood, she had regularly heard Yiddish, French, Russian, and Romanian. I imagine that she spoke some mix of all of these languages, maybe with some predominance of Yiddish.
When her family brought her to a new place that filled her ears with yet another language (Spanish), she gave up trying to find any consistency between all of those languages, and just stopped talking altogether. She remained mute for an entire year, but afterward she quickly came to find herself in the Spanish language as if America had always been her destiny.