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    What Language Do I Dream In?: A Memoir
    Unavailable
    What Language Do I Dream In?: A Memoir
    Unavailable
    What Language Do I Dream In?: A Memoir
    Ebook305 pages4 hours

    What Language Do I Dream In?: A Memoir

    By Elena Lappin

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Taking its title from a question often asked of polyglots, What Language Do I Dream In? is Elena Lappin's stunning memoir about how language runs throughout memory and family history to form identity. Lappin’s life could be described as “five languages in search of an author”, and as a multiple émigré, her decision to write in English was the result of many wanderings. Russian, Czech, German, Hebrew, and finally, English: each language is a link to a different piece of Lappin’s rich family mosaic and the struggle to find a voice in a language not one’s own.

    From Europe to North America—and back again, via some of the twentieth century’s most significant political upheavals—Lappin reconstructs the stories and secrets of her parents and grandparents with the tenderness of a novelist and the eye of a documentary filmmaker. The story of Lappin’s identity is unexpectedly complicated by the discovery, in middle age, that her biological father was an American living in Russia. This revelation makes her question the very bedrock of her knowledge of her birth, and adds a surprising twist: suddenly, English may be more than the accidental “home in exile”—it is a language she may have been close to from the very beginning.

    “English is not my mother tongue,” writes Elena Lappin, “it is something more valuable: a language I was lucky enough to be able to choose.” What Language Do I Dream In? is a wonderful, honest story about love, family, memory, and how they intertwine to form who we are.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCounterpoint
    Release dateFeb 1, 2017
    ISBN9781619029743
    Unavailable
    What Language Do I Dream In?: A Memoir
    Author

    Elena Lappin

    Elena Lappin is a writer and editor. Born in Moscow, she grew up in Prague and Hamburg, and has lived in Israel, Canada, the United States and—longer than anywhere else—London. She is the author of Foreign Brides and The Nose, and has contributed to numerous publications, including Granta, Prospect, The Guardian and The New York Times Book Review. She is the editor of ONE, an imprint of Pushkin Press.

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    Reviews for What Language Do I Dream In?

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      "It is our family tradition to leave gifts by the birthday child's bed late at night, so that they wake up surrounded by presents. On my tenth birthday I pretended to be fast asleep while my mother placed a mountain of new books on the chair by my bed and tiptoed out of the room. As soon as she closed the door I started reading them by the light of the street lamp just outside my first-floor window....By the time the milky greyish-white of morning I had read all my birthday books cover to cover....I absorbed all the stories, characters, illustrations: it was like a night full of vivid dreams."This memoir of a much travelled editor and writer's life was most interesting to me in the first half where she describes her life in the Czech republic as a child: growing up in Prague before 1968, seeing the crack down. Her family emigrated to Germany and her descriptions of her adaptation here too made for good reading. I found after that it lost focus on the linguistic aspect of her story, despite her shift onto Hebrew when she moved to Israel and then English in Canada and the US. She mwntions skme of the books she has helped get translated into English as a literary scout, but more of this as a 'book about books' would have been wonderful given her numerous languages (hopefully she'll write another like this!)Her family history (a grandfather a soviet spy in China in the 1930s) was fascinating but as she didn't have enough detail from the record probably would make more sense as fiction. For example, he was part of the Soviet forces in the Spanish civil war - but writes that she has little more detail. Given the controversy of the role of the USSR, this is tantalising.