Nyet!

by Laura and Allegra

Our grandfather on our father's side grew up in a family that spoke Russian at home. He and one brother emigrated to the States while our grandfather was in his late teens. His brother was five years older.

Because our grandfather was big on assimilating, he didn't teach our father how to speak Russian. Our grandmother grew up speaking Yiddish, which was secondary for our grandfather. They would talk in Yiddish when they didn't want our father to understand, but he figured out the important things.

We inherited a couple of our grandfather's Russian textbooks, but it's very difficult to learn a language where the written alphabet is so different from English. We have a co-worker who's Russian and speaks the language fluently, but we don't want to burden her. Our chances of learning more Yiddish would be easier, since Yiddish is a spoken language with no real "correct" spellings for words, so any written texts are purely phonetic and therefore easier to understand than the Cyrillic alphabet of Russian.