The Story of a Life
“They are a yellowish-green, some have stuck together, and my uneven handwriting is already blurred. For many years the diary lay in a suitcase, unopened. I was afraid of these notebooks, afraid they would reveal fears and character flaws that I’ve been trying to hide from myself for years.
It is 1946, the year I came to Israel, and the diary is a mosaic of words in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and even Ruthenian. I say “words” and not “sentences” because in 1946 I was not able to connect words into... sentences, and the words were the suppressed cries of a fourteen-year-old youth who’d lost all the languages he had spoken and was now left without language. The diary became a hiding place where he could pile up the remnants of his mother tongue and the words that he had just acquired. A “pile of stuff” is not just a figure of speech; it described my soul.
Without language, everything is chaos and confusion and the fear of things you needn’t be afraid of. Without language, one’s naked character is exposed.MoreLess
It is 1946, the year I came to Israel, and the diary is a mosaic of words in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and even Ruthenian. I say “words” and not “sentences” because in 1946 I was not able to connect words into... sentences, and the words were the suppressed cries of a fourteen-year-old youth who’d lost all the languages he had spoken and was now left without language. The diary became a hiding place where he could pile up the remnants of his mother tongue and the words that he had just acquired. A “pile of stuff” is not just a figure of speech; it described my soul.
Without language, everything is chaos and confusion and the fear of things you needn’t be afraid of. Without language, one’s naked character is exposed.MoreLess
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