By Ilya Magid

About Native Language

Our young children are quickly assimilating into the American culture. However, at home they are forced to speak in our "native" Russian language. That assimilation disturbs their grandmothers and grandfathers very much. I know one grandmother who paid her grandson for each hour that he read aloud a Russian children's book.

What does "native" language mean to me? It was "the great Russian language" which communists were forced to speak in the native republic of the former Soviet Union. From all Jewish religion, language, and culture the only thing that is left is the word "Jew" in his or her passport. *
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* Each Soviet person has an internal passport. That was the most important document. It contained a person's biographical information and his nationality too. You could not get into a job, college, etc. without it. It was required in many other cases also. Jews were hardly enrolled in a job, college, etc., because their passports showed that they were Jewish.
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If each Soviet citizen could have been awakened in the middle of the night and asked, Who wrote the sentence?, "I would have studied Russian only because Lenin speaks it" The citizen would have answered, " That was written by the well known revolutionary poet Mayakovsky."

Let me be guilty of plagiarism, "I do not love Russian only because Lenin speaks it"; he began the suppression of Jewish culture and it continued under his followers.

I gave advice to all grandparents that as long as we have time we can join the millennial Jewish culture. I hope, our grandchildren will absorb the Jewish culture themselves in search for their roots if the grandparents do not disturb them.

Editor Steven Siegel

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