Clarissa's Blog

N says he finds it curious that of all the languages I could have chosen, I went with German.

“Doesn’t it give you a bad feeling because of the Holocaust?” he asks.

But the German Jews killed by the Nazis were also speakers of German. The language was just as much theirs as anybody else’s.

Judging by the Germanic last names of my Jewish grandparents, we have roots in the upper left quadrant of the map. It’s not surprising then that I’d choose German as my next language.