and find my dead and dying language, the one that I don’t speak. Everyone knows it: I am the killer, always have been. I am guilty, no trial needed.  

Murderer though I am, I have made a few runs at resuscitation. In my thirties, I took classes at Los Angeles Community College where I was older than every other student by at least fifteen years. I attended another series of classes full of spouses trying to impress their in-laws. I signed up for another class, and another class, and another class, always learning a little bit more, though not enough to prevent its extinction, not enough to earn a reprieve. 

These days, I say to my kids:

“This is how you say, bread: hatz.” 

“This is how you say, dance: shoorch-bar.”

“This is how you say school: tbrotz.

“How do you say school?” I say. 

“Tbrotz,” they say, because they love me and want me to be happy. The fault isn’t theirs.

I protect the real killers; always did. I never called them out, my parents, when the shriveled Old Country folks would grip my wrist with their bony fingers and wag another in my face, give me a tongue lashing using a word that still lives on, will never die: amot, amot, amot, shame, shame, shame.

The real killers are the real killers, of course, always will be. The ones that did the actual killing. A convenient side effect being that the language died too. A genocide of one ethnic group to ensure the purity of another; a tale as old as time.

It would have been better to have stayed in our villages where we had been for thousands of years. We could have lived and loved and died, feasted and worshiped and shoush-bar’d in the same place for a thousand more.

But that’s not what happened. We were driven out. Displaced. Survived. That decision was made for us.

My parents could have chosen a different path: to live and raise me in a diasporan community. But they saw the writing on the wall, what was needed to ensure their daughter’s success: the importance of being perceived as white in America and erasing all traces of foreignness in pursuit of belonging. I come from people who were good at seeing the writing on the wall, or I wouldn’t be here. You can’t blame the survivors and their descendants for being good at surviving, can you?

I sometimes dream of saviorhood, of being Dr. Frankenstein toiling away in the basement until I scream to the Heavens a triumphant “It’s alive!” I am picturing here a wild-eyed Gene Wilder in the Mel Brooks spoof film “Young Frankenstein,” not the black-and-white film from the 1930s, or Kenneth Branagh. 

I think, too, of the story’s original creator, a teenaged Mary Shelley, on vacation with her stepsister and a couple of handsome, arrogant men,¹ in a mansion during an ashy, gray season. They challenged each other to write ghost stories. Hers ends with Dr. Frankenstein chasing his creation, the monster, through the Arctic, just as I chase this dead and dying language. She wrote about men trying to resurrect the dead, playing God. Clever young Mary understood the consequences of trying to change nature. The choice: accept the inevitability of death or spend your life chasing a monster endlessly through the icy tundra. 

A poster of the alphabet, all thirty-six of its curvy letters, hangs on my wall. It is beautifully framed with double matting. I bought an even bigger poster when I visited the homeland twenty years ago. It’s still rolled up and in a tube. I promise to frame that one too; the letters forever preserved, under glass, never to fade, the gorgeous swirls printed in deep, Middle Ages-looking colors, inky and fresh, always. I will remember him, the alphabet’s inventor, and his role in preventing our extinction. The language and the church were the only reasons we didn’t perish altogether. I know that. Don’t you think I know that?

I wrote this essay. I got it published. Am I exonerated?

1. Husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and friend Lord Byron.