Equidistant Between Two Continents: Learning to Navigate Language and Legacies

Review Essays Equidistant Between Two Continents: Learning to Navigate Language and Legacies by Michelle Friedman English Department Bryn Mawr College 145 French Lessons: A Memoir, by Alice Kaplan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 222 pp. $9.95. Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches and Diatribes, by Irena Klepfisz. Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1990. 256 pp. $11.95. A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New (1971-1990), by Irena Klepfisz. Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1990. 256 pp. $11.95. [Form] and content are determined by our spiritual and material circumstances . By retaining the difficult process by which we reach conclusions (through digressions, free association, interruptions, new beginnings, reiteration) we endow ideas with a three-dimensional reality which makes them accessible and operative in the world" (from preface to Dreams ofan Insomniac, p. xiii). IfI were to take Irena Klepfisz's words at face value, this review would be filled with inkblots and erasures, the beginning of sentences that never fully materialized, and paragraphs that never developed. These failed words and phrases would serve as traces to demarcate the difficulties I have had in reviewing these three texts. These difficulties do not emerge from a distaste for the texts, for the authors or their writing styles, but rather from the limited space I have in which to trace the multiplicity of ideas that thread their way through these texts. These difficulties emerge from trying to explain how these two authors' writings are so alike, when on the surface they appear so unlike. Alice Kaplan's memoir and Irena Klepfisz's collections of poetry and essays emerge from very different contexts, narrate very different histories, and tell very different stories, and yet each of these texts made me rethink my own relationship to language and to history. 146 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 Alice Kaplan's French Lessons could most aptly be described as a memoir of language. Kaplan constructs her memoir as a series of essays built around language, specifically her relationship to French. She divides the essays into four sections: "Before I Knew French," "Getting It," "Getting It Right," and "Revisions." Each essay (and each section) builds on the preceding ones, yet each essay (and each section) is also selfcontained and can be read separately from the others. Each is a "lesson" and a remembering complete in itself, though each can be paired and compared with other essays. In the essay entitled "Boarding School in Switzerland," for example Kaplan details her struggle to master the sounds of French, as much as the meanings. She focuses particularly on the French "r," one of the sounds most difficult for Americans to master. She returns to this struggle in her essay entitled "In Search of the French 'R'." In the earlier essay, Kaplan narrates from the perspective of a young student, struggling to discover who she is in relation to a foreign culture and language, as well as in relation to her home and her family. In the later essay, Kaplan, as teacher of that "r," evaluates what she has learned in order to understand what she herself now teaches. Other essays similarly wind in and out of entangled memories: "leaving," "Coming Home," and "Returning Home" is one example, and "The last Summer at Wildhurst Road," "Guy, de Man, and Me," and "The Interview" is another. In French Lessons, Kaplan details her relationship to language beginning with the first "adult" words that her older brother and sister challenge her to repeat when she is a three-year-old to the professor of French that she becomes. She describes her childhood, her coming of age, and the challenges of her chosen profession through the prism of language. language becomes the means for her to channel her energies and her anxieties as an adolescent, to locate herself in the world as an adult, to identify potential dangers and safe havens. language becomes a way for her to orient herself as a woman and as a Jew. This memoir is about learning how to survive within multiple identities-academic, woman, Jew-recognizing her privilege and the losses of her life, trying to determine the history and...