THE RELUCTANT MEMOIRIST
Author never thought she’d be subject
What Language Do I Dream in? Elena Lappin HarperCollins
LONDON It began as an ordinary winter evening in 2002. Elena Lappin was having dinner with her husband and three children in their North London home when the phone rang and changed the former Ottawa resident’s life dramatically. An agitated caller, speaking in a thick Russian accent, informed her that the man she had known as her father through 47 years of life was not her real father.
For the Moscow-born Lappin — a successful novelist, journalist and publisher — a family secret was suddenly laid bare. In middle age, she was discovering that her mother had married the man she believed to be her father when she was a toddler and had kept the truth about her origins from her for nearly half a century.
Lappin dealt with this revelation by writing a book — What Language Do I Dream in? — which is both personal memoir and a meditation on identity and language. Its publication in Britain last year sparked enthusiastic reviews, and it has now arrived in Canada. Yet its author insists she is “a reluctant memoirist.”
Lappin, 61, had never intended to write about her own nomadic life — one that had initially taken this child of Russian and Czech émigrés from the Soviet Union in the early 1950s to Prague, at a time when democracy was struggling to take root in Czechoslovakia, only to be suppressed by Soviet tanks. After this tragedy, there were more stops along the way — Germany, Israel, Canada, the U.S. and finally Britain, now home to herself and her husband, Canadian academic Shalom Lappin.
“I never occurred to me that I would be an interesting subject for a book.” Lappin is in a reflective mood as she chats in her cosy office near Piccadilly Circus. “If my life hadn’t suddenly become a narrative in my head because of that phone call and its aftermath, I would not have written a memoir. I remember thinking at that moment — this is not going to change anything about my life, but it’s going to change so much about how I see my life.”
At the time, Lappin was still enjoying critical acclaim for a recent novel, Nose, a story whose subject matter ironically seemed to reflect Lappin’s own background.
“It had to do with espionage and communism and Jewish life in various formations, and with dark family secrets. I never had any idea I was carrying those kinds of secret in my own life!”
Lappin now found herself applying her formidable skills as an investigative journalist to her own past. “It was odd how investigating your own history requires exactly the same process as investigating other people,” she says. “My secret didn’t throw me because I was very secure in the way I had been brought up. I had a lot of love — but I was still upset that I wasn’t given the opportunity to deal with this much earlier.”
The story she tells is full of drama. And with it comes an inquiry into how language relates to identity and culture. Lappin speaks Russian, Czech, German, English, Hebrew and French — yet, tantalizingly, she chooses to write in English, and in this book she seeks to understand why.
“That ultimately interested me — how did I become a writer in English and not in any other language?”
Canada became an important part of her life journey in the early 1980s when she taught German part-time at the University of Ottawa and her husband headed its linguistics department.
She appreciated the bilingualism in Ottawa — especially after she created an award-winning children’s television show featuring talented local youngsters.
“We would put them in a situation and tell them to improvise in response. What was interesting was the interaction. Most were bilingual, so they had no trouble moving back and forth, almost as though it was one language. That’s what the show was really about — how you could have two cultures side by side and still mesh and merge.”
But she also encountered an insidious form of culture collision in Canada’s capital. At University of Ottawa, she was teaching in a department run by “German oldtimers” who saw her as something of an impostor. One of them interviewed her, and in her book she relates what happened.
“He asked me about my family situation. Why was I in Canada, where had I lived in Germany? I told him that my husband was Canadian.
“‘But he’s not a real Canadian,’ he said.
“‘Oh yes he is. He was born in Toronto.’ “But he’s Jewish.’ ” The comment left Lappin speechless.
“Casual anti-Semitism doesn’t always present itself as a frontal attack,” she writes. “It appears seemingly out of nowhere, unexpectedly making you lose your balance. By the time you have managed to regain it, the moment is gone, and there seems nothing left to respond to. And yet, you know it will return.”