I was born into the South Africa of the apartheid era, where every white child was educated in two spoken languages – English and Afrikaans. The latter was a language which unfurled itself from its Dutch origins at the beginning of the twentieth century to bask in its distinctive, not to say unique cultural and literary identity.

Afrikaans is spoken nowhere else in the world and I have come to cherish it with the sentimental pride of someone who has acquired a rare but useless piece of bric-a-brac. The few novels and books of poetry in that language which I still have serve only to remind me of a lost world, just as my father used to peruse the Hebrew books in his collection which returned him to his childhood in Lithuania.

In my day, white parents had a simple choice to make. They could either enrol their child in a state school where every subject was taught through the medium of English, or in one where Afrikaans was the prevailing medium. In either case, the other language ranked a poor second.

Despite their Yiddish-speaking origins, my family conducted their everyday business in English. This was the language to which I was attuned from birth, so when it came to making the choice of schooling it was a ‘no contest’ that I would land up in an English medium school.

Black South Africans, the vast majority of the population, were lumped together in a monolithic category termed ‘Non-European’ (i.e. Not White) and deemed unsuited to any type of formal education. Some received a rudimentary form of schooling, the purpose of which was to enable them to cope with the unskilled employment which had been decreed as their lot. Most were left to conduct their lives in their own tribal languages and dialects. As with every other facet of life in that split society, a chasm separated the English and Afrikaans speaking worlds from the Bantu speaking world. Literature cast in a Bantu language was unheard of.

At my Johannesburg High School there were options for a third language. One could choose either French, a language respected as the gateway to European culture (‘European’ in this sense referring to the continent of Europe, not the idiosyncratic term used in South Africa to imply ‘whiteness’) or Latin, dismissed by some as a dead language but regarded by others (including my parents) as a foundation for higher education in law, medicine and the classics. Inevitably, I was steered towards Latin.

Other languages could be taught as extras. Jewish youngsters could opt for Hebrew, a subject taught to matriculation level in a handful of Jewish schools. My father, being both a teacher and a Hebrew scholar, coached me at home. He was patient enough to put up with my grumbles about the extra workload involved, so I managed to chalk up Hebrew as a matriculation subject. This was a low bar, as I was to discover in later years, after spending six months in Israel struggling to follow Hebrew broadcasts, books and articles in unvowelled Hebrew and rapid-fire everyday conversations.

I was also exposed to Yiddish, the ‘mamme-loshen’ of many Jewish homes. My parents conversed fluently in Yiddish, especially when they wanted to communicate some emotionally charged or secret bit of information. My mother was adept at scolding and cursing in Yiddish, so I naturally acquired a rich lexicon of hyperbolic and derogatory terms over the years. Unfortunately I was never taught to read or write in the language and this has remained a lacuna in my Jewish education. It is some consolation that I share this limitation with many of my contemporaries.

The language of a country sometimes acquires a negative colouring, especially when it is spoken by an oppressor. Unsurprisingly, Afrikaans came to be detested by many young blacks, forced to submit to the harsh regimentation of their Afrikaans-speaking overlords. And for many Jews, German remained the language of Hitler decades after the disappearance of his hateful rule. The Nobel Prize winning author, SY Agnon, was once taken to task for refusing to speak German. He was reminded by his critic that German was also the language of Goethe and that his fellow Nobel Prize winner, Nelly Sachs, was a German speaker. But brutal words shouted into the ears of victims of persecution cut deeply into the psyche and drown out the music of the language.

All in all, South African Jewish upbringing has bestowed five languages on me. I am far and away most comfortable in my native English. Next, in steeply descending order of fluency, comes Afrikaans, followed by Hebrew, clumsily spoken and even more clumsily read and written, then Yiddish, nowadays mainly exercised for its amusement value. My fifth language, Latin, only stares mutely at me from ancient texts, but is treasured nevertheless.

I can do no better than end with a quote from WS Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, who, though he was using the term ‘language’ in the sense of either refined or foul, nevertheless captures perfectly my attempts to achieve peace of mind by speaking, reading and writing in different languages.

“When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is taboo’d by anxiety, I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in, without impropriety.”

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)