Mother Tongues and Dissenting Daughters: An Essay

Rosina Lippi
September 1998
All Rights Reserved
rosinalippi@pobox.com

I grew up on the north side of Chicago, and I might be there still if a study-
abroad organization called American Field Service hadn't intervened.
In 1973, when I was seventeen and charting out a future that would have kept
me in the vicinity of Irving Park Road and Lincoln Avenue forever, AFS awarded
me a summer-long scholarship. They could have sent me anywhere; I knew that
when I applied. In fact the idea of Kenya or Borneo was exciting to me, maybe
because I was in the habit of going off to explore on my own from a very early
age. By ten I didn't think much of riding the El downtown to look around Marshall
Fields; at Halloween we ranged far and wide in the dark, and in my brief career
as a Brownie I knocked on doors in poorly lit apartment buildings and sold
cookies to strangers.
Once AFS accepted me, I had to wait to hear from my summer family in order to
find out where I was going. Word came by aerogramme, a long sheet of thin blue
paper that folded up to become its own envelope. The stamp said Oesterreich,
which meant nothing to me but looked suspiciously German. At the time I spoke
no German, but I recognized the look of it simply because the neighborhood I
grew up in was primarily German, and to a large extent, first generation. You
could buy knackwurst and dark bread and chocolates wrapped to look like
ladybugs in tiny shops where English was not the first recourse.
Not too far away was the Lutz Continental Cafe, where German grandmothers
took kids on special occasions, to drink Viennese coffee and eat pastries and
tortes with names like rum krokant and baumkuchen spitzen, everything bursting
with heavy cream and marzipan, ground hazelnuts and chocolate.
Very different from the Italian pastries I grew up with, which tended to the dry and
aesthetic and perhaps to an outsider, dire; my father's favorite cookie was called
ossi dei morti, bones of the dead.
But I grew up surrounded by things German. Until I was fourteen we lived above
a German photographer's studio on Lincoln Avenue. He filled the window next to
our front door with black-and-white photographs of silver anniversary couples
and brides with bubble hairdos, most of them with last names like Schmidt and
Hess and Klein. Cheeks were tinted pink and eyes blue; every now and then he
would add a string of pearls to an unadorned neck. The butcher, the undertaker,
the barber, the grocer -- they were all German.
Even the corner tavern where my father went for a beer was German, but we
weren't.

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To this day I don't know how we ended up in that neighborhood. My father had
grown up in Italy; my mother called herself Irish. This was, of course, a lie
concocted during WWII: her father's family could be traced back to the
Netherlands and then New Amsterdam in the 1630's, and her maternal
grandparents came to the Chicago area from Prussia and Holland. Sometime
during the war it had slipped her mind that she had relatives with names like Bjick
and von Luedtke and Gronewold.
I identified myself as Italian, by virtue of my father, my all-too-ethnic name, and
because I associated all things Germanic with people like Hildegard Metzler's
grandmother, a small, dry woman who made her own strudel pastry and who
didn't need English to make it clear that she didn't approve of me. The only other
Italian on the block was a senile old woman called Aunt Rose. She lived on the
third floor of a three flat and when the mood was on her, she would pelt us kids
with shoes and scream at us in Italian. This put me at an advantage, because it
was the one situation where I knew what the swear words meant and the other
kids didn't. Aunt Rose was crazy, but she was mine. On good days she invited us
in for stale Stella Doro cookies or peppery fried bread and syrupy coffee.
The neighborhood was a multicultural place to grow up, long before that term had
any cache. We called each other Heinie and Wop, Mick and Spic with a kind of
equal opportunity, come-one-come-all scorn. Kids took a stand, and fought to
protect territory. I usually watched from the sidelines, and used a book for a
shield.
So the suspicious stamp on this aerogramme was unsettling. It was from my
summer sister, introducing herself. They were dairy farmers, she wrote, in the
alps near the Swiss border. In Austria. It took me some days to come to grips
with this. My classmates -- many of them spoke German at home with their
parents -- reminded me that I had seen The Sound of Music more than once, and
that calmed me down a bit. I thought I knew what I was getting into. I am forty
three years old as I write this, and I see that letter as one of those pivotal
moments in a life, when things swing off in a direction never imagined.
I was an inner city kid, a good student, the product of a protective Catholic school
and a spectacularly dysfunctional home life. For us a vacation was a weekend at
a Wisconsin lake, but within a month I was on a plane for Brussels with 150 other
seventeen year olds. The thirty of us who were assigned to families in Austria
were put on a night train for a week's orientation in Vienna. The porter made up
beds for us on the red leather benches that folded down from the walls.
I remember a stop in a train station somewhere in Germany, late at night, and a
group of men standing on the platform in a circle of buttery lamp light. They wore
long cloaks and tall hats and boots to their knees, and right then I understood
how far I was from home.
At the end of the next train ride that brought me from Vienna to Bregenz, I met
my summer sister, Elisabeth. We drove more than an hour up winding roads into
the mountain valley. The farm was a large one in their terms: twelve milk cows,
all but one off at summer alp when I arrived. The family divided its time between

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making hay for winter fodder and the pension (bed and breakfast) they ran for
German tourists. I helped make beds and clean bathrooms, puzzling over
strange ceramic contrivances that seemed to be a cross between a toilet and,
disturbingly enough, a water fountain.
I learned what milk tastes like still cow-warm, that butter sweats water when it is
fresh, and I began to comprehend the complexities of cheese. For that summer, I
was part of a family of seven. Nobody went anywhere: they worked together, ate
together, fought and talked and sometimes in the evening Katharina -- a small,
round woman with braids wrapped around her head -- would successfully goad
her children into getting out instruments (guitars, zither and a dulcimer). They
were consistently out of tune and never in synch, but they played with great
earnestness.
I was good at languages, and in the last month before I left I had put aside my
antipathy to all things Germanic to study the materials sent to me. How to greet
people and take leave. How to count, ask for directions, order food, take the
tram. What the book didn't tell me, what no one could have prepared me for, was
a culture so different from my own in such subtle ways that it would take me
years (because while I didn't know it, this summer was only the start of a long-
term relationship) to learn how to negotiate my way through something as simple
as accepting a ride to the next village without giving offense.
And then, in the first few days it became clear to me that I had been studying a
language which had nothing to do with the mountain valley where I was spending
the summer. The German laid out so cleanly in textbooks bore no resemblance
to what I heard around the table or from the people in the village. My summer
sister spoke enough school English to make clear to me that the dialect I was
hearing from them was not something I should or even could learn. It was of no
use outside the mountain valley; nobody understood it and everybody made fun
of it. It's old, they told me, as if that explained everything.
What they didn't tell me was that I had stumbled onto a place that spoke the
German equivalent of Chaucerian English, a language not quite frozen in time,
but certainly slowed down to a trickle. Much later, when I took Old High German
in graduate school I saw the connection, there on the page. A six hundred year
old phrase book written by a French traveling salesman for his own use in
German speaking lands. Ischt das din wip? Ischt das din ross? Is that your wife?
Is that your horse? Alemannic, the variety of German spoken in Switzerland and
western-most Austria. The language I heard around me all day long.
Looking back, it seems to me that I should have realized there was something
unusual going on. It was 1973, and the villages stood on the brink of the
twentieth century. Telephones were the exception rather than the rule. Some still
had outdoor plumbing. A few farmers worked with horses rather than tractors;
most did at least some of their hay cutting with hand scythes, and while milking
machines were making an inroad, farmers still delivered their milk, morning and
evening, to the Sennhaus -- the communal dairy -- where it was made into
cheese. Some of them brought it by handcart, still wearing their blue milking

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overalls. It was clear that most of the real business of the village was conducted
there at the Sennhaus, and more important, that anybody who was truly
interested in the villagers would never get close to them unless they somehow
gained access to their language first.
For the villagers of the Bregenz Forest, facility in the spoken language ranked
second in value only to hard work. The ability to argue persuasively, to tell a
story, to do long calculations without paper and pencil, these were highly valued
accomplishments, whereas writing -- the book German they learned like a
second language in school -- was something nobody seemed to care much
about. And so my first problem was that while these were a talkative people, they
would not talk to me, because German was hardly more their language than it
was mine.
I started asking questions about the dialect. At first my interest was treated with
the kind of amused and affectionate condescension given a child who announces
she is going to write a novel. Before long they realized that I was serious. Anton,
a tall, gaunt man with a nervous smile and a two-pack-a-day habit started to pick
up things and name them in dialect, pausing for me to repeat after him. When
they saw I was in earnest, verybody got involved.
It wasn't long before I realized that I was learning the language not of the
Bregenz Forest, but only of the village I lived in, with eight hundred people in a
crook of the mountain valley. Down the road in the next crook people spoke a
similar, but distinct dialect. My summer sister imitated it for me, and her family
laughed. She was a good mimic, but she could not tell me how it came to be that
two kilometers in one direction or the other made the difference between gang
and gau, hua and hui, schmelg and motla, gurbl and goga – to go, home, girl,
child.
I started to understand the subtleties, but it took longer for me to realize that the
dialect was only the first hurdle to fitting in. On Thursday nights the village put on
entertainment for tourists from Germany. Afterwards there was a dance, waltzes
and intricate polkas that had nothing to do with beer barrels. We went to these
Heimatabend, not because we were interested in the show, but for what came
later. Young people came from all over to dance in a smoky hall that became my
classroom in adolescent mating rituals.
Women's liberation hadn't found its way to Vorarlberg, and we waited to be
asked. Once asked, it was easier to say yes than to negotiate the delicate
business of declining. At home in Chicago I was the antithesis of popular: a geek,
to put it plainly, one of those bookish girls who stood on the sidelines of the gym
during Spring Fling and tried to look as if I didn't really want to dance.
In Vorarlberg I rarely was without a partner. I was no prettier, certainly, but I was
exotic, an American from Chicago with an Italian father. Those who had any
English at all tried it out on me while I concentrated on my footwork. Did I carry a
gun? Did I know any gangsters? Did we eat everything out of cans? Was it true
that in America there were no butchers? These were the easy questions. The
real test came on the August night that a young farmer asked me to dance a

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second time, and then a third. The girls my age raised an eyebrow. I understood
that I was supposed to decline, but had no idea how to do that, or any real
inclination. He was friendly, he was nice looking, he was a very good dancer. I
was seventeen, and I felt like Scarlett O'Hara when she bursts out of mourning at
the Atlanta bazaar to dance a reel with Rhett Butler. He asked to walk me home -
- that much I understood -- and I accepted. I remember being anxious, not
because he made sexual advances, but because he talked to me very seriously
the whole way, and I understood only a small portion of what he was trying to tell
me.
The next day everyone in the family made it their business to explain to me how I
had transgressed, and it all came down to one simple fact: he was from further
up the valley; he spoke a dialect different enough to mark him as Not-One-of-Us.
I had heard the stories of rivalries. How at one point -- not so long ago -- if a man
from Bezau or Mellau dared to come courting a local girl he would be driven off
with pitchforks, or dunked in a trough and sent home soaking wet in January. I
had stumbled not into Gone with the Wind, but West Side Story.
It took that summer a few thousand miles from home to realize that the urge to
stake out a territory, to mark it with language, and to defend it, was not particular
to inner city Chicago. We were not the only human beings to wield a mother
tongue like a battle axe. This was my first object lesson in the universality of
sociolinguistics: all over the world language is used to build bridges, and to erect
walls. I was determined to fit in, and so I made a place for myself by learning the
particular dialect of a particular village of a couple hundred people. It took some
time, but when people asked where I came from and I said Grossdorf, they
nodded their heads in acknowledgement. When people asked who I belonged to
and expected me to provide an overview of my clan, I evaded the question. I got
away with this because my accent was convincing; my accent was convincing
because I learned the dialect from them directly before any well-meaning teacher
could intervene and correct my pronunciation.
Later I would realize that I had learned a variety of German that was as
stigmatized as the language of Alabama sharecroppers, but by then I didn't care
anymore: my allegiances were fixed. I learned the book language as a necessary
evil, but I always preferred, and still prefer, to speak the dialect of that village that
I chose for myself. I did that so successfuly that I was able to reap the benefits
and the disadvantages of being an insider: when I went out to one of the larger
cities in the Rhine Valley, people turned up their nose or pretended not to
understand me, just as they did to my friends. You can't talk! an elderly store
clerk sputtered at me, meaning he didn't care to understand me.
I was delighted. The insult registered, but to me it meant that I really belonged. It
was a game, but it did not remain one. On a visit to Munich, a friend of a friend
listened to me for some time and then cornered me. You speak English with an
American accent, and German with a Swiss accent. Don't you speak anything
right?

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That remark, tossed off so casually in a smoky bar, had more effect on the
course of my life than almost any other single question ever posed to me. It
focused what I had begun to understand about myself: that I would always be an
outsider, because I was most comfortable on the periphery. And more important:
I would always be fighting to assert myself from that spot I had chosen. It was a
lesson I learned as an Italian kid in a German dominated neighborhood, that I
relearned in a mountain village in Austria, and because I never moved really
back home to Chicago, it is one that I still confront on occasion.
Where are you from? is a question I hear once in a while, here in the Pacific
Northwest. It's very clear when this question follows from somebody's confusion
about my midwest accent. Under the right circumstances, if the question is meant
well and there's enough interest, I will provide a quick overview of American
dialectology and how I fit into the geographical whole. My Chicago vowel system
can be sketched out on a napkin and compared to that of somebody from Seattle
or Utah (where, a professor of mine once claimed in delight, people had barely
enough vowels to survive). But I am still a dissenter: my hackles rise when
somebody tries to put me (or anybody else) in their place because of the
language they speak.
To judge a person not on what they have to say, but how they say it is a kind of
discrimination too often tolerated. In the end, that is the greatest lesson I took
away from Austria.
Many of my connections to the Bregenz Forest are still alive and well. This
summer we had a visit from Maria, who grew up in the Sennhaus, and her
husband Gebi. Maria didn't remember that dance when I stepped across a
language line, but her daughters, eight and thirteen, found the story immensely
funny. They are growing up in a large city in the Rhine Valley and when they look
at us they don't see successful middle-aged writers and teachers, because the
dialect that unites us also separates us from them. It marks us for what we really
are, to them at least: people of the mountain valley, country folk, hopelessly out
of touch and time.
Things have changed a great deal since I first spent a summer in Vorarlberg in
1973. The twentieth century has caught them up: the roads have been widened,
the villages have grown. We go back regularly, and my daughter Elisabeth wants
to spend a summer there when she is older. She has taken it upon herself to
learn the language. Of course the books available to her present a rarified,
stilted, homogenized German, but for now I encourage her, and don't complicate
her vision of the way language works in the world. That lesson will come soon
enough.

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