I’ve tried Duolingo a few more times, since those first few attempts. It’s going okay. I haven’t had any more breakthroughs of realizing my brain can see the shapes of the characters, but it’s getting easier. I’m still getting things wrong, which I find a tad bruising, but I rally at the end of each lesson where the app gives you a chance to fix them.
I also find myself wondering, how did my great-aunt Sonia learn all her languages? Where did she go to learn Russian? If Yiddish was spoken in her shtetl back in Rizhyn, was it also written? Did her rabbi teach Hebrew, and did she learn it for her bat mitzvah? And what about all of the Slavic languages she spoke? When did she acquire those? Did she read them, too? French, of course, and German she read and wrote. Her husband, Kuril or Kurt, was from Vienna. What language did they speak at home, together?
Sonia had a deep, abiding love for librarianship, and took it so seriously. Did she also take herself seriously? As guardian of the commons, yes. She set herself that task. I know this, not because of the rigor she brought to the job at the Einstein Medical Library where she spent the final twenty years of her career, but because of how she wrote about the job in a condolence letter to a fellow medical library’s staff in 1970, eulogizing her compatriot, a librarian named Gertrude Annan. “As I grew to know Miss Annan,” wrote Sonia, “I realized that she was always ready to assist those who were in need…It is those who ‘counted less’ who got most of her attention. We love her for her liberalism, and, above all, for never making a distinction as to creed, color, or social status.” What a statement. Sonia here is putting her fingertip pointedly on the mark of what she considers to be a librarian’s highest calling, which was to make information available for everyone. Not just for those with the privilege and resources to find their own information.
For this, she was beloved, and for her skill in building the Gottesman Library at the Einstein Medical School, she was revered. Her death was recorded
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