Elena Lappin: ‘You can’t write when you lose your language’

I began to write almost as soon as I could read: stories in my head, mini novels in my notebooks, tales invented and told daily to my little brother. I started school magazines just so I could write in them. I published poems and satirical pieces in real magazines for children. I was quite sure that my first novel would be out in the world by the time I was 18.

But all this nascent writing of mine was in Czech. I was growing up, very happily, in Prague; my dream of becoming a writer was crushed when, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, my family emigrated to Germany. The death of the intoxicating freedom that was the Prague spring is, in my mind, always synonymous with my own death as a writer. You can’t write when you lose your language.

Czech wasn’t even my first language. I lived in Prague from the age of three, but I had been born in Moscow, and spoke Russian with my parents. As a child, I found this deeply embarrassing. In Czechoslovakia, Russian was the language of the enemy, and outside of home I pretended not to know it. I faked a Czech accent, and made sure my parents never addressed me in Russian in front of my friends. The emotional distinction between my two first languages was clear: one was disliked and tolerated only as a necessity, the other loved and deeply cherished. I had a native connection with Czech, and yet it was my foreignness that made me appreciate it even more.

I was almost 16 when we emigrated to Hamburg. As a teenager, I slipped into German with relative ease, admiring its precision and, once I was able to read German literature, its syntactic beauty. I was fascinated by the way a German sentence or paragraph could grip your attention: making you wait a long time before revealing its key verb or preposition, and thus its meaning. But for me, it had no emotional appeal; it felt heavy, hard, unwieldy, without a shadow of the kind of playfulness I so enjoyed in Czech. German could never become my language; and this meant that I had to forget about being a writer.

And then, English came to my rescue. First it was only a seed of a language I had to learn – quickly – to keep up with my German high school curriculum. Then, with unassuming strength, it gradually found its way into every corner of my life, private and professional. I studied in English, I taught and worked in English, I spoke English to my Canadian husband and our children – all born in different countries, as we continued to move around: Canada, Israel, America. One day, I suddenly noticed that I was writing my private diaries in English. Could I be born again, as a writer, in a new language?

Writing fiction in a language that is not your own is an intriguing process. You are always aware of being part impostor, part ventriloquist, part inner translator. Your voice originates in a hidden mix of inner voices, but only you feel their presence. Your readers should be able to trust your outward confidence. You wear your writer’s cloak with apparent ease, but you never forget the heavy price you paid for its protection.

All émigré writers have a story to tell about finding a home in a new language. In my case, I discovered that English was not an entirely accidental linguistic presence in my life. About 10 years ago, the phone rang in the middle of a noisy family meal at my home in London. I went into another room to answer it. A man speaking English with a heavy Russian accent and much emotion informed me, after an awkward introduction, that he was calling to tell me the true story of my birth. I was, he said, the daughter of an American living in Russia. My Brooklyn-born biological father had been brought up in Moscow when his father fled there in the 1930s from America, after a minor career in Soviet military intelligence.

The stranger turned out to be a distant relative who had been trying to find me for decades. It would take me many years to fully verify, research, understand and accept his tale. But I did immediately sense its truth. Somehow, this long-hidden family secret actually simplified my complicated biography. I had been born a foreigner.

Some time after this shocking phone call I met Joseph, my biological father, who was now living in America. We spoke Russian – the same language I speak with my mother and the only father I have ever known. Joseph started reading my books – I had published my first collection of stories and a novel at the time – and I thought: isn’t it ironic that the father I never knew was a native speaker of the language I came to write in, the language that to me felt most nimble, free and alive. In English, I found the humour and the lightness of touch I craved. Perhaps, when I discovered English as a writer, I fell in love with a distant memory of what was already mine.