I was born and raised in former Czechoslovakia to a Hungarian family. At home we spoke Hungarian, in school and elsewhere outside the house I spoke Slovak. My father was Moravian from Brno, so with him I spoke Czech. Russian was mandatory from 3rd grade forward, as well a mandatory elective language, and mine was German. Here lies one of my life’s first ironies: some of my classmates elected to study English and I thought they were the super smart kids because to me, English sounded as if someone rolled around a hot potato in their mouth. And what was this thing called “spelling” anyway? Didn’t they simply write the way they pronounced their words, as we did in Slovakia? What an incomprehensible language this English language was to me. . .
Little did I know that in a few short years I would be expert at rolling around that hot potato in MY mouth, and that English would become the language in which I was most proficient. Had someone told me in 1968 that within the span of one decade I will have almost forgotten to converse in Slovak, and that I would become a tourist in my own country, (that I would be writing something called a “blog” – whaaaa???), I would have shrugged and thought they were strange. However. . . sometimes life turns out to be the stuff of fiction.
The journey from “then” to “now” will be the subject of my future blogs – which I want to write, if not for anything else then for my children and for their children’s children. When I think about how to sum up into one word the hours that turned into decades, one word always jumps out – “Change”, and the phrase, “Adopt, Evolve, or Perish”.
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