For the past twenty months I have done my best to teach my child my native language -- Russian -- the beautiful, elegant, sophisticated language of writers and thinkers. My challenges are many, for no one in our little college town knows any Russian whatsoever (the university's Linguistics Department having been ingloriously dissolved several years ago). I speak only Russian to him (effectively forcing my husband to learn the foreign tongue in order to communicate with his only child). I order him Russian-language books from New York (from lavishly produced Pushkin's fairy tales to a series of hideously illustrated animal-themed books that smell suspiciously like gasoline). Our fridge is festooned with poorly-made Cyrillic letter magnets (which I have obsessively washed in the kitchen sink for at least thirty minutes before allowing them to be handled). Among his favorite toys are Crocodile Gena and Cheburashka, the two beloved characters of old Soviet books and cartoons. Gena sings his famous Birthday Song (non-stop). Cheburashka, conversely, is equipped with a rich array of difficult-to-decipher phrases, including "Would you like some milk?" that sends my son into immediate frenzy, for, in lieu of food, he does want milk, all the time. Our attempts, per our pediatrician's advice, to limit his intake of dairy have now been undermined by a furry creature with giant eyes and enormous ears.
As a result of all of these efforts, our toddler can count in both languages; knows every single letter of the Russian alphabet except for the soft and hard signs; can say at least fifty recognizable words in Russian; and chimes in when I read poetry to him. Yesterday, I oozed with unabashed maternal pride as I recited Pushkin's famous "U lukomorya dub zelyenij" poem, and my son interjected "dub!" (oak), "tsep" (chain), "kot" (cat), "krugom!" (around). I lost myself in a reverie: my son at Harvard at the tender age of ten, a Nobel laureate in Literature at the age of twenty, thanking his mother for all the hard work she put into raising him. All contemplation of my child's genius was interrupted by his scream: "PIG! PIG!!!" -- and frantic searching under the couch. Thirty seconds later he emerged triumphant, covered in filth (we really do need to clean under there), holding a small paper pig he ripped out from the book Tickle the Pig.
All attempts to return him to the refined world of nineteenth-century poetry failed miserably.
