In this series of four stories, we are highlighting students whose “Why I Learn Languages” essays have been selected as winners of the Trinity Language Council’s 2024 Best Essay competition. Sarah Gorbatov is a junior majoring in Biology and Russian, with a minor in Computer Science, who reconnected with her native Russian through her time at Duke. Read and let Gorbatov tell you, in her own words, how learning languages gave her the tools to reconcile a language of hurt with a language of love.
Pushkin Academy of Russian Heritage circa 2010. To this day, I distinctly remember the towering red doors of PS6 and the dimly lit halls swarming with the children of Soviet immigrants. I also remember my kicking and screaming during the weekly drive from New Jersey to the Upper East Side, and my mother’s defiant patience.
For me, those four hours at the academy stretched endlessly, like centuries passing in slow motion. For my mother, they weren’t long enough. She had ensured my first language was Russian, our nannies were picked directly from the streets of Brighton Beach, breakfast was сырники and dinner каша, and every night culminated in a Russian lullaby and cпокойной ночи. Hers was a desperate fight to keep a beloved tradition alive. And yet every week, much to her chagrin, my appreciation for the centuries of Russian-Jewish culture I was heir to seemed to dwindle, as did my Russian fluency. At five years old, I was more preoccupied with Barbies and scooters.
By the time I started public elementary school, I was so behind in English that I was put in ESL classes, a win for my mother. Her efforts had paid off! But it wasn’t long before assimilation worked its magic and English took center stage, while Russian was demoted to a secondary language necessary only to ask the nanny for a snack.
This time also happened to be the peak of my parents’ divorce.
My mother immigrated from Minsk to Nebraska in 1980, when she was still in the critical period of language acquisition and could adopt English rather quickly. My father immigrated from Moscow in 1990, when he was 17. According to him, my mother’s American-Belarusian accent was far less sophisticated than his “correct” Moscovian accent. In the fights that preceded their divorce, carried out in Ruslish, her “broken” Russian was weaponized as an opportunity for bullying. The language she treasured suddenly became shameful to speak aloud, and I rarely heard it for the following decade.
Throughout the years, I progressively lost my reading, writing, speaking and understanding abilities. No longer could I pore over the fairy tales of my childhood in their original language, nor could I interpret or reply to the messages I received from my grandparents without Google Translate. However, my loss of Russian was not something I scrutinized. Perhaps my father’s words lingered somewhere in the recesses of my mind, and I internalized the notion that speaking Russian, especially an imperfect Russian, was something to be ashamed of.
This changed dramatically on February 24, 2022, when Putin announced a full-scale land, sea and air invasion of Ukraine, an aggressive development in the war he started eight years prior. Essentially overnight, the war and my lack of Russian fluency became the only things I scrutinized. I desperately wanted to be able to read the news and listen to the broadcasting coming out of the region in their original Russian and Ukrainian, but instead was stuck with translations and often, as it happened, mistranslations.
As a simple example, on Russian state-owned domestic news sites, you can read about Putin’s «спецоперация». The term is often translated in English news sources as “war” or “invasion,” which is technically correct. However, the term directly translates to “special operation.” If you can read Russian, even without any understanding of the language, you can gather this, since it is a cognate. But without that ability, the reader relying solely on translated news sources misses this nuanced, intentional word choice. The deep-seated nature of the propaganda to which Putin’s supporters are subjected is lost on the reader.
Starting college just a few months later, I committed to reclaiming my Russian fluency, unearthing this long-lost facet of my identity. But why? Why relearn Russian? Why embrace my Russian heritage? Especially now, when I should try to evade anything and everything associated with Russia (as my family strongly advised).
Why? So I could read about the war without anything getting lost in translation. So I could read the works of Pushkin, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, Bunin and countless other literary giants who wrote in beautiful Russian. So I could read and respond to my grandparents’ messages. So I could have substantive conversations with Russian-speaking friends and family members. So I could, God willing, visit Russia, Belarus and Ukraine one day and feel confident finding my way. So I could carry on the centuries-long Russian-Jewish legacy bestowed upon me.
It is admittedly difficult to love a language at the heart of so much hurt: my mother’s hurt, my ancestors’ hurt as they were persecuted in the place they called home and the hurt experienced for years at the hands of Putin’s regime. And yet, it is essential to know the language to begin to comprehend this hurt. And to comprehend that it is also simultaneously a language of love. In the process of recalling Russian, I have also recalled many early memories, from watching “Ну, погоди!” in the mornings with my sister to lullabies at bedtime with my grandmother.
Five-year-old Sarah, throwing a fit in the backseat on the way to Russian school, would be shocked to know that, 13 years later, she has finished her Russian minor, completed a Russian study abroad program and is soon to earn a degree in Russian. But I would like to think she would also be very proud of how she learned to love a language she once hated, a language unbelievably complex in the politics and emotions it invokes. She would be happy to see how excited I am on my way to the Languages building, ready for another lesson on pesky participles.
