Who Are Your People?

And what makes you you?

For several of my preschool years, and then again in middle school and high school, my mother and I lived with my maternal grandparents. My mom had emigrated from Austria shortly after the Second World War, and my grandparents had followed after a couple of years.

German was their default language at home. My mom’s English had a slight Germanic tone and was littered with poor grammar. My grandparents spoke with thick accents. Their English vocabulary was very limited, and they frequently strung English words together in what I recognized as German syntax.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

My mother had finished the Austrian equivalent of technical high school. Neither of my grandparents had completed elementary school. Each of them held jobs t…