Page - 40 - in Tina and Amir & Ella - English

5 10 15 20 25 30 40 when our teacher suggested playing some language games. We had great fun and I wished every lesson would be like this. On my way home I could not stop thinking. “Why do we call a table ‘table’? Why do we not call a table ‘bed’? Could we make up a new language? Maybe a new language could be a real secret between me and my friends and all the others would like to find out what our secret would be. But what is language? And what would it be like not to un- derstand the language that everybody speaks? I thought about Isaac. It must be difficult for him. My brother was sitting at the table when I asked him, what he was doing. He just said: “Please let me think, I cannot concentrate at all when you are interrupting all the time.” My mother came and told me not to disturb David, be- cause he had to learn vocabulary for his French test. I asked myself: “What on earth is he doing with French? Most peo- ple speak English and not French. So why should he learn French?” When I talked to my father about it, he said: “You know my grandfather knew many languages. He lived with his parents in Thessaloniki. First the city was Turkish at that time, so he spoke Turkish, and then the city became a part of Greece, so he spoke Greek and since our family is Jewish he spoke Sephardic – old Spanish.” Suddenly my father stopped. “Please tell me more about my great-grandfather and all the languages he spoke and about the time in Greece and what he did later on”, I begged. My father said quietly: “Sometimes he did not speak, be- cause he didn’t speak of things which might cause him pain. Then I saw deep sadness in his eyes. So even if he knew many languages sometimes he stopped talking.” I could not under-