ABOUT ME
I grew up in Lviv in present-day Ukraine. Its people and stones have influenced my personality and interests more than anyone or anything. Over centuries, this place, also known as Leopolis, Lwów, Lemberg, and Lvov, changed hands repeatedly. It migrated, at various points in history, between Poland, Austria-Hungary, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine. Not even the ethnic unmixing of the post-WWII era succeeded in homogenizing it. In Lviv, the dividing lines remain entangled and the languages interwoven. Their intersections frustrate and inspire me in equal measure.
I came to the U.S. to study in 1996. The country's contradictions - frustrating as much as inspiring - have vaguely reminded me of Lviv, making it easier to feel at home. After years in Maine, Germany, and upstate New York, where I had received my Ph.D. at Cornell University, I settled down in Hanover, NH. Since 2007, I have been teaching German Studies at Dartmouth College.
The many absurdities of trying to learn English and French in Ukraine; German, Italian, and Dutch in the U.S.; and Yiddish in Germany (all spiced up with several dead languages along the way) have lead me to believe that the cultural contexts in which we pick up a new tongue matter as much as the tongue itself. They have made me feel first-hand what it means to command a language and what it means to forget it. They have made me wonder if the process of learning languages matters more than its outcomes and therefore ought to be less dependent on the pressures of fluency or any practical applications. Thinking about the reasons for why that would be has brought me to my most recent writing projects.
