As experiences, the journeys back and forth were always remarkable. At the age of five, I traveled with my family across the Atlantic Ocean for the first time aboard the luxurious Cunard liner, the Queen Mary. I saw grown men and women — fathers and mothers and ship captains — play such games as ping-pong and tennis and at the time the idea of adults playing came as a surprise. One day, after some persuasive begging, my parents agreed to play a game of ping-pong, and I remember that my mother was quick and competitive and my father was not.

On another trip, I met a family that very nearly matched ours. On the day of departure, an El-Al ticketing agent called to complain about a double-booking: according to their records fourteen reservations had been made for a Tobah Abraham and her six children. Hours later, at the airport, we met the other Abrahams and confirmed that the mothers were both named Tobah. Since this was real life, not fiction, the names of the children didn't match perfectly. There was a Pnina (my Hebrew name), a Moshe (my brother), and a Sarah (my younger sister), but not a Miriam, Levi, or Nachum. Also the other Abrahams weren't Hasidic. Pnina's mother had long black hair and wore long-legged bell-bottoms. My mother wore a navy blue turban and wool knit skirt suit. Pnina and her siblings wore shorts, t-shirts, and sneakers; my sisters and I wore matching pleated skirts, white shirts, and ankle-high shoes. We spoke Yiddish; they spoke Hebrew. I spent the long flight imagining myself as Pnina, daughter of a mother with long black hair, certain that I was never meant to be a member of my own family, that I was different and didn't belong.

There were variations on these experiences, more often than not initiated by novels. In my early teens I read every Girl Sleuth book and series every published and imagined myself leading the life of someone whose days were adventures. I gorged on Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Vicki Barr, Cherry Ames. I moved on to the British St. Claire Girls series. Somewhere along the way I read Little Women, Cheaper by the Dozen, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights. I fell upon The Scarlet Letter, a nightmarish page-turner for me. At some point dreams began augmenting my everyday real life. There were nights when I became a neighbor's child, others when I belonged to an Italian Mafia family. I was a child in India, and China, I was an acrobat in the circus turning cartwheels on horseback, and so on. These rehearsals in re-imagining the self surely enabled my eventual departure from my family's Hasidism and I did indeed become a woman with long hair and long bell-bottoms. More significantly, my early experience in displacement, of being perpetually new and different on the block and in the classroom, reinforced my sense of otherness, and probably led me to the writing life.

I often think The Romance Reader, my first novel, could be read as a Yiddish novel in English translation. A difficult hurdle in writing this novel was the question of voice, not the point of view, but rather the particular sound of the voice. In order to write about characters who think and speak in Yiddish, in order to evoke their lives and their culture, I had to find a way to capture the rhythms, culture, and vernacular of Yiddish. I didn't want to do this in broken immigrant English, the way Henry Roth had in Call it Sleep, which I find painful to read. Toni Morrison has said that she allows her characters to guide her in what they can and should say. In other words, If they wouldn't say something to one another, if the only reason they might say it is to benefit the reader, then it doesn't belong in the book. I tried to make use of this advice. It seemed to me that my Yiddish-speaking characters wouldn't sound like immigrants in conversation with one another unless they were attempting to speak English. The book opens with the sentence, “The sound of Ma's voice speaking English wakes me,” which is to say that it isn't the fact of her speaking English, but rather the way her voice changes when she speaks it that Rachel notices.

In my initial groping draft, certain rules asserted themselves. Anytime I had to choose between a two and three or four syllable word, I stayed with the simplest one. And I kept to short and direct sentences, perhaps as a way to give my characters what I think of as the rudeness or humor of Yiddish. There were other choices, mostly idiosyncratic, such as omitting certain conjunctions and prepositions from sentences, which editors and proofreaders subsequently tried to re-insert. Another oddity: I found that to render a particular expression with authenticity only an extremely literal, often clunky translation captured the beauty of the original. Then I came across a discussion of literal translations in one of Jorge Luis Borges' Norton lectures which he delivered in 1967 at Harvard, “Word-music and Translation,” which I think worth quoting at some length. Borges points out that:

After the fact, that is after I'd finished writing The Romance Reader, I found more support for literal translation in Vladimir Nabokov, a writer who transcended the limitations of language, who wrote more beautifully in his third and fourth languages than many of us write in our first. Defending his much-maligned, literal translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Nabokov wrote, “My own EO falls short of the ideal crib. It is still not close enough, and not ugly enough. In future editions I plan to deflowerize it still more drastically. I think I shall turn it entirely into utilitarian prose, with a still bumpier brand of English, rebarbative barricades of square brackets and tattered banners of reprobate words, in order to eliminate the last vestiges of bourgeois poesy and concession to rhythm. This is something to look forward to. At the moment, all I wish to put on record is my utter disgust with the general attitude, amoral and philistine, towards literalism.”

While I was at Hunter College, a period of my life when I read, wrote, and spoke English almost exclusively, though perhaps less than perfectly, I experienced what I might call a linguistic shift from Yiddish to English. I became aware of this shift when one day I awoke from a dream and realized that the people in my dream had been speaking English which was strange because in life they were not English speakers. I became more attentive to the language of my dreams and learned that now and then I dreamt in English. These days, years later, when I realize that I've been dreaming in Yiddish, it comes as a surprise, sometimes as a kind of revelation.