August 10, 2013 - Forty words of love in Hungarian

As a child, Charlotte Mendelson thought her grandparents' native Hungarian sounded ridiculous. But now her tiny vocabulary keeps their memory alive. 
My grandmother was fearless. Yet if I asked her about the past, she would start crying. What kind of monster would have questioned her? So I resisted and now it is too late. She and her husband, my maternal grandparents, were Hungarians. Or so I thought. They spoke Hungarian, impenetrably, to each other. Even after 50 years in Britain, their accents remained so strong that kindly strangers would direct them to tourist attractions.


Read the whole article in The Guardian