Forward Into Foreignness

As soon as I started reading Joseph O’Neill’s “Forward Into Foreignness” (called “Polyglotism” in the paper version of the issue of the New Yorker I was reading; archived), I knew I was going to post it: In the nineteen-sixties, my father, a Corkman, was employed by Chicago Bridge & Iron, an American corporation that built industrial plants worldwide. He worked in hardhat management positions. An early project took him to Mersin, in Turkey. There, he met my mother. She had just spent a year at Langham Secretarial College, in London. They courted in English, then married at Mersin’s Church of St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things. My mother belonged to Mersin’s well-off Christian community, which was mainly of Syrian origin. This Levantine subculture socialized in French, voiced endearments in Arabic, communicated with functionaries in Turkish. Polyglotism was prized. My mother’s father spoke French, Arabic, Turkish, German, English, Italian, and Ladino. He sent my…