Sunday Sentence

In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”

Pulsing within him was a cacaphony of tongues: the German of his parents, the Yiddish of his grandparents, the Ukrainian of the family’s domestic help, the Ruthenian and Romanian of the locals he’d known as a child, the Russian of the Red Army, the Hebrew of his new nation.

Source: William Giraldi, “Grasping for Words, Grappling with the Past: The Long Journey of Israeli Novelist Aharon Appelfeld,” for The New Republic.