Aline P’nina Tayar’s Lingua Franca

The Hubris Review

By Janet Kenny

“The book begins in Sydney, Australia at the end of the lives of her mother and father. Tayar has temporarily returned from abroad to attend to the needs of her elders; her brother, who also lives in Sydney, will have nothing to do with either parent. The first surprising detail is that Tayar’s parents were married in La Goulette, Tunisia. Both were already gifted linguists. Her French-speaking mother, from Tunisia, knew some English but her father, the grandson of a rabbi from Tripolitania (Western Libya) and British Malta, was fluent.  Her father’s family were all familiar with English literature, history, and even the names of British railway stations. Her paternal grandfather, a high-class tailor in Valletta, was steeped in all the mandarin British tailoring traditions. Although an Anglophile, Italian was the language spoken in his childhood home. His mother was formally headmistress of an Italian Jewish Dame school in Florence.”—Janet Kenny

 

My Family and “Them Languages”: A Multilingual Life, by Aline P’nina Tayar, UK Book Publishing,
2025.

POINT VERNON Australia—(Hubris)—June 2026—I, the reviewer, am not Jewish and yet Jewish people have influenced and enriched my life. I have a sort of love affair with aspects of being Jewish. 

My own family was inflexibly British-colonial in character, and I was trained to regard Britishness as the apex of human development. During the World War Two, I felt proud to be part of all the pink territories on the map that my father had affixed to the wall of the dining room.

My Bohemian aunt was a respected teacher and poet and the books she gave me emphasized the importance of being English.

In wartime New Zealand, we never heard a foreign language apart from some mispronounced Maori names and a couple of Māori songs sung in the same Esperanto as the French songs we also sang at school. France was never mentioned.

It was only when I escaped to art school that I encountered, on my first day in the women’s university hostel, the most beautiful and exotic human I had ever met. She was the intellectual child of two exceptionally distinguished Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. She told me their story and introduced me to the romantic idea of Kibbutz idealism. She opened the world for me. 

Later, when astonished by my young husband’s record collection, I became aware of the huge part Jewish musicians had played in Europe’s musical history. 

This article is not meant to be about me so I will skip a chunk of my life and arrive at the time when I found myself studying Italian in Sydney’s Berlitz School of Languages. There I befriended my Italian teacher and her behavioral-scientist husband, both of whom were Jewish refugees from Mussolini’s fascist regime. 

My teacher came from an educated middle-class family based in Torino. It was her idea that as an exercise I should translate the famous Italian Jewish family saga Lessico famigliare, by Natalia Ginzburg, a poignant record of Torino’s lost intellectual Jewish milieu. 

And now I have discovered another “family lexicon” that echoes Ginzburg’s book with one important difference. While Ginzburg’s book is a nostalgic portrait of a secure, insular family culture, Aline Tayar’s is a celebration of diversity and curiosity; the story of a family of peripatetic adventurers with global connections, a confusion of histories and, above all, a macedoine of languages.

The book begins in Sydney, Australia at the end of the lives of her mother and father. Tayar has temporarily returned from abroad to attend to the needs of her elders; her brother, who also lives in Sydney, will have nothing to do with either parent.

The first surprising detail is that Tayar’s parents were married in La Goulette, Tunisia. Both were already gifted linguists. Her French-speaking mother, from Tunisia, knew some English but her father, the grandson of a rabbi from Tripolitania (Western Libya) and British Malta, was fluent. 

Her father’s family were all familiar with English literature, history, and even the names of British railway stations. Her paternal grandfather, a high-class tailor in Valletta, was steeped in all the mandarin British tailoring traditions. Although an Anglophile, Italian was the language spoken in his childhood home. His mother was formally headmistress of an Italian Jewish Dame school in Florence. 

Tayar’s paternal grandmother was an Italian speaker from Corfu. Her father could quote Dante, Tasso, and Leopardi, as well as large chunks of Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi.

One more language was in the family mix, and that was Maltese, derived from Sicilian Arabic.

When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia, the grandfather was so outraged by the atrocities committed by the Italian army that he forbade his family to speak Italian. His younger brother, however, thought of himself as an Italian and, as a regular member of the Giovani Fascisti, he gave the fascist salute. By contrast, Tayar’s grandfather was attracted to George Bernard Shaw’s Fabianism. (My Italian Jewish teacher had been a compulsory member of the Giovani fascisti and also gave the salute until she was expelled from university for being Jewish.)

Tayar remembers that her French-educated mother corrected her father’s stories in the traditional Cartesian style of leading the discussion: theirs was a lively and entertaining relationship.

When World War Two came, the author’s father (whom we shall now call Dougie), unsuited to the military life due to his poor eyesight, was sent to India as an interpreter, and there studied Urdu. Next, as a captain, he joined a fighting unit in Egypt, where he was able to visit cousins; later, in Italy, surviving the brutal battle at Montecassino. In Florence, he searched for Italian relatives, fearful that they may have been transported to Germany: fortunately, they had successfully evaded capture.

In 1946, Dougie was demobbed in India, and his British passport was renewed by the Secretariat of the Government of Bengal. The United Kingdom was deliberately crossed out at the head of a list of countries to which visa-less travel was permitted. Though Dougie had risked his life for the United Kingdom for six years, he would need a visa to go there.

Tayar’s parents’ marriage certificate was written in French but attached were Arabic and Hebrew translations. The Grand Rabbinate of Tunis had hesitated to perform the ceremony, doubting the existence of any Maltese Jews until shown proof that Dougie’s great grandfather had been the first official rabbi in Malta since the Inquisition had expelled all Jews from the island four and a half centuries before.

The author’s mother, Line, came from a strictly observant family. Her great grandfather, a rabbi, could trace his ancestry back to the Jews of Livorno and the Jews who pre-dated Islam in North Africa. Her room had a Mediterranean sea-view from the windows of the house adjoining the synagogue in La Goulette. Her pious grandfather set aside one tenth of his income to give to the poor. The grandfather who had been a French/Arabic translator died when Line’s father was two. 

The female lineage in this extended household was quarrelsome, as such extended families always are. When the Germans occupied Tunisia, Jewish professional men were rounded up to dig ditches, and the family was evacuated to a tiny house where the discord intensified. Rebellious Line defied orders forbidding her to attend school or to write on Saturdays. 

After their marriage, Line and Dougie rented a room from one of Dougie’s sisters whose Croatian in-laws had perished due to their belief that the Germans would never get as far as Croatia.

When the United Nations recognized the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, Israel was one of the countries for which Dougie’s army passport—now joint—was valid. Two lines had been drawn through Palestine, and “Israel” had been written in by hand.

Dougie and Line both had tangled connections in Arab lands. Variants of Judeo Arabic had been ancestral languages and were still spoken by living relatives.

And so, Dougie and pregnant Line and little Aline (the author) arrived in Israel.

They were admitted to Givat Brenner, then Israel’s largest kibbutz, which was founded by, Enzo Sereni, a member of a Roman Jewish family and dominated by educated, left-wing Ashkenazim who shared Dougie and Line’s wish to relegate religion and capitalism to the past.

They both worked hard and, consequently, each suffered serious injury and illness. The children were placed in separate dormitories.

It was Line who first became disillusioned with claustrophobic communal life. They both disliked the condescending Ashkenazi cultural attitude towards Mizrahi Jews from Arab lands and Sephardim descended from Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula.

Dougie’s British army history was resented by many who remembered how Britain had reluctantly given up their mandate in Palestine. Insoluble claims dating back to the 19th century divided Jewish settlers and incumbent Palestinians.

And so, the family emigrated to Sydney, Australia. (I too am an immigrant to Australia, and arrived in 1970, just a year after Aline Tayar departed.)

Despite his dazzling Pitman’s shorthand speed Dougie failed an application to work as a court stenographer owing to his inability to understand Australian speech. (I too struggled with the Australian accent when I first arrived.) 

In response to a newspaper advertisement, the family found themselves on a train to the Hunter Valley where Dougie would find work as a farm hand on a small dairy farm where the family experienced isolation in contrast to the claustrophobic life they had left behind on the kibbutz. 

Unable to endure the life, Line, with Dougie’s help, mastered shorthand and typing. And so they escaped rural isolation to settle in Sydney. Dougie found employment at a manufacturer of electrical appliances and Line easily found office work at the French shipping line Messageries Maritimes, where she made lifelong friends.  

She then moved to a Belgian firm where two languages predominated, and rumors of violence between the two linguistic communities hinted at the real power of language. Line’s next job was with the Scottish publisher Collins, where she became assistant to the Chief Australian Editor and worked solely in English.

The four lived in one small room in a crumbling Italianate mansion that concealed a replica of the Trevi fountain in its back garden, determined to save every penny to buy a piece of land on which to build a house.

Line and Dougie talked wistfully of migrating yet again to France. And here is the explanation of the book’s title.

Line’s younger brother Mickey had shouted: “No, no! I’m not moving again, ever!” Unlike Aline, Mickey’s entire life had been marked by disruption, separation from his parents on the kibbutz, and broken school friendships.

When he was only eight, Mickey’s parents had paused in the street to speak to an Italian builder about the progress of their new house and Mickey turned around and ran away. When he was found he was sobbing, “I don’t want you speaking ‘them’ languages.” He was later to attach himself to a neighboring Australian family, rejecting anything that set him apart from Australians.

Dougie was a walking encyclopedia. He knew History and Literature and could sing the libretti of almost every Italian opera. Above all, he liked arguing about god. Both parents shared a love of languages. Together, they attended Hebrew classes, the first of many language courses they shared.

Dougie passed Finance Law exams while still in his mid-forties and was distressed to be rejected as too old. Then he tried computer programming. France was again a serious proposition, but Mickey’s misery at the thought of relocating was too profound.

Dougie later said that not until Line settled in France did she regain her sparkle: English had weighed her down.

Tayar notes feeling uncomfortable with the change of persona speaking a different language inevitably brings about. Dougie’s personality, however, remained a constant, no matter what language he spoke. Tayar admits in retrospect that she was fortunate as a student to have parents who were able to read set texts in “them languages.”

The generosity and sociability of her parents made Tayar suspect that her friends called in more to encounter them than to see her. Unlike her younger brother, Tayar adapted to Australia only with difficulty:  the insects, the sharks, and hostile gangs of working-class bullies all contributed: “Go back to where you came from!” Tayar learned that there was no such place. That no human being can honestly comply with this request.

Fast-growing trees were soon planted around the new family house.

Neighbors included a cultivated White Russian family who resembled nostalgic characters from a Chekhov play. Then there was the cruder Murphy family, whose behavior caused Dougie to plant a bamboo screen. They were soon replaced by a middle-aged couple who reminded Tayar of characters from a seaside postcard. Next came a Norwegian family who returned to Norway after their son burned a church down. And then, in another house, a dominating husband whose wife relieved her depression by gambling and turned up in tears when she was out of housekeeping money. When Dougie slipped twenty dollars into her pocket she said, “Clive always said it. He said I could rely on you. You may be Yids, but you would never let me down.”

The neighbors who did eventually dominate the Tayar household were the messy, disorderly, and brilliant Morgans. The father, Tock, was the impoverished son of a “good” family who had been “saved” from the life of a beach bum by Gracie, his energetic wife. Their daughter Rosie was brilliant academically and athletically. The son Rob was a mathematical genius and the less bright, good-natured Tom became Mickey’s inseparable friend.  

This family has an important place in the narrative because it was to this family that young Mickey attached his affections. Mickey, who when little had been isolated in a kibbutz dormitory and separated from his family, then sidelined as his family struggled to survive, found with this very Australian family, his language, security, and identity. Forthwith, he renounced his birth family.    

Gracie Morgan failed to appreciate Line’s quiet intelligence. Gracie worked as a postwoman; Line worked as a bilingual secretary in the city. Gracie’s hard start in life had inclined her towards communism.

At school, Tayar discovered that antisemitism existed in unexpected places. She and Mickey both were attacked by rough boys when they played in a park. 

Bloody Tykes!

Relatives in Malta were applying pressure: So, what about Mickey’s Bar Mitzvah?!  

Dougie had left home on the day of his own Bar Mitzvah. He was increasingly alienated from religion due to the patronizing condescension of the Ashkenazi during the family’s time on the kibbutz and by the snobbery dividing Protestants from Catholics in Australia. There would be no compromise.

In Malta, waiting for their Australian passage, both children had been sent to a crammer to study Hebrew. Living apart from their mother while on the kibbutz, both children had spoken Hebrew. In Sydney Line spoke French at work. French was the language of relatives in Egypt and Switzerland. Ironically Mickey excelled at French and won the nationwide Alliance Française competition.

The author continued her studies at Sydney University, emerging with a French Honors Degree. Armed with this degree, she set sail for Europe: Paris! She was then unaware that for the next four decades of her life she would work as a conference interpreter, moving back and forth between Brussels and London and, after a separation and divorce, between Brussels and Bath. When Tayar returned to Sydney, she astutely observed the change from country town to city. Her memories of Sydney are graphic and touching.

Back in Paris, a circuitous set of circumstances (and a vague memory of Audrey Hepburn in Charade) caused Tayar to become a simultaneous interpreter, which is one of the most impressive of linguistic skills. The task involves an exhausting but rewarding immersion in events and ideas all of which are empowered by language.

Although the interpreter is usually a shadowy figure behind glass, sometimes chance encounters with people whose words were interpreted produce interesting conversations.

The author then entered into a friendly marriage of convenience involving passports which came to an inevitable but amicable close. Dougie and Line were sorrier than the author herself to lose the relationship.

Her consequent loneliness was unavoidable. Finally, the pressure of work and her loneliness resulted in a breakdown.

Tayar began travelling to compile the histories of all her distant, geographically dispersed aunts and uncles. She found that many of them shared her sense of insecurity about identity, and were strangers in the lands in which they found themselves. 

She discovered that in the act of writing this history she achieved a contemplative calm.

Her book, How Shall we Sing: A Mediterranean Journey Through a Jewish Family, came at a time when she was experiencing many deaths among family and friends and the death of her greatest love.

After a long period of grieving, Tayar was inspired, through a discussion with an old acquaintance, to study Mandarin, which led to a job teaching conference-interpretation at the Shanghai International Studies University every autumn for six years until Covid. Next, she studied Welsh, which language shares with Hebrew an official resurrection from oblivion.

Tayar writes of her gratitude to her parents for their gift of a love of learning languages. She remembers that her parents left their Hebrew course because they were censored for being critical of Israel.

The British poet Roger McGough’s five-year-old daughter Isobel said that her father was a poem. Tayer wrote a poem in response in which she warned little Isobel that the trouble with having a poem for a father is that it might spoil her for other men.

Mickey had never told his in-laws that he was Jewish. It was Mickey as a child who refused to accompany the family to concerts, but Gracie Morgan must have thought it had been Line and Dougie’s decision to exclude him. So, blame and rejection were established. The horror of sibling rivalry augmented by provincial racism.

When Line died, Tayar sent Mickey a note informing him of her death.

She received this in return: “Thanks for letting me know.”

When Mickey’s wife remarked that Line had been a sad, embittered, unfulfilled old woman, Tayar looked around at the valuable Murano bowl given the couple by Line, and the William Morris tapestry which had taken her twelve months to stitch, and wondered why these objects were on display when the donor was hated?

Line’s last words were: “I have nothing left to say.”

The ashes of Line and Dougie were deposited in Florence’s Jewish cemetery, but not easily. At first, the rabbi at the Farini Synagogue said: “You say these people are related to you. But where is the proof that they were actually Jews? Tayar produced the proof and her parents were finally laid to rest.

On another grave nearby Tayar was comforted to read: Aaron Finkelstein/Born in Silesia 1920/Died in Sydney 1990. 

A fellow wanderer, and speaker of “them languages,” was there to keep them company.