Learning the Language

The most vivid memory Elizabeth Cassibry has of her childhood is attending German kindergarten, where she and four of her English-speaking friends learned their numbers, letters, and sounds. Before long, the four-year-old was ordering food for her parents in shops and restaurants.

 

As part of an itinerant military family, Elizabeth doesn’t really have a hometown, but she does have an affinity for Germany.

“I think it’s because I was there when I was so young,” she says. “My parents would show me pictures and tell me about all these amazing things we did. I really wanted to go back there.”

 In the summer after her junior year, she did just that, spending ten weeks at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Taking a single course, “Jewish Narratives,” Elizabeth began to build the framework for her Senior Capstone Experience (SCE) in German Studies, which examines the differences between Jewish community and non-Jewish community spaces.  (Her SCE in history examines the Baltimore Riot of 1812, an event considered pivotal to American democracy and Republicanism.)

While she was studying in Berlin, Elizabeth’s German professor at WC, Nicole Grewling, stopped by to see her, bringing tickets for a book reading by an author Elizabeth admired.

“At Humboldt I made a lot of friends who went to school at big universities, and this gesture seemed so strange to them; they thought that my professor and I were ‘awkwardly close.’ To them, it was odd, but also enviable. They were like, ‘I don’t have that kind of relationship with my German professor.”