Tag #139485 - Interview #88203 (Avram Aleksander Mosic)

I have to say that the Mosic family paid a lot of attention to education of children. My grandfather Mosic was an industrialist, he had a hat factory which among other places sold in Vienna and that is how Grandfather Mosic of Belgrade came to know Grandfather Nojvelt in Vienna. This relationship between my grandfathers resulted in my parents marriage. In my parents family German and Serbian were spoken. My mother tried very hard, she was a good bride, she was a very good young wife and she understood it to be her obligation to learn Serbian and she learned it. The truth is she sometimes made mistakes with the cases but today with the greatest amount of love and admiration I excuse her because she never claimed to know perfect Serbian but she spoke it. During my childhood I already learned German as well. The fact that I grew up bilingual later had a great impact on my upbringing, schooling and interests. I grew up bilingual, actually knowing two and a half languages, I spoke Serbian and German and understood Ladino. When I came to middle school, I must remind you that in those days school lasted four years, and after that one went to the lower gymnasium and then to the higher. When I came to the lower middle school already in the second grade I began to learn French as part of the curriculum and it was very easy for me. I am certain that the ease with which I learned French was a consequence of my two and half language upbringing. By the way, let it be said, I already mentioned middle school, it was called »Realka« and this no longer exists today, today this type of school is the mathematics gymnasium, so that I did not learn Latin nor Greek only modern languages. Upon graduating I already spoke fluent French. In the fifth grade then and the first grade today, I began to learn German, which was a breeze for me. I would like to draw attention to one thing, the knowledge of language which a child brings from home is very limited. The vocabulary from home life is limited and does not surpass 1000 words. My mother was a very well educated woman and she knew that she needed to develop German language for me parallel to Serbian. I subscribed to a German or Austrian magazine, which I received regularly and enjoyed reading, because it was very good. When I graduated from the gymnasium I spoke three languages fluently, with a vast vocabulary, with full knowledge of grammar and syntax. At the university I used only Serbian textbooks, but later in the higher years there were no Serbian textbook so I used German and French textbooks parallel and in the end I graduated with a knowledge of technical terms in three languages. We will leave my early childhood to graduation. We will continue with that in the second half.