Language as Legacy: Carrying Stories Across Generations

by SEAL's Sara Rizik-Baer

My grandmother, Emma Coll (whom I affectionately called Ita). passed away when I was sixteen. Her funeral fell just about on my sixteenth birthday. I loved my grandmother. She was beautiful, kind, and made the best flan in all of Maryland. But when she passed away, I realized something that has stayed with me ever since: I never connected with her as deeply as I could have, because I didn’t speak Spanish.

I come from a mixed family. My mother is German-Jewish; her family immigrated to this country in 1938 to escape Hitler’s rise to power. My father’s family immigrated from the Dominican Republic in 1960, fleeing the dictatorship of Trujillo. I grew up in a bicultural home.

My father tried to speak Spanish with me, but I never became fluent. And German was rarely spoken. There was so much pain associated with the language and that history that my grandparents hardly used it—just a word here and there.

So on my sixteenth birthday, as we laid my grandmother, Emma,  to rest, I made a promise to myself. I would become fluent in Spanish. I wanted to connect more deeply with my family in the Dominican Republic,  and with the many people in my life whose first language was Spanish. Learning Spanish opened an entire world for me. It deepened my connection to my culture and to others, and for that I am profoundly grateful. It led me to become a bilingual teacher and ultimately to the work I do today, specializing in language and literacy development for multilingual learners.

But language shaped my relationship with my German grandmother, Eva,  in a different way.

Before my grandmother on my mother’s side passed away, she showed me a document tracing our family genealogy back to the 1300s, to ancestors who settled along the Rhine River. She told she had translated document years ago from German to English.

In that moment, I realized something powerful: she had done for me what I had wished I could have done with my Dominican grandmother. She had carried the language across for me.

Because she translated those pages, we could read them together. I read them aloud while she filled in the spaces with stories—memories of people, places, and lives that stretched across centuries. Those were some of the final days I spent with her before she passed away.

With one grandmother, language was a barrier that kept us from fully knowing each other. With the other, translation became a bridge that allowed our family’s history to live on between us.

Both experiences shaped me.

They taught me that language is more than communication. It is memory. It is history. It is identity. It is how stories travel from one generation to the next.

I am the product of centuries of history; of journeys, survival, and resilience–of bloodlines stretching across oceans and continents. And I carry with me the voices of the women who came before me. Their stories live in my work today, every time I help ensure that a child’s language is not something they lose across generations, but something they carry forward.

At SEAL, we believe that language development is not about replacing one language with another, but about expanding a child’s full linguistic repertoire in meaningful, connected ways. That belief is deeply personal to me. I know what it means to lose the opportunity for connection when language is not sustained, and I know the power of what becomes possible when it is. It is about honoring and sustaining the languages students bring with them, so that their stories, their histories, and their connections to family are not lost, but strengthened. It is about making sure language becomes a bridge—one that carries stories, love, and identity across generations, just as my grandmother once did for me.

If this story resonates, we invite you to connect with us to learn more about how SEAL partners with schools and districts to support multilingual learners.