How about nurture?

Nurture impact on who I am

Through genes, nature gave me the potential to use intellectual capacity to earn a living. My family passed to me values and survival knowledge to help me develop this potential. All this proved to be essential as I grew up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.

Nurture is about environment

Upbringing conditions and education can help one develop his potential or totally mess it up.

Besides parental care, one important element of the environment for a child is mother tongue and when other languages are taught.  I recently read (citation needed) that the first language is deeply impacting the mind wiring and influences the way we think as adults.

In my case, mother tongue is Romanian, a Romance language, meaning its source is Latin. The presence of millions of Romance speakers in a sea o Slavic languages, in the middle of South East Europe, is a wonder but not the subject of this post. 

Hearing the stories of my grandparents, I realized that in this part of Europe mother tongue is a matter of chance. Mother tongue of grandchildren in areas like Dniester banks depended on how fast their grandparents could run during war. The parents of my father were faster than the Red Army in 1944, so I first spoke Romanian. The grandchildren of their siblings, that stayed there, had Russian as a first language. 

I understood the impact of Romanian on me when I learned other languages: it was easier to tackle other Romance languages like French. It also influences the way I use English, because I tend to employ more words than a native speaker would, building more intricate sentences.

But when I saw how much I share with my Russian speaking cousins living now near Dniester, I realized that language is an important part of me, but there is a deeper part of culture that unites me with my non-Romanian speaking family, like for example cuisine and sense of humor. 

Going back to family history, not all my ancestors, that I could identify, were Romanian natives, some were of Ukrainian and Polish origin on my father side and of Aromanian origin on my mother side. The later directly connects me with the multicultural Balkans, as Aromaninas are to be found all over there, from Greece to Serbia. This kind of movement of population and culture across Danube might explain common ritual meals like koliva, with recipes passed between generations, from the advent of agriculture in the Balkans 7000 years ago (my supposition though, any pros and cons are welcome).

Another piece of my family puzzle comes from my mother line, where some male ancestors came from Transylvania across the mountains. They were Romanian speakers avoiding being drafted by the Austrian Empire's Army. They were brought up in communities living along side with Saxon, Hungarian and Szekely communities. For them along with language, religious denomination was a matter of chance too.

A kind of conclusion

Contrary to nationalist and xenophobes views, I believe that people in this region share so much in terms of nature and nurture, something that transcends borders, language and religion.