This essay begins in my grandmother’s kitchen, where the scent of burning challah mingles with fragments of conversation I wasn’t meant to hear:
“I never learned to make the bread right,” she mutters to herself, then my grandfather switches to something else—not quite Yiddish, not quite Russian, not quite English—when he thinks I’ve left the room. “Dayne muter volt zikh shemen.“
My father translates later: “Your mother would be ashamed.” A sentence that would never appear in her English speech, with its perfect grammar and careful enunciation, emerges in this mixed tongue that appears only when they think they’re alone.
These overheard moments—these linguistic slippages—reveal more about my grandparents than any direct conversation ever could. The cadence changes. The sentence structure inverts. The voice drops half an octave. It’s as if other people emerge when they doesn’t know I’m listening.
As both a nonfiction writer and novelist, I’ve discovered that these overheard conversations contain the most authentic speech, revealing their generational differences and cultural identities. They break the conventional rules I was taught about dialogue, yet remain perfectly clear and emotionally resonant.
My grandmother spoke to me about the breadlines in Brooklyn, but it was always as an aside to a different conversation: “Back then, you didn’t ask for more. You took what they gave. You said thank you. You went home.” No commas, no conjunctions. Four staccato sentences that convey an entire philosophy of life.
No dialogue coach could teach this rhythm. No writing workshop could improve its authenticity. The power lies precisely in how it breaks convention, how it drops pronouns, how it eschews transitions, how it repeats sentence structure for emphasis, how it is decidedly my grandmother.
Real speech rarely follows the rules we’re taught in writing classes. Consider this exchange I overheard between my aunt (who isn’t really an aunt) and my cousin (who actually is a cousin, though we didn’t know it for the first 17 years of my life):
“Where’s the—” “By the thing.” “No, the other—” “Oh. Cabinet.”
A writing instructor would red-pen this; it’s incomplete, has lack of clarity, misses essential nouns. But that’s the point. Between these two women, it’s perfectly clear. The gravy was by the centerpiece. The serving spoon was in the cabinet. The meaning lived in the spaces between the words, in their shared history and understanding.
When my mother speaks to her sister on the phone about their childhood, she doesn’t use complete sentences: “Remember when Dad—” “God, yes. And Mom just—” “Every time!”
They laugh. Nothing is finished; everything is understood. This is the dialogue of intimacy, of shared experience. it’s broken, incomplete, and more powerful for it.
In my nonfiction, I’ve learned to preserve these fragments rather than “fix” them. Proper sentences do not exist in this life. In my fiction, I study these patterns to create authentic character speech. The half-finished thought often reveals more than the polished paragraph.
The question we must ask as writers is: How do we transform these overheard fragments into fully realized scenes without losing their authenticity?
I once stood in my grandmother’s kitchen, breathing in the ghost of burnt challah, eavesdropping as she spoke on the phone in that mixed language she only used with people from “before,” which often meant her older siblings. I heard her say something about a bakery in Russia, then switch to English to again comment on breadlines in Brooklyn.
This fragment becomes a scene where a character asks her grandmother about Russia, and the grandmother responds by talking about Brooklyn instead. The deflection itself is the story—the way immigrant narratives skip chapters, the way trauma creates gaps in storytelling.
The technique isn’t to transcribe exactly; it isn’t meant as a time capsule of the moment, it is to preserve the pattern of avoidance, the rhythm of deflection, the sudden code-switching that indicates emotional boundaries.
In nonfiction, especially when writing about identity, these patterns reveal more than the content of speech ever could. When does my mother switch from “we” to “they” when discussing her Jewish heritage? When does my grandfather’s softened accent slip into the Coney Island rhythms of his childhood? These are the questions that matter.
***
Here’s another question that matters: when does a story become yours to tell? When I use my grandmother’s private mutterings in my work, am I honoring her story or exploiting it? When I transform my family’s fragmented conversations into scenes in my novels, where is the line between inspiration and appropriation?
I’ve developed a personal framework that guides my use of overheard conversation. In nonfiction, I name the source when possible, acknowledging whose words I’m using. I also consider the purpose—am I revealing this speech pattern to explain something meaningful about cultural identity, or merely for color? For private conversations involving trauma or vulnerability, I often create composite scenes that preserve the theme without relying on the speech pattern. Finally, I ask: Would this person recognize themselves? Would they feel honored or betrayed?
I record conversations at family gatherings, analyze how our dialogue reveals our relationship to tradition. My sister drops Yiddish words into English sentences without translation. My cousins understand but never use these phrases themselves. I occasionally attempt them with my daughter, my pronunciation never quite right.
This linguistic layering tells a story about assimilation, preservation, the generational evolution of cultural identity that straightforward exposition never could.
***
I think you have to train yourself to hear the musicality and rhythm in natural speech. It begins with intentional eavesdropping, listening for the cadence of generational differences; the way emotion disrupts grammatical structure; the cultural markers that appear in stressed moments; the silences between words.
When teaching writing, I send writers to public spaces with instructions to record conversations they overhear. We then analyze not what was said, but how it was said—the rhythm, the dropped words, the repeated phrases.
One student recorded an elderly Jewish man at a deli counter saying to the server: “Not so much. A little. There. That’s plenty.” The economy of words, the directive yet polite tone revealed cultural patterns that I recognized in my own grandfather and my father.
I have practiced this technique at synagogues across the world, from Melbourne to Bangkok, and even when hitchhiking to religious centers in Jordan, noting how the linguistic patterns changed and persisted across geography. The questioning nature of statements (“It’s good, this challah?”), the emphasis through repetition (“It’s good, good”), the inverted word order that echoes Yiddish sentence structure; these patterns appeared everywhere, connecting diaspora communities through speech.
***
My daughter bites into a sufganiyah, red jelly staining her fingers. She’s five, and already knows exactly what she wants: the filling of the donut, not the dough. I’m the opposite. Together we make a whole donut, a perfect circle of consumption and waste. She scrapes out the jelly while I collect her discarded dough, both of us finding what we need in the same tradition.
But maybe some foods aren’t meant to taste good. They’re meant to taste like memory.
I record our conversation:
“Why don’t you eat the bread part?” “It’s not the good part.” “I think it is.” “That’s weird.”
Four simple lines that contain a metaphor for our different relationships to tradition. “That’s weird,” breaks the rules of polite dialogue. It presents dialogue as it actually occurs—messy, incomplete, rule-breaking, unpolished. Not literary speech. The authenticity of the exchange matters more than its adherence to conventional structure.
One day, my daughter will ask me the same questions I once asked my grandmother. She will hold up old photographs and expect me to name the faces, to tell her who they were and what they loved and I’ll have to explain why their stories matter.
I find myself recording our conversations now, preserving not just what we say but how we say it. The way she still uses “ed” on irregular verbs: “I runned to the car.” The way I unconsciously slip into my grandmother’s cadence when talking about tradition: “This we do on Shabbat.”
These speech patterns are as much our heritage as the stories themselves. Presenting authentic dialogue with all its grammatical “mistakes” and cultural markers communicates more about who we are than pages of explanation. When my daughter asks what it means to be Jewish, it will be easy to say it is the asking, the searching, the telling. Even when we don’t know the whole story. Even when we never will. Even when it’s hard to understand.
I’ll listen closely to how she asks, not just what she asks. I’ll wonder about the question itself—its structure, its rhythm, its phrases from borrowed generations—curious if it is already part of the answer.
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Douglas Weissman is a novelist and creative writing instructor exploring the intersection of personal history and cultural identity in both fiction and critical work. Weissman’s most recent novel, “Girl in the Ashes” (Between the Lines Press, 2024), follows his literary debut “Life Between Seconds” (Addison & Highsmith, 2022). His essays on craft and criticism have appeared in Variable West, Perdigiornale, and Reader’s Digest.
