I no longer remember when I started speaking to Raffi in Russian. I didn’t speak to him in Russian when he was in his mother’s womb, though I’ve since learned that this is when babies first start recognizing sound patterns. And I didn’t speak to him in Russian in the first few weeks of his life; it felt ridiculous to do so. All he could do was sleep and scream and breast-feed, and really the person I was talking to when I talked to him was his mother, Emily, who was sleep-deprived and on edge and needed company. She does not know Russian.

But then, at some point, when things stabilized a little, I started. I liked the feeling, when I carried him through the neighborhood or pushed him in his stroller, of having our own private language. And I liked the number of endearments that Russian gave me access to. Mushkin, mazkin, glazkin, moy horoshy, moy lyubimy, moy malen’ky mal’chik. It is a language surprisingly rich in endearments, given its history.

When we started reading books to Raffi, I included some Russian ones. A friend had handed down a beautiful book of Daniil Kharms poems for children; they were not nonsense verse, but they were pretty close, and Raffi enjoyed them. One was a song about a man who went into the forest with a club and a bag, and never returned. Kharms himself was arrested in Leningrad, in 1941, for expressing “seditious” sentiments, and died, of starvation, in a psychiatric hospital the following year; the great Soviet bard Alexander Galich would eventually call the song about the man in the forest “prophetic” and write his own song, embedding the forest lyrics into a story of the Gulag. Raffi really liked the Kharms song; when he got a little older, he would request it and then dance.

Before I knew it, I was speaking to Raffi in Russian all the time, even in front of his mother. And while at first it seemed silly, because he didn’t understand anything we said, in any language, there came a point when I saw that he did. We started with animal sounds. “What does a cow”—korova—“say?” I would ask. “Moo!” Raffi would answer. “What does a cat”—koshka—“say?” “Meow.” “And what does an owl”—sova—“say?” Raffi would make his eyes big and raise his arms and pronounce, “Hoo, hoo.” He didn’t understand much else, though, at a certain point, around the age of one and a half, he seemed to learn that nyet meant “no”—I said it a lot. He didn’t understand me as well as he understood his mother, and he didn’t understand either of us all that much, but still it felt like a minor miracle. I had given my son some Russian! After that, I felt I should extend the experiment. It helped that people were so supportive and impressed. “It’s wonderful that you’re teaching him Russian,” they said.

But I had doubts, and still do.

Bilingualism used to have an undeservedly bad reputation; then it got an undeservedly exalted one. The first came from early twentieth-century American psychologists, who, countering nativists, proposed that something other than heredity was causing Eastern and Southern European immigrants to score lower than Northern Europeans on newly invented I.Q. tests. They proposed that the attempt to learn two languages might be at fault. As Kenji Hakuta points out, in his 1986 book, “The Mirror of Language,” neither the psychologists nor the nativists considered that I.Q. tests might themselves be useless.

In the early nineteen-sixties, this pseudo-science was debunked by Canadian researchers in the midst of debates over Quebecois nationalism. A study by two McGill University researchers, which used French-English bilingual schoolchildren in Montreal, found that they actually outperformed monolingual children on tests that required mental manipulation and reorganization of visual patterns. Thus was born the “bilingual advantage.” It remains the conventional wisdom, as I have recently learned from people telling me about it over and over.

In fact, in recent years, the bilingual advantage has been brought into doubt. The early studies have been criticized for selection bias and a lack of clear, testable hypotheses. It’s possible there is no bilingual advantage, aside from the indisputable advantage of knowing another language. And while it is not the case, as some parents still think, that learning another language alongside English will impede English learning significantly, it may be the case that it impedes it a little bit. As the psycholinguist François Grosjean stresses, language is the product of necessity. If a child discusses, say, hockey only with his Russian-speaking father, he may not learn until later how to say “puck” in English. But he’ll learn when he has to.

In any case, in the absence of a “bilingual advantage” that will automatically test your kid into the preschool of his choice, you have to decide, as a parent, whether you actually want him to know the language. And here, for me, the trouble begins.

My parents took me out of the Soviet Union in 1981, when I was six. They did it because they didn’t like the Soviet Union—it was, as my grandmother kept telling us, “a terrible country,” violent, tragic, poor, and prone to outbursts of anti-Semitism—and they did it because there was an opportunity: Congress, under pressure from American Jewish groups, had passed legislation that tied U.S.-Soviet trade to Jewish emigration. Leaving wasn’t easy, but if you were aggressive and entrepreneurial—my father at one point paid a significant bribe—you could get out. We moved to Boston. Probably no other decision has had a greater effect on my life.

My parents were attached to Russian culture by a thousand ineradicable ties. But they did not cut me off from American society, nor could they have. I assimilated wholeheartedly, found my parents in many ways embarrassing, and allowed my Russian to decline through neglect. Six is an in-between age in terms of assimilation. If you’re much younger—two or three—the chances of keeping your Russian are slim, and you basically just become an American. If you’re older by a few years—for Russians, nine or ten seems to be the cutoff—you probably won’t ever lose your accent, and you will be marked as Russian for the rest of your life. At six, you can still remember the language, but you won’t have an accent. It’s up to you what to do. I know many people who came over at that age and still speak Russian to their parents, but don’t do anything with Russian professionally and never go back to Russia. I also know people who came over at that age and go back all the time and even married Russians. I am in the latter group; I started going over while in college and have been writing and thinking about Russia ever since.

Knowing Russian has meant a great deal to me. It’s allowed me to travel with relative ease throughout the former Soviet Union. Culturally, I have enjoyed the things my parents enjoyed—the Soviet bards, some of the charming Soviet rom-coms of the nineteen-seventies, the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and the plays of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. As I got older, I added some things of my own. But I am aware that my connection to Russia is an attenuated connection. I do not know Russian or Russia as well as my parents did. I am an American who inherited certain linguistic and cultural skills and saw in the wake of the Soviet collapse an opportunity to deploy them as a writer and translator, as my parents once saw a different opportunity—to get out. But most of my life has been lived in English. Does a talented computer programmer teach her children C++? Maybe. If they show an interest in it. But a talented computer programmer doesn’t teach her children languages for which they have no use, or languages that will get them into trouble. Right?