fiefoe

The other first person voice is that of young Alma, whose mother is translating the titular novel from Spanish to English.

... but sometimes words will come back to me, kum-kum, shemesh, chol, yam, etz, neshika, motek, their meanings worn off like the faces of old coins.
Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure... after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.
Sometimes she would get stuck on a certain sentence for hours and go around like a dog with a bone until she'd shriek out, "I'VE GOT IT!" and scurry off to her desk to dig a hole and bury it.
"One of the lamed vovniks," he whispered. "The thirty-six holy people." "What thirty-six holy people ?" "The ones that the existence of the world depends on."
"Dai ruku. What does it mean?" Misha took my hand and held it.
(Among the list of 'Memories passed down to me from my father':) The sound of cards being shuffled by his mother and her friends when they played canasta on Saturday nights after Shabbat. {My counterpart memory from past Spring Festivals: the crisp wash of sound of mahjong tiles being shuffled.}

"The History Of Love"