Emma Laurent is twenty-eight when she finds the box behind her late grandmother's coats. Inside are nine letters in a language she cannot read. She had thought they were French. Grand-mère had always been French. The letters are German. What follows is Emma's journey into the language her grandmother had hidden, from a closet in St. Louis to a Sprachschule in Köln, from confused first lessons to her first Pessach seder, into a family story sixty years buried. A bilingual novella in English and German, with passages of Yiddish and Hebrew. The narrative begins in English; as Emma's German strengthens, so does the book's. Companion chapters along the way help language learners follow the shift.