My friend Jerome Garger explains:

My father was raised in Austria on a small farm near the Hungarian border, apprenticed to a tailor at age 12, and at age 16 emigrated to the U.S. in 1921, not long after World War I.  He spent much of his life working for peanuts at a clothing company in downtown St. Louis on a large pressing machine on the 5th floor in sweatshop conditions. Because he spoke with a very pronounced German accent and had Jewish bosses, he paid some very heavy dues for it during and beyond WW II at work -- and also in our Irish-dominated Catholic parish.

My German mother (maiden name Nuttmann) went to a Catholic grade school in south St. Louis that taught half the day in German and half in English. After graduating  from 8th grade she had to go to work. My father finished his eighth-grade education in night school.  They spoke mostly German mixed with some Yiddish at home. Then sauerkraut became Liberty Cabbage during WW II and no more German spoken at home. (Remember, more recently, when french fries became Freedom Fries?)

Though young, I was picking up on a lot of German at home and would have, I'm sure, become proficient. I took one year of high school and two of  college German, but all we ever did was translation and endless grammar and vocabulary quizzes. Never any conversational German. 

Pablo Neruda says that if you have two languages you have two souls. I've always regretted not having developed my second soul more completely.