JESSUP - When Paulette Maggiolo moved to America from France 65 years ago, she brought her languages with her. All five of them.
After she married an American officer she had met during World War II, she built her life in the United States teaching the languages - French, English, Spanish, Italian and German - in public and private schools.
Now 90, she is spending her retirement writing novels and nonfiction books in her native and adopted tongues.
Most of her works reflect parts of her life: "The Guilty Teacher" is about an educator dealing with the prevalence of drugs in schools; "No Such Word" traces the relationships of a war bride brought to the U.S. She has written books about cooking, grammar, graduation parties and immigrants. Now she is working on a book of conversations "between two old women," inspired by her talks with her sister in France.
"My sister and I talk on the phone like she was 10 miles away from me," she said last week at United Neighborhood Centers' Mid Valley Senior Center, where she has spent several days a week since moving from Virginia to Archbald this year to be closer to her daughter. "That's a blessing of the 21st century."
Her first book-length work was a dissertation on French novelist Colette for her doctorate in modern languages, which she pursued during summers while her children were high school-age.
"I had to do something," she said. "I was always looking for something to do. Something to read, something to write."
Throughout her life, her facility with languages has allowed her to adapt to new challenges and places: In the predominantly Italian New Jersey neighborhood where she lived, "We spoke Italian, we shopped in Italian, we cooked in Italian." In occupied Normandy, she taught languages to young French men while they were in hiding and conveyed information about German plans she overheard and translated.
"I went to the resistance camp and told them, 'Be careful tomorrow. You are going to be surrounded by German soldiers,'â" she remembered.
In a sign of her acclimation to her adopted country, she writes her books in English, then translates them page by page into French. A publisher in France has printed several of the translations.
She thinks in English first, "always," she said. "I've been here so long."
Contact the writer: llegere@timesshamrock.com