Ilan Stavans is a Mexican-American Jewish writer; his grandparents emigrated to the land of the Aztecs from the Ukraine before the Russian Revolution, and he emigrated to the United States as an adult. He was exposed to some Hebrew as a boy in a Jewish school in Mexico City, and decided to resurrect it, and write a book about the resurrection of the language in Palestine. Stavans walks in the footsteps of Eliezer Perelman aka Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the creator of modern Hebrew, who did not permit his son to listen to birds singing so his Hebrew would be uncontaminated. He meets a bunch of linguists, from a lexicographer member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language to a professor of Arabic who views Hebrew as nothing but a colonialist language, and is not swayed by the fact that Ben-Yehuda borrowed many Arabic roots to create modern Hebrew.