Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love

by Uhlberg, Myron

  It’s remarkable how your imminent demise so sharply focuses your mind. I could visualize in acute detail the shocked look on Mrs. Abromovitz’s face as she unsuspectingly reeled me in along with the rest of her wash. The image so amused me that I burst into laughter.

  This laugh was to be my salvation. Hearing me, Freddy thought that he had failed to scare the wits out of me. Never having actually intended to drop me (I hoped), he pulled me back onto the roof.

  Thereafter Freddy never bothered me again. He had done his worst, and I had laughed in his face. He had never before encountered such bravery. I had passed some insane test that only he could devise. I was the envy of every kid on the block.

  17

  Polio

  Nineteen forty-five was the height of the polio scare in America. And so it was that every mother in Brooklyn forced down her children’s throats a daily dose of cod-liver oil. The sickening, vile, thick, oily, fishy-smelling liquid clung to our lips, coated our tongues, and lined our throats for hours. It was impossible to get rid of the taste. We resigned ourselves to the fact that it just had to wear off by itself, in its own sweet time.

  “It’s good for you,” my mother signed, in exasperation at our daily struggle; often, she literally had to force my mouth open for my daily dose. I hated most fish, and I despised cod-liver oil, the deadliest by-product of fish ever devised by man—pure distilled evil, as far as I was concerned.

  My brother, on the other hand, was used to taking medicine every day to control his seizures and not only took it without complaint but may even have liked it.

  “It hurts me more than it does you,” my mother signed after our daily dose had been administered.

  Then came the killer ending to any argument: “Do you want to get polio?”

  We Brooklyn boys and girls heard about polio what seemed like every day of our lives, especially in the summertime. For us kids, summer was the golden time, wonderful carefree days blending seamlessly one into the other. But for our parents it was another matter entirely: “Don’t get overheated. Do you want to get polio?” (This was invariably followed by “That’s what happened to President Roosevelt when he was a young man. Do you want to sit in a wheelchair for the rest of your life like him?”) “Don’t go in the water right after eating. You’ll get a cramp and die. And if not, you’ll get polio.” “Stay away from crowds. You’ll get polio.” “Don’t get dirty. You’ll get polio.” “You can’t go to the movies this Saturday. Some kid on the next block got polio.” “Don’t drink at the public fountain. You’ll get polio.” “Don’t eat food if a fly lands on it. You’ll get polio.” Don’t do this, don’t do that. And then the dreaded final words: “Do you want to end up in an iron lung?”

  Because she wanted to emphasize that this was a matter that went beyond her daily and wide-ranging litany of prohibitions, my mother employed not the usual one but two signs for don’t. She used the everyday, utilitarian don’t that she employed for any number of ordinary occasions, whenever I was doing something she preferred me not to be doing—the quick flick of her thumb from under her chin. And then, to leave no room for doubt or argument, she used the special don’t with crossed hands, palms facing me, which she would repeatedly separate and recross, all the while looking at me with the sternest expression she could muster.

  She would keep it up until I acknowledged her warnings to her satisfaction—not with a simple nod of my head or a shake of my hinged fist in the sign for yes, but with an emphatically finger-spelled “Okay! Okay!…OKAY, ALREADY!”

  And if I ever, heaven forbid, had a sniffle, or a stomachache, she put me to bed immediately; and until the sniffle or the stomachache was gone, and I had convinced her that it was, she hovered over me, like a soft enveloping cloud.

  My brother was even more closely monitored. Whenever there was a reported outbreak of polio, she would keep him indoors, always at her side, so that there wasn’t even the slightest chance of his being exposed to polio—or any other germ, for that matter.

  No one knew how a person got polio; our doctor didn’t, the scientists didn’t, our teachers didn’t, and our parents didn’t. Even Mrs. Birnbaum, who spied on the entire block while leaning out of her bedroom window all day long with her fat arms resting on a pillow, didn’t, and she knew everything. But our parents seemed convinced that heat was a great incubator of the polio germ, and they viewed the long golden days of summer with particular alarm. Every time a heat wave descended on Brooklyn, all the kids in the neighborhood were consigned to their rooms.

  As I was performing my magic tricks for my brother in our bedroom one day, I wondered: If an epileptic person caught polio, would his seizures stop? Like magic? I also wondered: Were deaf people perhaps immune to the disease? I had never heard of a deaf person who had polio. My father hadn’t either. “We have enough trouble without polio,” he signed when I asked him about it. “Maybe God has spared us.”

  But God did not spare Barry Goldstein, my friend from across the street. Late that summer, just as we were feeling the first hints of fall in the air and thinking that the danger might be over for the season, a blast of heat drove the cool air off. At the height of this last heat wave, Barry got sick. And his sickness became polio. Now I knew someone who had polio.

  Barry was taken to Coney Island Hospital and was immediately put into an iron lung. For the next few weeks it was touch and go, but finally he stabilized. The iron lung did his breathing for him.

  One day Barry’s father came to our apartment door with a handwritten note for my father: “You and Myron can visit my son if you want. I think he’d like that.”

  The very next Saturday my father and I took the subway to Coney Island, and then we walked to the hospital. My father did not sign a single sign to me. There was nothing he could say to me that would lessen my shock at my friend’s illness and the sadness of his condition.

  Coney Island Hospital seemed the stuff of nightmares to us kids. We’d heard about people going there, but they never seemed to come out. We were sure it was the place where you went to die. Once my father and I arrived, its appearance more than lived up to my worst fears: dark, dank hallways, cheerless gray rooms filled wall to wall with beds inhabited by ghastly looking sick people.

  The elevator took us to the top floor, where we exited onto a dark hallway. At the far end was a single large room, blindingly illuminated by numerous hanging lights. In the room were row upon row of iron lungs, lined up in neat columns. Protruding from the end of each one was a solitary head resting on a pillow. Above each head was a tilted mirror. By looking at this mirror, each patient could see what lay immediately behind him.

  Looking in his mirror, Barry saw me. And looking in the same mirror, I saw Barry’s upside-down face—and watched him smile at me.

  Only Barry’s head was visible. The rest of him lay hidden in the iron lung.

  Barry and I had a good visit. I told him about all the happenings on the block since he had gotten sick. (I didn’t once mention the word polio.) Some of my stories made him laugh.

  He told me I could ride his bike until he came home and could use it himself.

  Soon a nurse came by and ushered us out, telling us, “This boy needs his rest.”

  We said our goodbyes, and as I was leaving, he said, “You know, I have polio.”

  On the way home in the subway car, my father signed to me his sadness. “Poor, poor boy.”

  But then he signed something surprising. “Now I know why I never heard of a deaf person getting polio.” He paused, thinking. “God wouldn’t do that to a deaf person. How would a deaf person talk, if his hands were hidden in an iron lung? How would a deaf person sign his fears with hidden hands?” My father did not sign an additional thought all the way home.

  That fall it rained almost every day. Barry’s bike sat on his porch, exactly where he had left it after his last ride, a mute reminder of my friend. It was never taken in when it rained, and by the beginning of winter it was covered in rust. With wint
er’s first snowfall, it disappeared completely under a layer of snow, which meant that now when I looked over at his silent white porch as I left my apartment building each morning, the image of Barry in his iron lung, unable to ride his bike, no longer leaped unbidden into my mind.

  For my father, however, the thought of polio was much on his mind all that winter, as was his God, the god who would inflict polio on a young boy.

  I had no interest in God as represented by the dilapidated wooden synagogue around the corner from us, with its smelly, impossibly foreign-looking men dressed in the same drab black clothing year round. This mysterious exclusive gathering was the world of my father’s father, not mine. My world was the moment, as represented by my Brooklyn block, not a history five thousand years old.

  But I was never clear how my father felt about this subject. Our family did not observe the Sabbath. We did not keep any Jewish holidays, as many—though not all—of my Jewish friends did. Although my father had had a bar mitzvah—an experience, he told me, that was totally incomprehensible to him—he knew no prayers. He did not attend weekly services at our neighborhood synagogue, or even High Holy Day services. What would have been the point? He could not sing the hymns, nor read the words. God did not speak to him, and if He did, my father could not hear Him. There were no signs known to the deaf for the ancient Hebrew words, so how could he speak to God, in God’s language?

  My father talked to me about everything, but not his God. One day, however, my father came home early from work. There was a snowstorm, and he had been given a half-day off with pay, as the paper supply had been exhausted, and fresh newsprint inventory was stuck on trucks stranded in snowdrifts north of the city. As usual, he had the day’s paper folded under his arm, but there was not much to it since there was no sports news (thanks to the snowstorm), no reports of murders the night before in Brooklyn (probably for the same reason), and very little in the way of war news (fortunately). Lacking any news to discuss with me, and being in an unaccountably thoughtful mood, my father began, that afternoon, a halting monologue about the role God had played in his life.

  My father’s bar mitzvah, 1915

  “My father was a deeply religious man from the old country,” he signed to me. “And in the old country his father was a cantor. I was told as a boy that my father had a sweet voice. I have some memory of this, but I can never pin it down in my mind. I remember him covering himself every morning with his shawl, and then wrapping his arm and forehead with his tefillin, which he kept in a burgundy velvet bag embroidered in heavy gold thread with Hebrew words.” My father’s sign for Hebrew was clear: his two hands descended downward from his chin repeatedly, opening and closing as if stroking a long imaginary beard. “Then my father would bend up and down repeatedly, and talk to someone; someone I couldn’t see, but who was in the room with us. I knew he was talking, because I saw his lips moving, moving, moving.

  “But as observant a Jew as my father was, when I was a boy he never involved me in his daily rituals. And how could he? We never talked. We had no real language.

  “So I never knew who God was. It was a mystery all my life. Still is. Like everything else for us deaf, life is a puzzle, and we have only ourselves to solve the thousands of pieces of the puzzle.” While he was telling me this, his fingers revolved around each other, as if they were manipulating pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, a giant ever-changing puzzle that only he could see. Then my father looked at me for the longest time. “Sometimes I hate God. He made me deaf, but not my sisters or my brother. Why was that? I was only a little boy. What did I do wrong? I never understood. And now look at your friend Barry. Such a sweet boy. He always smiles at me and tries to sign hello to me. Now he will never ride his bike again. Why would God do such a thing?

  “And what kind of god would cause your brother, a sweet beautiful boy who never hurt anyone, to be an epileptic? Why did God strike him so? Does God see him when he falls down? Does God care when he bites his tongue and his blood flies everywhere?”

  My father expected no answer from me. He sat there at the kitchen table, deeply troubled. I could read it on his face and in the slump of his shoulders. For the longest time my father continued to stare into space, lost in the maze of unanswerable questions, until I saw him slowly begin to refocus. He was looking at me with a strange expression on his face, and his hands began to move.

  “But just when I curse God, I think of Mother Sarah. I think of you and your brother. And I think this puzzle will never be answered.”

  Memorabilia

  The End of the Presidency

  On April 12, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died unexpectedly in Warm Springs, Georgia. He had looked increasingly old, weary, and sad as the war dragged on. But as he was the only president I had ever known, his death was shocking news to me. That night, as always, my father brought home the newspaper. After supper he signed the front-page headline: “FDR DEAD.” His sign was as bold and black as was the bold, black-printed headline. My father’s hands were sad and mournful. “He was a cripple. He had polio as a young man. Until then he was just like any other young man.” Then he stopped. “I was just like any other boy, until I got sick. Then I was crippled in my ears, just like the president was crippled in his legs. But look what FDR could do. He won the war.”

  Then my father cried. I had never seen my father cry before. He did not make a newspaper hat from the front page that night.

  18

  A Boy Becomes a Man

  On August 6, 1945, a lone American plane dropped a single bomb on the city of Hiroshima, signaling the end of World War II.

  One month earlier, the day after I turned twelve, my father had dropped a bomb on me. He informed me that I would have my bar mitzvah when I was thirteen, a year later. That news was as shocking to me as the news of the atomic bomb. Bar mitzvah? Since when, I wondered, was my father interested in the traditions of the Jewish religion? Until the day he spoke to me about his sense of alienation from God, I’d never gotten the impression that religion occupied any space, positive or negative, in his thoughts.

  Although born of Jewish parents, he had had no formal Jewish upbringing, unless you counted the mock bar mitzvah he had undergone. All he remembered of that event, he told me, was being unaccountably dressed in a suit and hat one Saturday upon turning thirteen, and accompanying his father to the local shul, the storefront house of worship. There he was pushed onto a wooden stage, where he stood with a prayer shawl draped around his shoulders and a man’s hat on his head. Then he watched carefully, but with a total lack of comprehension, while the gray-bearded rabbi faced him, his hair-shrouded lips moving, my father said, a mile a minute.

  “I had no idea,” he told me, “what was going on. No one could explain it to me, and no one even bothered to try. Like much of my life in the hearing world at that age, nothing I experienced made much sense.”

  My grandfather had reasoned that as his firstborn son could not hear, he could never truly participate in any formal religious services. Of the Torah, did not Moses instruct the priests to “read it in their ears”? Being deaf, how could his son hear Torah? And as God did not speak in sign, how would God hear him respond? And so it was that my father had his bar mitzvah in silence; it was a dumb show, devoid of all meaning. My father’s final word on the subject was the observation that during the ceremony, he saw tears falling from his father’s eyes, disappearing into his beard. Tears of joy? Tears of sadness? My father could not say.

  But now, to the surprise of both sides of the family, my father was determined that his firstborn son, their firstborn grandchild, would have a bar mitzvah. He would show them all that even though he was a deaf father, he knew how to raise a hearing son in the proper fashion and that, in all the ways that counted, he was as good a father as any hearing father.

  All the long year that followed, surely the longest year of my young life, I endured my weekly bar mitzvah lessons. It was a dreary year of rote, uncomprehending chanting done to the metro
nomic tune of the rabbi’s rod-cane beating on my desktop, with occasional well-directed swipes at my knuckles as I stumbled over a particularly grievous passage. Slogging my undistinguished way through my lessons, I found the experience sheer torture.

  But when I finally stood at the podium of our local synagogue reading my Torah section, and then recited my “Today I Am a Man” speech, my father’s face beamed up at me from the front row of the congregation with a look of undisguised pride—a pride not in the least diminished by the fact that he had not heard a single word I spoke. That made it all worthwhile. Although his hands never once moved from his lap to explain how he felt, his face said it all. Just as his father had done so many years in the past, my father was quietly crying.

  My bar mitzvah, 1946

  As for me, the bar mitzvah boy, it seemed to me that the only result I experienced as a consequence of my year-long enforced brush with piety was an amazing increase in speed. I could run like the wind.

  You see, as a “Jewish adult man” in the eyes of Jewish tradition, I was now eligible to complete the ten-man minyan necessary for the daily service at the synagogue, which often didn’t attract the requisite number. Thus in the midst of playing a game on our block, my friends and I would suddenly be interrupted by eight spry congregants sent out by the rabbi to scour the neighborhood for a recent bar mitzvah boy to complete the minyan: I was their latest target. I could almost hear their excited whispers as the pious Jews, older in years but still fleet of foot, rounded the corner and locked eyes on me: the newly minted bar mitzvah boy. My head start of a bare few yards never diminished as my sneakered feet pounded up the block, a gaggle of flapping long black coats in hot pursuit. They were surprisingly fast, but they never caught me. In time they focused their raids on newer, and slower, bar mitzvah boys.