Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love
Myron Uhlberg
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0553806882
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
By turns heart-tugging and hilarious, Myron Uhlberg’s memoir tells the story of growing up as the hearing son of deaf parents—and his life in a world that he found unaccountably beautiful, even as he longed to escape it.
“Does sound have rhythm?” my father asked. “Does it rise and fall like the ocean? Does it come and go like the wind?”
Such were the kinds of questions that Myron Uhlberg’s deaf father asked him from earliest childhood, in his eternal quest to decipher, and to understand, the elusive nature of sound. Quite a challenge for a young boy, and one of many he would face.
Uhlberg’s first language was American Sign Language, the first sign he learned: “I love you.” But his second language was spoken English—and no sooner did he learn it than he was called upon to act as his father’s ears and mouth in the stores and streets of the neighborhood beyond their silent apartment in Brooklyn.
Resentful as he sometimes was of the heavy burdens heaped on his small shoulders, he nonetheless adored his parents, who passed on to him their own passionate engagement with life. These two remarkable people married and had children at the absolute bottom of the Great Depression—an expression of extraordinary optimism, and typical of the joy and resilience they were able to summon at even the darkest of times.
From the beaches of Coney Island to Ebbets Field, where he watches his father’s hero Jackie Robinson play ball, from the branch library above the local Chinese restaurant where the odor of chow mein rose from the pages of the books he devoured to the hospital ward where he visits his polio-afflicted friend, this is a memoir filled with stories about growing up not just as the child of two deaf people but as a book-loving, mischief-making, tree-climbing kid during the remarkably eventful period that spanned the Depression, the War, and the early fifties.
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pillowcase. His body was as rigid as a wooden plank. He squirmed and writhed and jerked about. His arms and legs flew in every direction, like the demented arms of a windmill. Sweat was flying from his body. I was stunned, turned to stone. I couldn't say afterward if his seizure had lasted one minute or an hour. Time had no meaning. My entire focus of attention was on my brother as he was transformed into a creature beyond my comprehension. When he was finally still—which happened, it seemed,
sitting halfway down a wide deep hole, behind a chrome railing, revolved an enormous globe. The globe spun on its axis, basking in the rays shed by the soft spotlights positioned overhead; it was illuminated from below by the lights shining from a circle of glass steps that rose out of the depths to the brass belt around the equator. It was a solitary, endlessly spinning object, bathed in light, in the otherwise dark lobby. My first sight of that magnificent spinning ball, which represented the
crinkled sheet of sketch paper covered in indecipherable scrawls, with occasional splotches of color. And I, like every one of my classmates, no doubt, would be routinely commended by my teacher, and lavishly praised by my parents, for my “work of art.” One day I showed my father a sketch I had done which, I explained—since an explanation seemed necessary—represented the Brooklyn Bridge. “And here are the seagulls.” I pointed proudly at a tangle of black lines. “Yes,” my father's hands
quite nicely, with creases in all the right places, and I liked to wear it tilted over one eye at a rakish angle. With my sailor hat on my head, I marched around our apartment, walking splayfooted as I imagined my uncle did when manning the deck at the height of a storm in the Pacific, the waves crashing over the bow, roller upon roller. Our apartment was small. I was constantly underfoot. And as my mother liked to wash and wax the kitchen floor every day— hourly, it seemed to me—she often
didn't know. “But,” his hands continued, “we were determined to find out. And quickly!” The reason for the doubt on my father's part was that he and his family had no sure way of knowing the reason for his own deafness. Yes, they all agreed, my father had been quite sick as a young boy; he had run a high fever and, when better, was discovered to have lost all hearing. The same was the case with my mother, who, it was thought, had scarlet fever when just a baby. But, their parents reasoned, the