Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (27 page)

“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 metronomic 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.

N
ow that I was a “man,” I was officially grown up. Although I had always been old as a child because of my role as interpreter for my father in the hearing world, I was now fiercely determined to be grown up, to be considered mature beyond my actual years. I thought I had earned it.

My father continued to see me as an adult only when he needed me to be one. Most of the time I was still his child. But whenever we encountered a hearing-deaf situation in the outside, hearing world, I was still obliged to metamorphose into an instrument for his use and fill the role of an adult. As soon as my father’s needs had been met, I morphed back into a child once again.

It was a dizzying transformation—child-adult-instrument-child—a veritable high-wire act, from which I could never look down, for fear of falling. And nothing about it was made easier by the fact that I was now a
man,
the rabbi having said so.

W
hen my brother turned thirteen, there would be no bar mitzvah for him. My father’s tenuous hold on religion, and his sense of himself as a Jewish father, had been discharged with my bar mitzvah. That occasion ended all formal connection with his mysterious God (until the cold drizzly day forty-two years later when he would be buried in a Jewish cemetery in Brooklyn, next to the graves of his mother and father). As before we kept no Sabbath in our Brooklyn apartment and attended no High Holy Day services in the wooden synagogue around the corner. And after my bar mitzvah, I never attended a single Saturday morning service in all the years I lived in Brooklyn.

I knew of my father’s tortured relationship with his God. As a boy, I saw my father and my mother and their deafness, and I had my own angry questions for Him. These questions only multiplied when I saw how my brother suffered from epilepsy. Eventually Is topped caring. This God did not care about my family, and I would not care about Him.

19

Vaudeville on 86th Street

A
fter the war ended, once a month my mother would lead my father, brother, and me to my grandmother Celia’s apartment on 86th Street in Brooklyn. There all of her children and grandchildren would gather for a Sunday dinner, at which we gave thanks for the safe return of my mother’s brothers, Milton and Harry. Milton had been a paratrooper, stranded in the steaming jungles of Burma, where he had come down with malaria; Harry had been a sailor on the
USS Missouri,
the site of the signing of the unconditional surrender of Japan, which he witnessed firsthand, on the deck of his own ship. We had won the war, just as my father said we would. And now they were both home.

When we arrived at Celia’s, my mother would immediately go to the kitchen—from which the most amazing odors were emanating—to help her mother and younger sister, Mary, cook the feast that they had been preparing all the previous week. The chicken had been plucked and was in the oven, the brisket lay marinating in a roasting pan, and an enormous cow’s tongue sat simmering in a pot on the stove; now all that was left were the finishing touches—each of which “touches” for anyone else would constitute an entire meal for a family of four.

My brother and I quickly joined our cousins who, having traveled the farthest, usually arrived first. My favorite cousin was Stephen, my uncle David’s son, who was just a few months younger than I. Stephen was nothing like me—he was tall and slim, where I was of average height and more muscular. He was fair-skinned and blond, where I was dark-haired and swarthy in complexion; in the summer I tanned, while he sunburned. He swam, as did his father, like a fish, while I resembled, like my father, an anchor in the water. Where he was extroverted, I was introspective. In short, as opposites in every way, we were perfectly suited to be the best of friends and, we assumed, friends for life.

While the cousins played, my father would join my mother’s brothers David, Harry, and Milton, where he would promptly produce a pipe from his jacket pocket and begin elaborate preparations for a fresh bowlful of Walnut tobacco. Although my father was deaf and his brothers-in-law knew not a single word of sign language, within minutes of greeting one another they were deep in discussion—of a sort. This “discussion” consisted of exaggerated speech on their part, and sheer guesswork involving lipreading on my father’s part. The misunderstandings that this area of “discussion” produced were comical, even more so because my father, being a comedian at heart, often exaggerated his malapropisms.

Politics was a subject of particular interest to my father and Milton, my mother’s youngest brother. Because of his experience growing up poor during the Great Depression, Milton held strong beliefs on the superiority of an egalitarian, socialist society over the dog-eat-dog ways of capitalism, and before the war he had fought in Spain as part of the anti-Francoist Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The other two brothers weren’t much interested in politics. David, the oldest, was known far and wide in Brooklyn as “the Duke of Coney Island,” and as I later learned, his interests lay basically in wine, women, and song. Harry, the middle brother, was as taciturn as his famously taciturn mother and betrayed no apparent interest in any subject whatsoever, least of all politics.

My mother’s oldest brother, David, the Duke of Coney Island

But David and Harry were both fascinated by the lengthy political conversations between my father and Milton, not because of the content (which was slight) but because of the manner in which they conducted these pseudo-debates. Lacking a common language, my father and Milton communicated in mime. Of course, my father was the more gifted in this physical language, but Milton managed to hold his own—if not in technique, surely in inventiveness, enthusiasm, and conviction. One of the recurring bits involved pipe smoking.

All three of my mother’s brothers were pipe smokers. No sooner did my father put his empty pipe in his mouth than they followed suit. There they sat, thoughtful looks on their faces, four men with pipes in their mouths, staring expectantly straight ahead, like an ad for Walnut tobacco, the premier pipe tobacco of its day. However, in this case only my father had Walnut tobacco in his tobacco pouch. The others had rough-cut, no-name brands of lesser quality.

This frozen tableau was broken when my father began to load his pipe. The sweet aroma of his fine-cut tobacco caused his brothers-in-law’s nostrils to flare, as they sniffed the air expectantly. When my father completed the task of lovingly tamping down the tobacco in his pipe bowl, Milton waved his empty pipe in front of my father’s face. My father studiously ignored him.

Then my father ever so slowly lit his pipe with a wooden match and drew deeply. Holding that first mouthful of smoke within his bulging cheeks for the longest time, he opened his eyes wide, curled his lips up around the pipe stem in exaggerated satisfaction—and winked, all the while looking at Milton and shaking his head no.

I knew my father to be the most generous of men, so I understood that his broad gesture of refusal to accede to Milton’s request was only the opening gambit—triggered by the political concept of “sharing”—of a prolonged discussion of the relative merits of Stalinist Russia and its Communist system, versus Harry Truman’s self-reliant America, all done in mime, worthy of the opening act in a Coney Island vaudeville show.