'We would be strong together, and strong for our children.' We would be two deaf people in the hearing world. I had a union card, just like the hearing workers. So they had plenty of time to play, and make muscles, and get brown skin from the sun. The handsome young boys with their chocolate skin and big muscles only wanted to have fun with Sarah. I couldn't stand on my hands if my life depended on it. They could jump and leap over each other's back. All the young boys had muscles and chocolate tans. 'There were many handsome boys on the beach. 'All the deaf boys were crazy about Sarah. 'I first noticed her at the beach in Coney Island.

One bleak winter day, while we were sitting at the kitchen table, the rain sleeting against the windows of our Brooklyn apartment, his hands told me the rest of his story, in which began my story: A world that would begin with a deaf wife. It was time, he thought, to create his own silent world. My father was tired of being alone in this hearing world. Even in the dark days of the Depression, when one out of four men were out of work, he, a deaf man, could support himself.Īnd, he reasoned, he could also support a wife. It was tangible proof that he was as good as any hearing man. Like most in the hearing world, they treated him as if he were an alien - primitive, incapable of speech, and lacking human thought: a person to be avoided if possible, and if not, ignored.Īfter an apprenticeship of many years, my father was issued a union card. In all that time he worked side by side with hearing co-workers, but he never really knew them.

He would work for the newspaper until he retired over forty years later. He acted as the 'interface' between his father's deaf world and the hearing world in the stores and streets of Brooklyn.īeing a printer was the only job my father ever had, and he loved it. His first sign was for 'I love you.' But as soon as he learned spoken English, Uhlberg became his father's translator. Uhlberg learned American Sign Language before he learned to speak. He grew up in Brooklyn, near Coney Island, in an apartment his deaf parents secured in spite of their parents' objections and belief that the young couple 'could not manage alone.' Myron Uhlberg was born the hearing son to a deaf mother and father 'shortly after midnight, July 1, 1933,' at 'the absolute bottom of the Great Depression.' Uhlberg sees the timing of his birth, halfway through the calendar year, as a metaphor for his life, where one foot was 'always being dragged back to the deaf world,' the other 'trying to stride forward. From his earliest childhood, author Myron Uhlberg's deaf father would ask him questions about the nature of sound, such as 'Does sound have rhythm?'

Hands of my father myron uhlberg