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

Myron Uhlberg is the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of a number of children’s books. He lives with his wife in Santa Monica and Palm Springs.

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.

Publishers Weekly

In this memoir about growing up the son of deaf parents in 1940s Brooklyn, Uhlberg recalls the time his uncle told him he saw his nephew as "cleaved into two parts, half hearing, half deaf, forever joined together." These worlds come together in this work, his first for adults, as Uhlberg, who has written several children's books (including Dad, Jackie, and Me, which won a 2006 Patterson Prize) effortlessly weaves his way through a childhood of trying to interpret the speaking world for his parents while trying to learn the lessons of life from the richly executed "Technicolor language" of his father's hands. With the interconnection of two different worlds, there is bound to be humor, and Uhlberg is able to laugh at himself and his family's situation. He recounts unsuccessfully trying to reinterpret his teacher's constructive criticism for his parents and finding himself pressed into duty interpreting the Joe Louis prize fights for his dad. There are, of course, more poignant moments, as Uhlberg tries to explain the sound of waves for his curious father or when he finds himself in charge of caring for his epileptic baby brother because his parents can't hear the seizures. As Uhlberg grows up through the polio epidemic, WWII and Jackie Robinson's arrival in Brooklyn, he also grows out of his insecurities about his family and the way they are viewed as outsiders. Instead, looking back, he gives readers a well-crafted, heartwarming tale of family love and understanding. (Apr.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Prologue 1

1 The Sound of Silence 3

Memorabilia: A Fox in Brooklyn 23

2 The Child as Father of the Man 26

Memorabilia: The Language of Touch 36

3 The Fights 39

Memorabilia: Sounds in the Night 47

4 Another Child 49

Memorabilia: Trains, Trains, Trains 60

5 Heaven 64

6 Clothes Make the Boy 68

7 A Day in the City 77

Memorabilia: Gone Fishing 82

8 The Smell of Reading 87

9 Falling in Love 94

10 Tales Told 103

Memorabilia: What's in a Name 107

11 The Sound of Color 110

12 The Triangle and the Chihuahua 119

13 My Father's Language 130

Memorabilia: The Palmer Method 134

14 Parent-Teacher Night 136

Memorabilia: The Spider-Man of Ninth Street 141

15 A Boy in Uniform 146

Memorabilia: A Chip Off the Old Block 156

16 Brooklyn Bully 162

17 Polio 166

Memorabilia: The End of the Presidency 173

18 A Boy Becomes a Man 175

19 Vaudeville on 86th Street 180

20 Sounds from the Heart 189

21 My Brother's Keeper 195

22 Dad, Jackie, and Me 200

23 Silent Snow 205

24 Pigskin Dreams 208

25 Exodus 214

26 The Duke of Coney Island 217

27 Death, a Stranger 222

Epilogue 231