英语传记：Hands of My Father 简介 (ZT)
HANDS OF MY FATHER
A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents,
and the Language of Love
by Myron Uhlberg (nonfiction)
A Bantam Book
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
ISBN: 9780553806885
Copyright (c) 2008 by Myron Uhlberg
HANDS (Part 1 of 5)
======================================
"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
watched his father's hero Jackie Robinson play ball, from
the chow mein-suffused air of the branch library above the
local Chinese restaurant to the hospital ward where he
visited the polio-afflicted friend who was in an iron
lung, 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.
*****************************
英语传记：Hands of My Father（节选１）ZT
PROLOGUE
In the language of the deaf, the sign for "remember" begins with the
sign for "know:" the fingertips of the right hand touch the
forehead.
But merely to know is not enough, so the sign for "remain" follows:
the thumbs of each hand touch and, in this joined position, move
steadily forward, into the future. Thus a knowing that remains,
never lost, forever: memory.
In my memory, what I remember most vividly are the hands of my
father.
My father spoke with his hands. He was deaf. His voice was in his
hands.
And his hands contained his memories.
CHAPTER ONE
THE SOUND OF SILENCE
My first language was sign.
I was born shortly after midnight, July 1, 1933, my parents' first
child. Thus I had one tiny reluctant foot in the first half of that
historically fateful year, and the other firmly planted in the
second half. In a way my birth date, squarely astride the calendar
year, was a metaphor for my subsequent life, one foot always being
dragged back to the deaf world, the silent world of my father and of
my mother, from whose womb I had just emerged, and the other trying
to stride forward into the greater world of the hearing, to escape
into the world destined to be my own.
Many years later I realized what a great expression of optimism it
was for my father and mother, two deaf people, to decide to have a
child at the absolute bottom of the Great Depression.
We lived in Brooklyn, near Coney Island, where on certain summer
days, when the wind was blowing just right and our kitchen window
was open and the shade drawn up on its roller, I could smell the
briny odor of the ocean, layered with just the barest hint of
mustard and grilled hot dogs (although that could have been my
imagination).
Our apartment was four rooms on the third floor of a new redbrick
building encrusted with bright orange fire escapes, which my father
and mother had found by walking the neighborhood, and then
negotiated for with the impatient hearing landlord all by themselves
despite their respective parents' objections that they "could not
manage alone" as they were "deaf and handicapped" and "helpless" and
would surely "be cheated." They had just returned from their
honeymoon, spent blissfully in Washington, D.C., planned to coincide
with the silent, colorful explosion of the blossoming cherry trees,
which my mother considered a propitious omen for the successful
marriage of two deaf people.
Apartment 3A was the only home my father ever knew as a married man.
Its four rooms were the place he lived with and loved his deaf wife,
and raised his two hearing sons, and then left by ambulance one day
forty-four years after arriving there, never to return.
One day my father's hands signed in sorrow and regret the story of
how he had become deaf. This was a story he had pieced together from
facts he had learned later in life from his younger sister, Rose,
who in turn had heard it from their mother. (The fact that he had to
learn the details of his own deafness from his younger hearing
sister was a source of enduring resentment.)
My father told me he had been born in 1902, a normal hearing child,
but at an early age had contracted spinal meningitis. His parents,
David and Rebecca, newly arrived in America from Russia, living in
an apartment in the Bronx, thought their baby would die.
My father's fever ravaged his little body for over a week. Cold
baths during the day and wet sheet-shrouded nights kept him alive.
When his fever at last abated, he was deaf. My father would never
again hear a sound in all the remaining years of his life. As an
adult, he often questioned why it was that he had been singled out
as the only member of his family to become deaf.
I, his hearing son, watched his hands sign his anguish: "'Not
fair!'"
My father and his father could barely communicate with each other.
Their entire shared vocabulary consisted of a few mimed signs:
"eat," "be quiet," "sleep." These were all command signs. They had
no sign for love between them, and his father died without ever
having had a single meaningful conversation with his firstborn
child.
My father's mother did have a sign for "love." It was a homemade
sign, and she would use it often. My father told me that his
language with his mother was poor in quantity but rich in content.
She communicated less through agreed-upon signs than through the
luminosity that appeared in her eyes whenever she looked at him.
That look was special and reserved for him alone.
Like their parents, my father's siblings--his younger brother, Leon,
and his two younger sisters, Rose and Millie--never learned a word
of formal sign. They remained strangers to him his entire life. At
my father's graveside Leon screamed his name, as if, finally, his
dead deaf brother had been granted the power to hear his name on his
brother's lips.
Background music: Violin: O Mio Babbino Caro （我亲爱的父亲） Artist: Elissa Lee Koljonen & Robert Koenig Album: Heartbreak
温馨提示：2010年6月20日 星期天 为父亲节
英语书籍：Promises I Made My Mother (节选三）ZT
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