2
Our Roots
LIKE ME, both my parents were born deaf (or had been deaf as long as they could remember), but unlike me, they were born into hearing families. My paternal grandparents, Ben and Rose, hadn’t known anything about raising deaf children, nor where and how deaf children could be educated, so they kept my father and his hard of hearing sister, my Aunt Cranie, at home above their grocery store in Sioux City, Iowa. They were Yiddish and Russian speakers with very little English, who found it doubly difficult to communicate with or about their deaf children who were growing up in an English-speaking country.
My mother’s grandparents and my father’s parents all came to the United States from Central and Eastern Europe in the 1800s. Like most European Jews of the time, they made the trip to escape poverty and persecution. My paternal grandfather, Baruch Gurevich, was born on September 29, 1885, in Chavusi, Belarus. He escaped from Czarist Russia in the late 1890s and landed at Ellis Island in New York. He couldn’t read or write English. When the clerk asked his name, he might have thought my grandfather said “Hurwitz,” and that became his legal name. His first name, Baruch, was changed to Benjamin, and everyone called him Ben.
Although he worked as a tie peddler at first, Ben had an adventurous spirit and soon joined the wave of western migration, probably with intentions to dig for gold. On his way to California, he stopped in Sioux City, Iowa, where he met a young woman named Rose Mazie, my grandmother. She had also been born in Belarus, on February 20, 1892, in Klyetsk, Minsk, and had arrived in America with her parents in the mid-1880s, where they settled in Iowa for reasons lost to us now. Her parents most likely had connections among the large Jewish immigrant community in Sioux City. (Their neighborhood was home to famed twin advice columnists Pauline and Esther Friedman, whose syndicated columns were known as Dear Abby and Ask Ann Landers, and whose parents were Russian Jewish immigrants as well.)
Since my father’s sister, Aunt Cranie, had some usable hearing, she could lipread her parents better than my father could. My father, however, never learned Yiddish, and his communication with his own parents and neighbors was limited to gestures.
I don’t know what would have become of my father if his life had stayed on this limited path. Luckily, in 1926, when he was thirteen years old, my grandparents learned about the Iowa School for the Deaf (ISD), and they enrolled him there. The school was eighty miles south in Council Bluffs, so my grandparents drove him to the school every fall and picked him up for the holidays in December and the summer months. Finally, he was receiving a formal education. It did not take my father long to learn sign language, make many friends, and become an outstanding student and a standout basketball player who also loved playing tennis and baseball. He loved ISD and thrived there, but his sister, who attended ISD for one year, was unhappy at school and returned home to public school in Sioux City, where she dropped out before graduating high school, a very common outcome for a deaf student in the 1930s.
Ben and Rose Hurwitz, my paternal grandparents.
ISD, like many other residential schools at that time, had a rigorous academic program. My father took high school courses in English, mathematics, chemistry, and physics. He also took several vocational courses that prepared him for jobs as a baker, Linotype operator, and furniture maker. Graduating at the age of twenty-five, he took the entrance exams to attend Gallaudet College and passed. But soon, new circumstances, and his priorities, would keep him from ever attending.
MY MOTHER, JULIETTE, was born on January 15, 1916, the daughter of two first-generation Kansans. Her mother, Rosaline Berlau, was a native of Leavenworth, Kansas, and the daughter of two Polish immigrants. Her father, a dashing man named Tobias Kahn, was the son of immigrants from Bohemia. My mother was always an active child, playing ball, loving to climb trees, and preferring the outdoors to staying inside. In contrast, her hearing sister, Sylvia, was a bookworm. But the two sisters were always close.
How my mother became deaf and whether she was born hearing remains unknown. My grandparents did not realize she was deaf until she was five years old, when a deaf nine-year-old neighbor, Elizabeth Shannon, told them she thought Juliette was deaf. Soon after, my grandparents enrolled her at the Madison School in Kansas City, which had an oral program for deaf children. My mother and her sister communicated well because Sylvia was an excellent lipreader.
Rosaline (Ga-Ga) Kahn, my maternal grandmother.
And then, when my mother was ten, her parents sent her to the Central Institute for the Deaf (CID) in St. Louis. The school had opened its doors just a little over a decade earlier, in 1914, and was founded by Max Aaron Goldstein, an Austrian-educated American physician. He aimed to teach deaf children to speak orally. By the time my mother was sent there, the school had erected new buildings and had a wait list for enrollment. Unfortunately, after about a year at CID, she became very ill with thyroid problems and left to have surgery and recuperate. She spent the remainder of her middle school education at the Madison School back at home. But when she was seventeen, she asked her mother, my grandmother Rosaline (we called her Ga-Ga), if she could return to CID, where my mother felt that she could get a better education. In all her years at school, my mother still had not learned to read! When she saw Sylvia with her nose in a book, she sometimes wondered what that would feel like to be able to sit for hours, immersed in a story. What was the trick to reading, she wondered?
Ga-Ga strolling through downtown Kansas City on her way to work.
Her primary teacher upon her return to CID was Mrs. Jessie Skinner, the mother of deaf twin sons who were also CID students. Mrs. Skinner struggled to teach my mother how to read, but with little success. Finally, Mrs. Skinner told my mother that if she didn’t become literate, she would be sent home. Terrified, my mother picked up the novel Little Women, determined to read it word by word. It was slow going at first, but after a while, she began to visualize the story of the four March sisters—their cozy house, their loves and literary ambitions, Beth’s battle with illness, and the dramatic plays Jo wrote and directed in the attic. When my mother began to picture the characters and settings in her mind, she was finally inspired to keep reading, to stay in that world, and discover what happened next. She told me that as soon as she finished Little Women, she picked up a second book, and then another. Soon, like Aunt Sylvia, she was a true fan of reading, and it was a love that would last her whole life, and one that she would work steadily to instill in me.
Tobias Kahn, my maternal grandfather.
When she graduated from CID, my mother entered ninth grade in a public school in Kansas City. By then, she was nineteen and thought herself too old to be in high school, so she left after just a few months and went to work.
It was a few years later that she met my father, who was visiting his aunt, Elizabeth Mazie Shapiro, in Kansas City. Aunt Elizabeth knew my mother’s great-aunt Emma Berlau, so they played a role in introducing them to each other.
My father had just graduated from ISD and planned to attend Gallaudet College in Washington, DC, at the end of the summer. Although my mother didn’t know sign language and my father didn’t speak or lipread, they somehow managed to fall quickly and deeply in love. How they communicated with each other is a mystery. My father decided to forgo his college education in favor of settling down with my mother, and they married on October 6, 1938, when my mother was twenty-two years old, and my father was twenty-five. Over time, my mother became proficient in sign language, and my father learned how to lipread my mother. It takes two to tango, I guess!
Soon after the wedding, they moved from Kansas City to Topeka, where my father got a job as a Linotype operator at a newspaper. After one year, they moved to Orange City, Iowa, where he again worked as a Linotype operator. They stayed in Orange City for three years before moving to Sioux City, where my father got a job as a baker, another skill he had learned at ISD. They lived with my father’s parents for a while before moving to an apartment on Pierce Street. My mother was a homemaker, and she soon learned her way around Sioux City and made new friends in the Deaf community.
On September 17, 1942, I was born, their first and only child. Following the Jewish custom of naming children after a deceased family member, typically using the first initial of the person’s name, my parents decided to name me after my mother’s father, Tobias Kahn. He got the H1N1 virus in the 1918 pandemic and died of rheumatic fever and a heart attack (a common complication of the virus) just before my mother’s sixteenth birthday when he was only forty-seven years old. Later, my father told me that they’d wanted to name me Thomas or Theodore, but they couldn’t pronounce either name well enough to be understood by the attending nurse. She wrote down “Tracy?” and my mother liked it. My parents then added Alan as my middle name, since my paternal grandfather’s middle name was Allan, and my father’s middle name was Allen.
SIOUX CITY, a medium-sized city in the flat grasslands of northwestern Iowa, is bordered on its south by a meandering Missouri River. The Sioux City metropolitan area includes cities in three states: Sioux City, Iowa; South Sioux City, Nebraska; and North Sioux City, South Dakota. It was a homey and convenient place to grow up, with at least one of everything we needed—stores, banks, gas stations, car dealerships, museums, hospitals, a big library, bowling alleys, and many parks. A popular refrain in our town was, “If it’s more than a ten-minute drive, it’s too far.”
I was lucky to have been born into a supportive and loving family. My parents nurtured and protected me, and I never wanted to disappoint them.
One of my earliest memories in Sioux City is of a chilly afternoon when I was three years old. My parents took me with my tricycle to Grandview Park, where there was an outdoor opera band shell with a small pond in front of it. I was having fun pedaling around on the sidewalks uphill from the band shell when suddenly I lost control and started coasting downhill toward the stage and the pond. I picked up speed. The cold air bit my ears and pushed against my face. My little trike was hopping and bouncing with each bump and dip on the frozen grass. I had never ridden so fast in my life, and I had no clue how to stop. I hurtled down the steep hill toward the stage and pond until my trike hit the retaining wall and threw me into the air. I flipped and landed flat on my back in the frigid water. Looking up, I saw the big, gray sky and geese flying. Then my parents’ faces were there above me, looking down at me with horror and relief. They swooped me up out of the water, stripped my wet coat off of me, and wrapped me up in their own dry coats. We hurried back home to warm up, and they fussed over me and fed me hot tea. I had never seen my parents so worried as they’d looked at that moment in the pond, nor realized before that I was vulnerable in any way.
Mom and I.
Growing up, I knew the city’s layout well—a downtown business district surrounded by residential neighborhoods, which were ringed by stockyards where farmers would haul their livestock for processing. Beyond the stockyards was farmland. It took me five minutes to ride my bicycle from our home to my grandparents’ house. Whenever we drove in our car near the stockyards, I would make faces, cover my nose, and hold my breath because the smell was so horrible. My parents laughed at my reaction and explained to me what was happening at the processing center. “This is where the trucks deliver cattle to the stockyards, and each animal is slaughtered here. Afterward,” they told me, “the carcass is hung on big hooks hanging from the ceiling, and aged to allow the enzymes to increase meat tenderness before the carcasses are butchered into the cuts sold at stores.”
Mom and Dad with me when I was two years old.
“Oh,” I thought. “Good to know.” I liked learning how the world worked. My parents knew so much.
When I was seven, I got a new bike that I rode all over the neighborhood. One day, a neighbor boy, Mike, who was nine or ten, told me to follow him on his bike. Sure! I thought. We rode down the hill from my grandparents’ home through downtown, past warehouses where there were eighteen-wheeler trucks parked in neat rows. We continued riding—under the parked vehicles and onto a long bridge crossing the Missouri River. I kept following Mike. I felt that we’d been riding for hours, but I wasn’t tired, and I was seeing fresh new sights—bridges, fields. Then, up ahead, I noticed a huge sign welcoming us to South Sioux City, Nebraska. Whoa! We had biked five miles from my grandparents’ home.
Upon seeing the sign, I immediately knew it was wrong to go that far without my parents’ knowledge, let alone cross the state line. “I’m going back!” I told Mike, but he said he would keep on going. I wheeled around and headed for home, pedaling as fast as I could back past the warehouses, under the trucks, through downtown, and up the hill. My parents were there waiting for me, furious that I had been gone so long. “I was following Mike, and I didn’t know where we were going until I saw the sign!” I told them. “You’re grounded,” they told me, sending me straight to my bedroom without dinner. I sat on my bed feeling terrible, remembering the looks on their faces and imagining how they must have felt not knowing where I’d disappeared to. A half-hour later, my mother came into my room and beckoned me down for dinner, after all. “I guess you need to eat,” she said, “after such a long journey.”
IN 1946, when I was four, I was sent to live 500 miles away at CID, my mother’s alma mater in St. Louis. Even though my father had benefited greatly from his years at the closer ISD, he was concerned that ISD no longer offered the college preparatory courses that he had taken. So he concurred with my mother that it was worth being farther away to get a better education. My mother was a prime example: She had strong speaking skills and could easily communicate with my dad’s hearing parents and his extended family while he couldn’t. “Why not send him to ISD? It’s only an hour-and-a-half drive away!” my parents’ friends argued. But my parents stood firm.
As soon as they enrolled me in the school, the principal, Dr. Helen S. Lane, asked my parents to stop using sign language with me, even though I had never signed much with them anyway. My parents agreed, and from then on, my mother and I would always talk with each other orally. She was an excellent lipreader, and we had an effortless time communicating with each other.
Dr. Helen S. Lane, principal of CID chatting with my mom, Vicki, and myself.
“I am going to take you to a very good school, the same school I went to when I was little,” my mother told me. “It is a few hours from here, in St. Louis,” she explained. It was going to be an exciting journey, she promised. We would be riding on a train. We’d first drive to Council Bluffs and then get on a train to St. Louis, going through Kansas City and Jefferson City, Missouri.
She let me have the window seat, and I watched the fields and shining lakes rush by, black and white cows in vast pastures, little towns and the back edges of cities, where the houses were crowded together under drooping power lines and cars were parked close together along the streets. We had a picnic of roast beef sandwiches and potato chips in the dining car, and I took naps.
When we arrived at CID, the school looked interesting—bright and clean. Everyone we met was friendly. My mother and I were introduced to other mothers and fathers and children, to teachers and dorm parents. Mother hugged and kissed Mrs. Skinner, her old reading teacher, who still taught at CID. “This is the field I played in when I was a girl,” my mother told me, pointing out a window. But eventually, she knelt to say goodbye to me, reminding me I’d be coming home over the holidays. I began to cry and couldn’t stop crying. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my green plaid suitcase, which was packed with my long pants, shirts, sweaters, and pajamas, and a few of my favorite picture books.
Although she had tried to explain (at home and then again on our train ride) that I would be staying at the school without her, I didn’t want her to leave. She hugged me so tightly that it hurt a little, and I breathed in her familiar smell. When she let me go to look into my crying face, I saw that her face was sad too. She hugged me to her again, told me she loved me, stood up, and walked away.
I stopped crying when I realized there were ten other boys in my dorm room to play with.