Hands of my Father by Myron Uhlberg

Myron Uhlberg is an author of books for children, and this is his first book for an adult audience. It is not so much a story, as a bunch of childhood recollections that are roughly in chronological sequence, but do not work together to show any development of the principal characters – Myron, his younger brother, and their deaf parents. His brother is the least illuminated, with most of the focus on Myron and his father. The recollections range from trivial (what Myron picks out in a candy store, watching a neighbor tend his pigeons) to terrifying (his brother having grand mal seizures, his father cutting himself accidentally on a broken bottle). The book is noteworthy in its depiction of how people who were deaf lived then, in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Myron describes a virtual wall between his parents and the hearing world, one constructed by ignorance and prejudice. (It would be interesting to learn how this wall has been affected by our presently more “enlightened” acceptance of handicapped people.) The author remarks on how incredibly close his mother and father were, leading him to speculate how their deaf condition may have served to increase their dependence and focus on each other. Both his parents came from hearing families, and they describe (to him) the pain of living as aliens in their family circles. But the author hesitates to examine these stories closely, seeming to tread more on the surface of their narratives. When he asks for a dog, he hears about his mother’s experience of having a dog in childhood, how she communicated with it, how it knew her moods and her inclinations in an instant. The dog had to go, after a biting episode – but the pain of the story is not about losing the dog, but the glimpse into what the dog alleviated - the darkness, the lack of relating. All Myron says is, he stopped asking, realizing he didn’t need a dog. His life was not like that. But then, he was not deaf.