Submitted by ErikaJ on Tue, 04/07/2009 - 12:31.
Myron Uhlberg's memoir of growing up with deaf parents,
Hands of My Father, has already attracted a lot of attention in the mainstream press for its depiction of how much responsibility young Myron assumed, acting as his father's interpreter from about the age of six...he doesn't mention doing this in quite the same way for his mother...maybe the neighbor women were more patient at accepting handwritten notes or maybe she was content to allow her husband to be the public face of her family in the world...it's hard for a frustrated wannabe egomaniac like myself to believe there were ever women that domestically inclined, but that's material for another book.
It is hard to believe that only within one person's lifetime, there was no closed-captioning and no way for ordinary folks to get sign-language interpretation, even when their seizing second child needs a doctor.