Leah Hager Cohen
Although she is not deaf, Leah Hager Cohen (1967 - ) lived for much of her childhood at the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens, New York, where her mother was a teacher and her father was an administrator. (Both her paternal grandparents were deaf.) Her strong identification with the deaf students at the school led her to see deafness as “not a pathology but a cultural identity.” A graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism, Cohen has been a writing instructor at Emerson College in Boston and an interpreter for deaf students in mainstream classes. In 1994 she published a book about deaf culture; its title, Train Go Sorry, is a translation of the American Sign Language symbols meaning “to miss the boat” or “to be left behind.” Her latest book is Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things (1997). In the following selection from Train Go Sorry, Cohen remembers her grandfather, Sam Cohen, whose parents had to hide their son’s deafness from immigration officials when they passed through Ellis Island in the early 1900s. Once a student at the Lexington School, her grandfather provides Cohen with another connection to the deaf community.
“Words Left Unspoken”
My earliest memories of Sam Cohen are of his chin, which I remember as fiercely hard and pointy. Not pointy, my mother says, jutting; Grandpa had a strong, jutting chin. But against my very young face it felt like a chunk of honed granite swathed in stiff white bristles. Whenever we visited, he would lift us grandchildren up, most frequently by the elbows, and nuzzle our cheeks vigorously. This abrasive ritual greeting was our primary means of communication. In all my life, I never heard him speak a work I could understand.
Sometimes he used his voice to get our attention. It made a shapeless, gusty sound, like a pair of bellows sending up sparks and soot in a blacksmith shop. And he made sounds when he was eating, sounds that, originating from other quarters, would have drawn chiding or expulsion from the table. He smacked his lips and sucked his teeth; his chewing was moist and percussive; he released deep, hushed moans from the back of his throat, like a dreaming dog. And he burped out loud. Sometimes it was all Reba, Andy, and I could do not to catch one another’s eyes and fall into giggles.
Our grandfather played games with us, the more physical the better. He loved that hand game: he would extend his, palms up, and we would hover ours, palms down, above his, and lower them, lower, lower, until they were just nesting, and slap! He’d have sandwiched one of our hands, trapping it between his. When we reversed, I could never even graze his, so fast would he snatch them away, like a big white fish.
He played three-card monte with us, arranging the cards neatly between his long fingers, showing us once the jack of diamonds smirking, red and gold, underneath. And then, with motions as swift and implausible as a Saturday morning cartoon chase, his hands darted and faked and blurred and the cards lay still, face down and impassive. When we guessed the jack’s position correctly, it was only luck. When we guessed wrong, he would laugh – a fond, gravelly sound – and pick up the cards and begin again.
He mimicked the way I ate. He compressed his mouth into dainty proportions as he nibbled air and carefully licked his lips and chewed tiny, precise bites, his teeth clicking, his eyelashes batting as he gazed shyly from under them. He could walk exactly like Charlie Chaplin and make nickels disappear, just vanish, from both his fists and up his sleeves; we never found them, no matter how we crawled over him, searching. All of this without any words.
He and my grandmother lived in the Bronx, in the same apartment my father and Uncle Max had grown up in. It was on Knox Place, near Mosholu Parkway, a three-room apartment below street level. The kitchen was a tight squeeze of a place, especially with my grandmother bending over the oven, blocking the passage as she checked baked apples or stuffed cabbage, my grandfather sitting with splayed knees at the dinette. It was easy to get each other’s attention in there; a stamped foot sent vibrations clearly over the short distance, and an outstretched arm had a good chance of connecting with the other party.
The living room was ampler and dimmer, with abundant floor and table lamps to accommodate signed conversation. Little windows set up high revealed the legs of passerby. And down below, burrowed in black leather chairs in front of the television, we children learned to love physical comedy. Long before the days of closed captioning, we listened to our grandfather laugh out loud at the snowy black-and-white antics of Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges.
During the time that I knew him, I saw his hairline shrink back and his eyes grow remote behind pairs of progressively thicker glasses. His athlete’s bones shed some of their grace and nimbleness; they began curving in on themselves as he stood, arms folded across his sunken chest. Even his long, thin smile seemed to recede deeper between his nose and his prominent chin. But his hands remained lithe, vital. As he teased and argued and chatted and joked, they were the instruments of his mind, the conduits of his thoughts.
As far as anyone knows, Samuel Kolominsky was born deaf (according to Lexington records, his parents “failed to take note until child was about one and a half years old”). His birthplace was Russia, somewhere near Kiev. Lexington records say he was born in 1908; my grandmother says it was 1907. He was a child when his family fled the czarist pogroms. Lexington records have him immigrating in 1913, at age five; my grandmother says he came to this country when he was three. Officials at Ellis Island altered the family name, writing down Cohen, but they did not detect his deafness, so Sam sailed on across the last ribbon of water to America.
His name-sign at home: Daddy. His name-sign with friends: the thumb and index finger, perched just above the temple, rub against each other like grasshopper legs. One old friend attributes this to Sam’s hair, which was blond and thick and wavy. Another says it derived from his habit of twisting a lock between his fingers.
Lexington records have him living variously at Clara, Moore, Siegel, Tehema, and Thirty-eighth streets in Brooklyn and on Avenue C in Manhattan. I knew him on Knox Place, and much later on Thieriot Avenue, in the Bronx. Wherever he lived, he loved to walk, the neighborhoods revolving silently like pictures in a Kinetoscope, unfurling themselves in full color around him.
Shortly before he died, when I was thirteen, we found ourselves walking home from a coffee shop together on a warm night. My family had spent the day visiting my grandparents at their apartment. My grandmother and the rest of the family were walking half a block ahead; I hung back and made myself take my grandfather’s hand. We didn’t look at each other. His hand was warm and dry. His gait was uneven then, a long slow beat on the right, catch-up on the left. I measured my steps to his. It was dark except for the hazy pink cones of light cast by streetlamps. I found his rhythm, and breathed in it. That was the longest conversation we ever had.
He died before I was really able to converse in sign. I have never seen his handwriting. I once saw his teeth, in a glass, on the bathroom windowsill. Now everything seems like a clue.