the SENIOR issue
photos from Uhlberg's personal archive show a very actie young man during his football years at brandeis. access religion. There are congregations with a Rabbi who signs. “My father never complained about being deaf, but he always commented on how unfairly he was treated. He was a very proud person. He didn’t expect a break, but some consideration or acknowledgment, and equal dignity – including in his own family. He made more money than all his siblings, but they still thought of him as ‘the poor deaf kid.’ Till the day he died, he was conscious of being a part of a huge minority in an uncaring, unfeeling, often hostile world. Without language, you live in a separate country. Sharing a language is what makes cultures and societies.” All these experiences feature in his first book, “Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love,” published in 2009. It was an Amazon recommended book of the month. The Wall Street Journal called it “fascinating” and “vividly evocative.” Publishers Weekly dubbed it “a well-crafted, heartwarming tale of family love and understanding. ...[Uhlberg] effortlessly weaves his way through a childhood of trying to interpret the speaking world for his parents while trying to learn the lessons of life from the richly executed ‘technicolor language’ of his father’s hands.”
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Now, the family of Ken Burns is interested in turning it into a feature film.
The Road to Brandeis: Football During his adolescence, Myron’s “escape from the deaf world” was football. When he graduated from high school in 1951, he was offered two football scholarships – to NYU and a new school in Waltham, Mass. – Brandeis. This chapter of his life became his next book: “The Road to Brandeis: From Silence to Sound,” which is due out soon. Though his father cried when he left him at Grand Central Station, “knowing that our relationship would never be the same,” it was “an electrifying time” for Myron. Brandeis had just been founded in 1948. The total student body was 450, of which 225 were boys. Of those, 3040 were gentiles, and most of them were on the football team. “We traveled all over the country, showing that ‘This is the face of this new school; it’s not a ‘Jew-school.’ Abraham Sachar, the brilliant first President of Brandeis; Benny Friedman, the athletic director; and the football players – one Irish, one black, one Italian and one Polish. ‘And oh yes, we do have Jewish students, too!’” There were 150 in Myron’s Brandeis graduating
class of 1955. The next year, “in a typical Jewish ceremony,” he married his college sweetheart. They had three children and “divorced amicably.” Then, he had his shiksa moment, marrying a sixfoot blonde Protestant. He’s been married to his current wife, Karen, for 40 years. His major at Brandeis was American Civilization (though sometimes, he says it was “cheerleaders”). “I was not a distinguished scholar,” he confesses. But he’s part of a community of “about 45,000 graduates of Brandeis who maintain a lifelong love of the University.” He intends to use the book as a funding/promotional tool for the school. At age 60, Myron enrolled in law school at night, while still running his successful clothing design and manufacturing business by day. It was his successful writing in law school that kickstarted his writing career. “At 66, I finally became an overnight sensation,” he quips. “Now, at the age of 80, I have the audacity of looking long-range.” With a new children’s book, another adult book and a movie in process, this charismatic, energetic guy has a lot to look forward to. A