Amazing as it seems to me now, my mother, Pearl Drechsler, was nearly deaf and no one knew it. She was so careful to hide her lack of hearing that she was able to raise two children who didn't learn this important fact until they were grown. My father may have known it, but he never let on that he did. My mother, was born in the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1894. She may have acquired partial deafness at some time in her childhood when she was stricken with Scarlet Fever. She wasn't born with a hearing disability because her speaking and language skills were very good. I will never know how it came about, but when she was ten years old, her parents believed that she was 'dumb' and they took her out of school so she could learn a skill. She was sent to live with a dressmaker where she learned to sew and design clothing.
And learn she did. By the time she was in her early teens she was a skilled seamstress. At that time, it was the custom of families to hire a seamstress to come into their home and make all of the trousseau linens, the brides dress and other clothing when there was to be a wedding. She was successful at this and eventually, because of her extraordinary skill, she went out on her own to start a small dressmaking business in Hungary. She was able to support herself and hire some help. I imagine it was rather unusual for a woman to be self supporting at that time, but she told me she was able to do this because of necessity.
In thinking back on this history, although she said that she was told she was dumb, it is more likely that she couldn't hear well enough to follow the lessons that the teacher dictated. I believe she taught herself to lip read. If she was faced directly in front of another person speaking to her, she could follow the conversation. In this way she was able to give the impression of being able to hear the conversation. This is how she managed her life. She became very adept at managing conversations, too. If she knew what the subject was, she took charge and directed the discourse in order to continue the context. If the conversation would abruptly change she would lose the context. In that case she would disengage from the conversation.
In 1923 she came to the United States like so many immigrants at that time, in search of freedom and a more prosperous life. She didn't know a word of English but she was determined to learn. She had come to stay with her sister who had moved to Chicago before the first World War. Within a week of her arrival in the city she went downtown to Marshall Field's Department Store and got a job as a seamstress.
All department stores had a staff of seamstresses. They altered and in some cases, made dresses for customers. She enrolled in "night school" and somehow learned to read. In order to learn the vocabulary, she went to the public library and read the dictionary. Of course, she didn't learn the pronunciation and the language she tried to speak, although she believed it to be English, was a very thickly accented English-Hungarian mix. She met her husband through socializing with other Hungarian immigrants, and in 1925 they married with the idea of being able to work together because he was a tailor and he spoke Hungarian. This is a very typical story of immigration to the United States.
They continued to speak Hungarian to each other their entire lives. They both attempted to speak English to Americans, but it wasn't until my brother and I were old enough to go to public school that they both really learned the language. We taught them. Both my brother and I got in the habit of standing directly in front of our mother and speaking to her in a loud, clear voice.
We somehow realized that if we wished to tell her anything this was how to do it. It didn't occur to us that she couldn't hear us very well. If we were trying to talk to her while facing in another direction she wouldn't acknowledge that we'd said anything to her. We accepted that. She spoke to us in Hungarian. We only spoke to her in English. At the beginning, I think that her lip reading skills in English were acquired because of our careful and repeated enunciation of sentences. I didn't realize that my way of speaking was unusual until other children in school teased me about speaking so slowly. It didn't connect in my mind until I was much older.
As soon as I learned to read, I would sit in front of my mother and read to her. This continued for many years. She always carried a notebook with her to write down words she would see that she needed to look up in the dictionary. Our parents bought an encyclopedia and she began to read it. She never learned how to pronounce English words correctly so the language she spoke was hard for most English speakers to understand. Not only was her accent very thick and Hungarian, but since she couldn't hear the words clearly, she would pronounce everything phonetically based on the way it was spelled.
Our parents were interested in becoming Americans. They embraced everything they believed was American and began the process of becoming citizens of this great country. They opened a small tailor shop and began the upward climb towards the middle class. Unfortunately, the Great Depression struck, and they, like so many others, struggled to stay afloat. Eventually they had to give up the business and find work in the industrial world of the garment industry.
My mother became a seamstress in a garment factory where she became a "sample maker." Her skills were well appreciated in industry but the noise of the sewing machines pushed whatever hearing she had over the edge and she became deaf. She began asking us to write her notes to tell her things that she didn't understand but we didn't realize why she asked this. We thought she just wanted to see how things were spelled. She never used the telephone. I made all of her phone calls whenever they were needed. She said she didn't like to use the phone and we accepted that explanation.
Whenever she went shopping she took me with her so I could explain things more clearly to her and to the clerks.
When she was in her late fifties, without telling anyone, she secretly went shopping and was fitted for a hearing aid. It wasn't until she began to tell us we were talking too loud that she revealed that she had a hearing aid. We were amazed. By then we had some suspicion that she had a problem, but we would never mention it to her.
The hearing aid changed her life. Her new ability to hear enabled her to expand her lip reading skills and participate in more social activities. But she never let go of the shame she felt about not being able to hear. She went to many extremes to hide the hearing aid because she didn't want anyone to know she had to use it. Eventually even the hearing aid did not help and she continued to live a long and full life, communicating with the world and lip reading in both English and Hungarian.
In retrospect, when I see the great strides that have been made in the knowledge and technology available to people who have hearing loss, I wish she had been able to take advantage of it. Nevertheless, she was amazing in her capacity to learn new things and to live a rich and full life. When she died at the age of 101 she was carrying the hearing aid in her pocket, along with her teeth, having outlived both of them.
