In Ruth Sidransky's book, In Silence: Growing Up Hearing in a Deaf World, Sidransky tells how she acted as intermediary between hearing shopkeepers and her deaf mother. The butcher, the vegetable vendor and the grocer all carried on their transactions with Ruth's mother through Ruth as their interpreter. Occasionally, she went to the movies with her mother, and with her hands, added voice to the story as it unfolded on the screen. Once she went to court with her parents, who had received a summons for some minor infringement, to help resolve the difficulty. In her days of growing up, before the TTY and relay service, she was the telephone voice to hearing relatives. She was the "light" that signaled when the doorbell rang. She was truly the go-between for her parents, helping them navigate between the confusing hearing world and their deaf world.
But the deaf world was not alone in its need for go-betweens. In the latter part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century with the influx of immigrants teeming upon American shores with their foreign-born infants and their first generation of American-born children, the need for go-betweens was tremendous. These immigrant parents were either too busy trying to eke out a livelihood for their families, or too loyal to their mother tongues to learn a new one and the lower east side of New York abounded with these young go-betweeners. In the wealth of free education, these children became bilingual soon after entering the public school system.
Such was the story of my mother, Sophia Hochberg, born in New York in 1890, the first living child of immigrant parents who had come from Austria a few years before. My grandparents spoke only Yiddish and that was the tongue my mother spoke until she entered P.S. 62 in Manhattan. But then a new world opened, adding importance and a new purpose to her life. She became intermediary, interpreter, negotiator and go-between for her parents. She dealt with English-speaking shopkeepers, interpreted doctor's orders and translated when they brought her younger siblings to school for registration. My mother was a natural at it and she enjoyed every minute, never once considering it a burden.
In 1900 at the age of ten, my mother was Queen Esther at the Purim Carnival at the Educational Alliance on New York's lower east side and with her parents permission she was involved in other activities the center had to offer. The Educational Alliance was the forerunner of the Jewish community centers as they exist today in most of our country's larger cities. It was here that she learned to read Hebrew and brought that knowledge back to her home becoming expert in reading the Yiddish newspapers to her parents who only spoke the language but were not familiar with the printed word. Since Yiddish uses the Hebrew alphabet without the vowels she would coordinate the words she read with the sounds she had heard since infancy. My mother was able to bring the events of the world, the politics of the day and the happenings of the city and community to her parents and their neighbors. There would sit ten year-old Sophia, still in pigtails, on the front stoop at 222 East Broadway, unfolding the pages of the Jewish Daily Forward, the neighbors gather and the little girl reads column after column to the crowd. As she reads the current episode of the Forward's weekly heart-rending serial story, the much beloved advice column, A Bintel Brief, she brings American life, romance and reminiscences to her parents and their neighbors.
Like my mother, the offspring of other ethnic groups found their niche as go-betweens. Italian, Greek, German, Swedish, Irish alike survived easier and learned American ways faster because of their Americanized children who helped them gap the culture chasm and break language barriers. America became the great melting pot and the cream on top were these aculturated children.
Every now and then a very special go-between is born who stands out and creates even greater miracles, jumps even further distances. Such a child was young, deaf Annie Plapinger. Almost the same time as my mother was interpreting for the Yiddish-speaking community on East Broadway, Anna, about the same age, was interpreting for her mother at the Lexington School for the Deaf for a parent-teacher conference. With amazing skill, Anna lipread her mother's Yiddish, and relying only on her eyes, voiced it into English for the school principal, then watching the principal's lips, she reversed the process and spoke the principal's reply in Yiddish for her mother. Anna was an excellent communicator and carried out her task with ease and fluency. We can surely imagine, when the interview was over, the school principal ended by saying "You have a wonderful little girl." As if Anna's mother didn't already know!
Editor's note:
In 1977, the National Congress of Jewish Deaf (now, Jewish Deaf Congress, [JDC]) established the Plapinger Award named after founding member Henry Plapinger, Annie's husband, initially endowed by Annie herself. This award is given bi-annually at their conventions in recognition of outstanding service to the Jewish Deaf community. TBS members, Alvin Klugman, and Bess Hyman are among the recipients. After Annie's death in 1990, the Plapinger Youth Essay Contest was added to the award package, in which TBS member, Shoshana Stern received in 1996.