Bob Brody: Deafness didn’t stop my mother from learning the piano

The 12-year-old girl who became my mother took weekly piano lessons. This happened along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx in the 1930s. She practiced at the keyboard until she could finally play a Johann Strauss waltz straight through without a mistake.

So far so good. But the first time I heard about this cultural education, it struck me as strange, largely because of an inescapable fact: Aileen Roslyn Sheft was by then profoundly deaf. She was stricken with spinal meningitis, in an epidemic outbreak in 1929, shortly after she turned a year old. Besides, how must my mother have felt, I wondered to myself, playing piano and dancing even though she was deaf? Maybe, I suspected, she felt even more self-conscious than she would otherwise, unable to see the point of disguising her disability and perpetuating a falsehood.“Aileen had no real interest in taking the lessons,” my nana explained to me. “But I wanted to give her the feeling that she was as good as all the hearing girls in the class.

How must my grandmother have delighted in watching my mother play piano and dance, then, thrilled in the illusion thereby conjured of a daughter equipped with ears that functioned perfectly. my nana must have told herself in those transcendent moments. Maybe, despite my original suspicions, my mother actually wound up feeling just as her mother intended her to feel, in every respect equal.So it went with my nana.

Source: Education Headlines (educationheadlines.net)

One would think the child of a deaf piano player would be more up to speed on how any deaf or blind person can learn to play piano these days, and the importance thereof.

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