leave me alone, I'm reading

Good book, for all the obvious reasons.

We are different people than our parents. Due to the basic fact that we, by definition, are of a different generation than our parents, we can never fully and completely get each other. Times change - that's a fact, however slowly - and the changes in political atmosphere, pop culture, economic times influences the difference in view, however subtle, held by different generations. In this book, the obvious difference in backgrounds between father & son is that the father had been deaf since very young, and the son had full hearing capabilities, but there were subtle differences in their backgrounds as well: the father grew up during the Depression, the son during World War II, the father grew up in a relatively religious Jewish family, the son's religious upbringing included a bar mitzvah and nothing more, the father was a manual laborer (basically) and the son went away to college.

I think any one of us can identify with the small and large eureka moments when we realize that our parent's worldview is different than our own and coming to understanding why that is. The process of having those realizations, I think for a child in particular, is difficult. When growing up, your parent is your whole world, and the beginnings of the realization that you think differently than they do is the realization that you and you parent are not a single being. Of course when you grow up, this is interesting, and even fun sometimes. But when young, it's bewildering and scary; it's a new experience from knowing that your parent is always right. It's time to eat, it's time to sleep, these are the right answers, you know your parent knows what to do; this is different from this is the college to go to, this is the right career - here you are going forward with advice, not answers, and that's scary.

In the end, this is a book about love - parent/child love. It is a beautiful ode from a son about his father. He describes the frustrations of being his deaf father's interpreter with the hearing world, but it's also very much a book about what the son learned from his father - the lessons he was taught about people and how to live in the world and how to carry oneself.

As an aside, I also loved this book's descriptions of growing up in Brooklyn. As a Brooklyn native myself, though now living in Iowa, I had a happy nostalgia spread through me with the descriptions of stickball, subways, butcher shops, mothers calling their children in from playing 'on the block' from 2nd and 3rd story windows. I can clearly see my own mother leaning out of our 2nd story apartment window, calling to me & my sister to come in and eat. Reading this book, I could hear the waves of Coney Island, the smell of the Atlantic, feel the bustle of the busy avenues. It made me smile.