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Saul Rosen

Saul Rosen was a Deaf Polish Jewish Holocaust-child-survivor, a union printer, a childhood sweetheart who became a husband for seventy-nine years, a father who produced one daughter and declined to apologize for the sheer volume of nonsense he inflicted on her, a grandfather who made the word Zayde sound like an accusation of crimes he had definitely committed, and a self-described menace who lived to one hundred and then left the world with a filthy joke still cooling on his hands. He was rescued as an infant from the Warsaw Ghetto by the Żegota network in the last months before the Great Deportation made his rescue impossible; he did not learn until he was nearly seventy that the congenital deafness he had lived with his entire life had a name, a category, a genetic cause, and a small American-Jewish founder population. He was beloved by his family, adored by his grandchildren, roasted regularly by his daughter, and quietly grieved by half of Mt. Washington when he died. His wife Miri followed him within hours.

Overview

Saul was a man who refused to be tragic about being alive. The facts of his life were, objectively, some of the heaviest facts a person could carry: born to Jewish parents in occupied Warsaw in the autumn of 1944 (the accepted approximate date; rescue records were imperfect, and Saul himself was indifferent to the precision), profoundly Deaf from birth, smuggled out of the Ghetto as an infant by the Żegota network in an operation his birth parents did not survive, reunited with distant relatives in New York City after the war, educated at the New York School for the Deaf, and married for seventy-nine years to the love of his life, Miri, whom he met at fourteen in a Fanwood classroom and never looked away from again. Saul declined to carry any of this as weight. He carried it as fuel for mischief. He lived ferociously, signed filthy jokes in public while hearing bystanders smiled at the "sweet old Deaf man," made every deli waitress in Mt. Washington, Baltimore laugh at least once, and wore his scars so lightly that his grandchildren believed for years that being smuggled out of Warsaw as a baby was the kind of thing that happened to everyone's Zayde.

His daughter Annie once observed, in her own therapy, that her father had processed an entire generational trauma inheritance through the single chosen coping mechanism of being, at all times, an absolute pain in the ass. She said it with love. She meant it with love. Saul would have cackled if he had heard her, and then signed something cutting enough to make her cry, and then kissed the top of her head and left the room before she could compose a response.

He was a menace. He was a mensch. These were not contradictions. They were how he stayed alive.

Early Life and Background

Warsaw, 1944-1945

Saul was born in the autumn of 1944 to Polish Jewish parents whose names were lost along with every other fact of his pre-rescue life. The Warsaw Ghetto had been liquidated the previous summer in the Great Deportation of 1942, which sent approximately 265,000 Jews to Treblinka; the remnant population left in the Ghetto when Saul was born was fighting a losing battle against starvation, disease, and continued German violence. That he was born at all was an act of defiance. That his parents had him baptismally Deaf and kept him alive for the months before rescue was an act of love his descendants would never be able to adequately honor because they would never know what it cost.

He was smuggled out by the Żegota network (formally, the Rada Pomocy Żydom, the Polish Council to Aid Jews) sometime in late 1944 or early 1945. Saul himself, in adulthood, would claim to remember details of the operation -- being carried in a bread basket, a woman's humming against his chest, a specific Polish lullaby -- and his family alternated between believing him and assuming he had fabricated the memories from stories told later. Saul preferred the ambiguity. He declined to ever clarify.

Żegota worked primarily through Polish-Catholic families, Catholic convents, and orphanages, and also through the Warsaw sewer system in the final months of the Ghetto's existence. Saul was placed with a Polish-Catholic family in the Warsaw suburbs for safekeeping; the Deaf infant was harder to hide than a hearing one in some ways (neighbors noticed a baby that did not respond to sound) and easier in others (a Deaf baby could not cry out at the wrong moment if given no stimulus). The family that took him in risked their lives. Saul did not learn their names until he was in his forties, when a historian tracing Żegota records located partial documentation. He made one trip to Poland in 1992 to meet the surviving daughter of his rescuers; he signed to her, she spoke Polish to him, her son interpreted, and Saul cried for the first time his own daughter had ever seen.

Rescue and Relocation, 1945-1948

After liberation in 1945, Saul was transferred to a Jewish children's home in Łódź briefly, then moved through a series of Jewish agencies helping to relocate orphaned survivors. His Deafness complicated the process -- most agencies had no capacity for Deaf infants -- and he was eventually matched with a distant surviving cousin of his birth mother who had emigrated to New York City before the war. He arrived in the United States in 1948, at approximately three and a half years old, with no language, no formal name beyond what his rescuers had assigned him (Saul, after a refugee worker's father), and no memory of the first five syllables of his life.

His adoptive family were observant but emotionally closed Polish Jewish immigrants who had survived the war in America but lost everyone they knew in Poland. They gave Saul shelter, kosher food, a bedroom, a Hebrew name, and a surname (Rosen) that was the husband's mother's name. They did not give him a language. They did not know how. Saul spent his first two years in the United States in functional isolation, watching the family talk around him in Polish and Yiddish and English he could neither hear nor access, until a social worker finally connected the family with the New York School for the Deaf and Saul was enrolled as a residential student at age five.

Fanwood, 1949-1962

The New York School for the Deaf -- known universally as "Fanwood," after its original White Plains location -- was the place where Saul's life began. He arrived at five with no signs, no vocabulary, and no idea that language was possible. He left at seventeen with native American Sign Language fluency, a literate command of written English, a formal education, and the woman he would eventually marry.

The experience of being a Deaf child acquiring language at five rather than from birth left Saul with specific cognitive marks that persisted his whole life: a slight reticence in abstract vocabulary, a tendency to prefer concrete and embodied expression over theoretical abstraction, and a permanent private fury at what the pre-Fanwood years had cost him. He rarely spoke of it. When he did, decades later, it was usually to his daughter and usually in the same shape: They didn't know. They were good people. It cost me years.

He became, at Fanwood, the boy everyone knew. Class clown, signed-joke savant, a kid whose mischief operated at such a sustained volume that teachers eventually gave up on discipline and started channeling it into school theater productions. Saul excelled at physical comedy on stage. He also excelled at shop class. And he fell catastrophically in love, at fourteen, with the new girl in his class, Miriam Goldfarb, who had arrived from a Jewish family in Boston and who signed like she had been born doing it (she had -- she was a child of Deaf parents, rare in that era). Saul passed her a note in a combination of written English and signed ASL glosses, asking whether she would allow him to walk her to the dining hall. She said yes. They walked to the dining hall together for the next four years. They continued, in some sense, to walk to the dining hall together every day thereafter.

Education

Saul completed his secondary education at the New York School for the Deaf in 1962. He did not attend college; Gallaudet University was available to him as a Deaf student, but his family could not afford it and Saul had already committed himself to a trade. He completed a vocational apprenticeship in printing through a union-linked program in New York from 1962-1966, qualifying as a journeyman printer and subsequently transferring his union card to Baltimore when he and Miri moved south in 1966.

Printing was, historically, one of the "Deaf trades" in twentieth-century American industry. The shop-floor noise that was hazardous or unpleasant to hearing workers was a non-issue for Deaf printers, and several American Deaf communities had built strong multi-generational networks around union print shops. Saul was proud of belonging to this lineage. He was also proud of the fact that the work itself -- inked metal type, hand-set galleys, the smell of ink and paper dust and solvent -- was work you could do well only by paying close attention with your hands and eyes. His hands became Miri's hands' opposite (hers delicate and quick; his broad and patient); their ASL signatures reflected their respective crafts for the rest of their lives.

Personality

Saul's personality was a single sustained project of refusing to allow tragedy to have the last word. He had been smuggled out of a genocide as an infant; he had arrived in America without language; he had lost years of cognitive development in a silent adoptive household; he had gone through life with a body that was progressively losing vision no one could explain until he was nearly seventy; he had watched his only daughter carry the inheritance of his survival as a clinical vocation; he had watched his only grandson, the only Rosen great-grandchild likely to ever bear the surname, progress through deafblindness faster than Saul himself had. Any of these facts alone could have justified a lifetime of brooding. Saul declined.

His personality instead was mischief, deployed tactically, with the precision of someone who had figured out young that humor was the one weapon genocide had not taken from him. He signed filthy jokes at shabbat while his non-signing neighbors smiled at the sweet old Deaf man; he gave every member of his family signed nicknames that doubled as affectionate insults and refused to explain them to anyone outside the family; he told the same five stories about his youth in variations so wildly contradictory that nobody knew which version, if any, was factually true. He claimed, at various points, to have been smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto in a bread basket, in a suitcase, in a violin case, under a nun's habit, in a barrel of pickles, and once -- to his then six-year-old granddaughter Lindsay -- inside a trained goose. He watched Lindsay consider this with her whole face, decide to believe it, and explain it at school the following Monday. He was delighted.

He was also, underneath the mischief and entirely inseparable from it, one of the steadiest men his family had ever known. He did not miss Friday shabbat dinner for seventy-five years of married life. He did not speak ill of his wife in public or in private, ever, not once. He did not withhold love. He did not punish silence with silence. He told his daughter Annie that he loved her approximately eight thousand times across her lifetime, in ASL, sometimes while she was crying and sometimes while she was sleeping and sometimes while they were eating dinner at the kitchen table and he wanted to break the quiet with something true.

His core motivations were simple and unshakeable: his wife, his daughter, his grandchildren, his community, and the active refusal to let anyone in any of those categories feel alone. His fears, when he had them, he swallowed. The one he could not swallow -- his grandson RJ's accelerating deafblindness -- he channeled into becoming, in his eighties, a competent Pro-Tactile signer, so that RJ would never have a conversation with his Zayde mediated by anyone else.

He did, however, apologize for nothing. The apologies he owed were owed to history, not to individuals, and history did not take them.

Cultural Identity and Heritage

Saul was Ashkenazi Jewish by birth, Polish by origin, Deaf by native linguistic formation, and American by every other measure. He was also, culturally, specifically Jewish Deaf -- a particular intersection that mattered deeply to him and was invisible to most people outside it. The Jewish Deaf community in mid-twentieth-century America was small, tight, and bound together by both the linguistic minority of American Sign Language and the cultural-religious minority of American Jewry. Saul was a founding member of the Baltimore Jewish Deaf Association (established 1974) and attended monthly signed Torah study sessions for forty-plus years, including years when his Usher-related vision loss had progressed enough that other members had to adapt the signing to his reduced visual field.

He was Reform in observance, mostly because his adoptive family had been Reform, but culturally he carried the traditions of pre-war Polish Jewry as they had been carried to him through fragments -- a few Yiddish phrases, a handful of recipes Miri cooked on holidays, a relationship to loss that sat below daily life like a foundation stone. Friday shabbat dinner was the nonnegotiable anchor of his week. Kiddush signed over wine, motzi signed over challah, candles lit by Miri while Saul signed the blessing (he preferred signing the blessings to reading Hebrew text; he said the signs felt older, somehow, which annoyed exactly nobody since nothing he said about religious practice could be taken entirely seriously).

He lit a yahrzeit candle every year on the approximate anniversary of the Żegota rescue that saved him. He did not know the exact date of the operation. He did not know the name of the woman who had carried him. He lit the candle anyway. He said the mourner's kaddish for her in signs, alone in his kitchen, every year for more than seventy years. His grandchildren knew about this ritual without ever having been formally told; they had simply noticed their Zayde in his kitchen on the same night each year and understood.

Speech and Communication Patterns

Saul did not speak aloud. He had no usable residual hearing and no formal oralist training in childhood (a fact that, had his adoptive family been middle-class in a different American city, might have been different; oralism was aggressive in the mid-twentieth century but his family's isolation and the Fanwood enrollment protected him from it). He was, therefore, a lifelong and exclusive American Sign Language user in face-to-face communication, supplemented by written English for written or typed exchange.

His signing was a specific dialect all its own. Forty years in Baltimore's Jewish Deaf community had layered Baltimore-area regional ASL variations onto the New York Fanwood ASL he had acquired in childhood, and his Yiddish-inflected home culture had introduced a handful of unique signed phrases that were intelligible only to other Jewish Deaf signers of his generation. He signed fast, with broad amplitude, and with his entire upper body engaged -- face, shoulders, chest, the whole instrument. His signing had a specific rhythmic quality that linguists would describe as prosodic richness; his family described it as Saul is telling a story, get comfortable.

He used physical humor constantly in his signing. He would sign a sentence and then, at the last beat, substitute a joke sign for the expected word, creating a visual punchline. He would tell jokes that required the viewer to interpret a sign incorrectly at first and then reframe retroactively. He loved puns that existed only in signed space and could not translate into English at all. He did this to his grandchildren from the time they were signing to him in infancy, and all three of them -- Lindsay, Leslie, and RJ -- grew up with specifically ASL-based humor that hearing peers did not always follow.

As his Usher Type I progressed into significant Retinitis Pigmentosa-related tunnel vision in his sixties and seventies, Saul's signing space contracted. He learned to ask his interlocutors to sign directly in front of his face, slower, with compact handshapes. In his eighties he began the transition toward Pro-Tactile ASL, learning to receive signs on his hands and against his arm. He was an impatient student of Pro-Tactile (he hated being slow at anything) but he persisted for RJ's sake. By his mid-nineties he and RJ were fluent Pro-Tactile partners. He told Miri once, in signed reflection, that learning Pro-Tactile at eighty was the hardest thing he had done since learning English alongside ASL at five, and that both times the reason was love.

Health and Disabilities

Conditions and Diagnoses

Saul lived with profound congenital deafness from birth, later identified as a manifestation of Usher Syndrome Type I. The Deafness was visible and well-accommodated his entire life; the Retinitis Pigmentosa that developed alongside it was not identified as Usher-related until his late sixties, when his grandson RJ was diagnosed in infancy with USH1F (the specific Ashkenazi Jewish founder mutation of Usher Type I) and Saul's entire medical history retroactively acquired a name. Saul had noticed his peripheral vision narrowing in his forties and had been told at the time by a Baltimore ophthalmologist that it was "likely just RP, not uncommon, no known connection to your hearing"; this was clinically accurate for the period and reflected the general absence of genetic testing for Usher in the 1980s. He filed the information, adapted to the progressive tunnel vision through his fifties, and continued.

When RJ's infant genetic testing in the 2010s identified USH1F, Saul underwent confirmatory testing and received his formal Usher Syndrome Type I diagnosis in his late sixties. He was, by his own account, less upset by the diagnosis than he was amused by the timing. He told Annie: Seventy years I thought I was just unlucky twice. Turns out I was unlucky once. The rest was my grandson's problem. He was joking. He was also not joking. He carried a grief about RJ's Usher Type I diagnosis that his public persona never permitted him to show.

His Usher Type I manifestations included the standard congenital profound deafness, mild vestibular dysfunction (lifelong balance issues that made him walk slightly wide-legged and explained his lifelong refusal to ever close his eyes in the shower), and progressive retinitis pigmentosa leading to night blindness in his thirties, significant tunnel vision by his fifties, and severe visual field constriction by his seventies. He used a white cane outdoors from his late seventies onward. He never formally identified as "deafblind" -- he continued to identify as Deaf -- but by his nineties his communication was predominantly Pro-Tactile.

Daily Management and Equipment

Saul adapted pragmatically to each stage of his vision loss. In his sixties, when the night blindness first became dangerous, he stopped driving; Miri became the household driver (she, unaffected by Usher herself, had full vision, though she declined to ever tell Saul he was a backseat-driving menace even when he absolutely was). He began using a white cane in his late seventies and, after a fall in his own kitchen at age 83, started using a mobility cane indoors as well. He used a BrailleSense device from his mid-eighties onward for reading (he had been a lifelong newspaper reader in print; the transition to refreshable braille was slow, his grandson RJ taught him the remaining nuances). He wore no hearing aids, having been profoundly Deaf from birth with no usable residual hearing; he did carry a pager-style vibrating signaler for home alerts (doorbell, fire alarm, someone signing to him from across a room).

His daily management of vestibular dysfunction included a specific morning sequence of orientation movements taught to him by a Deaf-culturally-competent physical therapist at Johns Hopkins in his seventies; he continued this sequence every morning of his life until the morning of his death. Miri signed to him during the sequence. It was one of their rituals.

Medical History and Crises

Saul's medical history was, miraculously, light for someone who had lived through what he had lived through. He had a heart attack in 1998 at age 54 (mild; recovered fully with stent placement and lifestyle modifications he honored for approximately six months before returning to his beloved corned beef), a broken hip in 2018 (fall in the bathroom, age 74; recovered with rehab), and cataract surgery on both eyes in 2021 (unsuccessful at meaningfully improving vision given the advanced RP; he had agreed to the surgery primarily to humor his daughter and son-in-law). He had no dementia. He had no cancer. He had the cardiovascular risk factors of an Ashkenazi Jewish man who refused to eat less corned beef, but he did not, in the end, die of any of them.

He died on a Tuesday morning in October 2044, in his own bed, at age 100, hours after having signed a filthy joke to Miri that made her cackle loud enough that their home-aide nurse came running thinking something had gone wrong. Nothing had gone wrong. The nurse found Miri laughing. Saul was laughing too. Four hours later he was asleep, and an hour after that he was gone, and Miri sat with her hand on his chest for a long time before she signed to the nurse that it was okay, he had finished, she was ready.

Miri followed him within thirty-six hours. The attending cardiologist listed the cause as takotsubo cardiomyopathy (broken heart syndrome). Their family listed the cause as love.

Relationship with Body

Saul's relationship with his body was characterized by pragmatic acceptance cut with a certain dark humor. He had not chosen to be Deaf and had not chosen to have Retinitis Pigmentosa and had not chosen to have vestibular dysfunction, but he had lived inside those facts for so long that they were simply him. He did not romanticize his Deafness (the way some hearing people tried to romanticize it at him), and he did not pathologize it either. It was his first language. It was his culture. The RP that took his peripheral vision in his fifties, and then his functional daylight reading in his seventies, and then most of what remained in his eighties -- this he treated as a long slow negotiation with his body, in which his body kept changing the terms and Saul kept signing fine, we'll adapt again.

The one thing he grieved openly, to Miri, never to anyone else, was that by his last decade he could no longer see his own grandchildren's faces clearly across a table. Pro-Tactile let him know them through their hands. It was not the same. He did not complain about it. He simply let Miri catch him on the hard evenings, when he would sit with his hand on her wrist and say, in small compact signs close to her face: I miss their faces. Tell them I miss their faces.

She told them.

Physical Characteristics

Saul was a broad, compact man -- 5'7" at his tallest, an inch shorter by his nineties -- with the thick Polish Jewish frame that had carried generations of his bloodline before him. He was short-waisted and strong through the chest and shoulders even in old age; the printer's decades had built and kept a specific muscular texture in his arms that his grandchildren would run their hands down when they were small and marvel at. He was olive-skinned like his daughter Annie, with thick dark hair that grayed steadily from his forties and was entirely silver-white by his seventies, worn short and brushed back. His eyes were dark brown -- the same dark brown he had passed to Annie and to RJ -- and in his later decades they held a slight unfocused quality that was a consequence of the RP and that he refused to minimize for anyone's comfort.

His face was strongly-featured: broad forehead, deep-set eyes under heavy brows, the prominent Ashkenazi nose his daughter and grandmother and great-grandmother had shared, a wide mouth that fell into a resting scowl when he was not intentionally smiling. When he smiled (which was, in fact, most of the time), his whole face reorganized around the expression; there was no subtle Saul smile, only a full-face commitment or nothing at all. His laugh lines were deep by his fifties. By his seventies he had the face of a man who had earned every crease.

His hands were the most distinctive part of him. Broad palms, short thick fingers, calluses and tiny scars from forty years of hand-set type and press work that never fully faded after retirement. His hands were the hands his daughter had inherited -- broad, short-fingered, practical -- and the hands she had passed to her own signing, making Annie's ASL unmistakably her father's in cadence and shape. Saul could do a hundred things with his hands that most hearing people thought required two people to do at once. He could sign to one grandchild while tying another grandchild's shoe without looking down. He could carry a pot of soup from the stove to the table with his left hand while signing a complicated joke with his right. He did not perform these feats; he simply did them. By his nineties his hands had slowed. They had not stopped. They never stopped.

Items and Personal Effects

Saul kept few objects close, but the ones he kept were load-bearing.

A small tin tzedakah box from the Baltimore Jewish Deaf Association, battered and hand-signed in silver paint on its lid, lived on his kitchen counter his entire adult life. He dropped coins into it every Friday evening before shabbat. The box traveled with him from the rowhouse to his daughter's guest room when he and Miri stayed there in their final years; its interior accumulation was counted and donated annually to the Association.

A slim silver pocket watch that did not work, had never worked in his lifetime, and that he carried in his trouser pocket every day he was not in pajamas. The watch had been given to him by his adoptive father in 1962 as a graduation gift from Fanwood; the story his adoptive father told him was that it had belonged to Saul's biological paternal grandfather, a watchmaker in Warsaw. There was no way to verify this. Saul chose to believe it. He never had the watch repaired. He said a watch that had survived what that watch had survived did not owe anyone the time.

A yahrzeit candle holder, inherited from his adoptive mother, used once a year on the anniversary of the Żegota rescue and also on the anniversaries of his adoptive parents' deaths. The wax accumulation around the rim was never fully scraped away, by his deliberate choice.

A photograph of the surviving daughter of his Polish rescuers, taken in 1992 on his one trip back to Poland. He had had it framed in the small-photograph way he preferred (cheap wood frame, dusty glass) and kept it on his dresser. He never spoke about it. He did not need to.

Personal Style and Presentation

Saul dressed like a union printer who had retired: dark work trousers, plain button-down shirts in solid colors (navy, gray, olive, the occasional white for shabbat), suspenders he refused to abandon despite his daughter's periodic campaigns, sturdy leather work shoes that he re-soled rather than replaced. For shabbat he added a plain kippah and, in his later years, a wool blazer over the button-down. He wore nothing ornamental beyond his simple gold wedding band. His glasses, by his sixties, were as much a part of his face as his nose.

He kept his hair cut short by a Mt. Washington barber named Georgie who had cut his hair for fifty years (the two men communicated entirely in ASL, which Georgie had learned in the 1980s specifically to be able to talk to Saul and his community; Georgie was hearing and Italian-American and utterly devoted to the Rosens). He shaved daily. He smelled of Old Spice aftershave for seventy-five years with absolute consistency; his grandchildren associated the smell of Old Spice with being hugged.

Tastes and Preferences

Saul's tastes were those of an American Jewish man of his generation, held with conviction. He preferred corned beef to pastrami (a controversial position he defended loudly), rye bread to any other bread, seltzer water to all other beverages, and borscht in the specific Polish-Jewish variant his adoptive mother had made (beet-based, served warm, with a dollop of sour cream). He drank schnapps on high holidays and a single beer on Friday nights. He did not drink coffee. He detested tea. He had a specific and unshakeable loyalty to the Baltimore Orioles, whose games he watched on television with the closed captions on and who he loved with a grim fidelity that had survived decades of losing seasons.

He loved physical comedy in film and would watch the same Buster Keaton and Chaplin films his entire life, laughing the same places every time. He had, in his fifties, discovered the American sitcom The Golden Girls via closed captions and become obsessed with it; Bea Arthur signed to him in a way no other hearing actress had ever signed, even though Bea Arthur had never actually signed. He had read the entire Philip Roth bibliography in his fifties and sixties and had specific objections to several of the books which he was prepared to defend. He had no interest in his own life being the material of anyone's literary work and had told Annie, sharply, that if she ever let anyone write about him she would hear about it, which she had found hilarious, since she had been planning no such thing.

He loved his wife's challah above all other food. He had eaten her challah every Friday for seventy-five years and had told her, without irony, every Friday, that this week's was the best she had ever made. She had never once corrected him.

Habits, Routines, and Daily Life

Saul's life ran on a stable set of weekly rhythms. Morning vestibular sequence with Miri signing. Tzedakah drop on Fridays before sundown. Shabbat dinner Friday evening, in their kitchen or at Annie's kitchen, for seventy-five consecutive years. Signed Torah study at the Baltimore Jewish Deaf Association twice a month through his eighties. Orioles games whenever they were played. A weekly phone call (video relay) with his one surviving childhood friend from Fanwood, a man named Morris who had stayed in New York. A morning walk with his cane through Mt. Washington, waving to neighbors who all knew him and many of whom had picked up basic ASL greetings over the decades specifically so they could exchange a good morning with Saul when they passed.

He drank his morning tea -- the one tea he tolerated was the Polish-style glass of hot water with a slice of lemon, barely a tea at all -- from the same chipped enamel mug he had brought with him from New York in 1966. He read the newspaper (later, the BrailleSense) every morning in the same chair. He took his afternoon nap in the same recliner. He went to bed at 10 PM with Miri on his arm, and they signed to each other in the dark for twenty minutes before sleep every night of their marriage.

Personal Philosophy or Beliefs

Saul's philosophy, as articulated by Saul, was simple and blasphemous: The Nazis didn't get to decide. They tried. They failed. Everything after that is extra. So I eat. I love my wife. I tell jokes. I take up space. That's my whole religion. Anyone who wants theology can ask my rabbi.

He had told this to his daughter Annie, at various points in her life, usually when she was in crisis about something. She had, as a trauma therapist, eventually come to understand that her father's philosophy was one of the most sophisticated forms of Holocaust survivor resilience she had encountered in her clinical career. She never told him this. He would have mocked her for it.

His actual spiritual life was more complicated than his glib version suggested. He believed in something -- he called it, in ASL, by a specific sign of his own invention that combined the signs for memory, continuation, and laughter -- that he could not or would not name more precisely. He lit his yahrzeit candles. He said his kaddish. He went to shul on Yom Kippur every year of his adult life. He did not discuss what these practices meant to him with anyone except, very occasionally, Miri.

Family and Core Relationships

Main article: Saul and Miri Rosen - Relationship

Miriam "Miri" Rosen

His wife of seventy-nine years. Met at fourteen at the New York School for the Deaf; childhood sweethearts through their teenage years; married at twenty-one in 1965; moved to Baltimore together in 1966; parented Annie together; grandparented their three grandchildren together; and died within thirty-six hours of each other in October 2044. Miri was the one thing Saul did not joke about, the one person he never tried to outmaneuver with humor, and the one face he kept trying to see clearly even as his RP took away every other face. He had signed to her, many times across the decades, the same phrase in his own invented grammar: You are the reason I'm funny. Without you none of it lands.

Main article: Annie Whitaker and Her Parents - Relationship

Dr. Annette Miriam Whitaker

His only child, born 1978, named Annette for no specific reason Saul could remember and Miriam for her mother, whom Saul had insisted be honored in their daughter's name the moment he and Miri first discussed it. Saul had wanted more children; Miri had had a difficult pregnancy with Annie and the couple had been advised not to try again. Saul channeled the would-have-been energy into aggressive overparenting of his single daughter, which Annie had absorbed as a bottomless reservoir of parental love that she was still drawing on in her late sixties after his death. Saul had mercilessly teased Annie her entire life -- her profession (you get paid to listen?), her hair (you look like your mother at fourteen, except more tired), her wine habit (drink the good stuff, life is short), her tendency to overcommit (stop fixing everyone, fix me a drink) -- and beneath every tease was a column of love so steady that Annie had built her entire capacity for being loved on it. She grieved him after his death the way a person grieves the ground.

Lindsay and Leslie Whitaker

Identical twin granddaughters, born to Annie and Robbie in the late 2000s. Saul could tell them apart from birth (their signing rhythms differed in subtle ways he said he could feel); most other family members could not for the first several years. He gave each twin a signed nickname -- the one with the laugh, for Lindsay; the one with the stare, for Leslie -- that they both adopted and cherished. Both twins are hearing and sighted; both are USH1F carriers. Saul had taught them signed swear words at age four, telling their mother he was teaching them Yiddish, which he was, in a very specific sense.

Robert "RJ" Whitaker Jr.

Grandson, born to Annie and Robbie in the 2010s. Saul's only grandson and the only person besides himself and Miri in his immediate family with Usher Syndrome Type I. RJ progressed through his vision loss faster than Saul had at the same age; by the time RJ was twelve he was deafblind, and Saul -- then in his mid-seventies -- had already been learning Pro-Tactile ASL for three years in preparation. Saul's relationship with RJ was, of all his relationships, the one with the least mischief and the most quiet tenderness. When RJ was small and newly diagnosed, Saul had sat with him for hours signing on his hands, saying without words I am here, I am here, I have walked this road, you are not alone. RJ, who had almost no memory of being newly diagnosed, carried the cellular knowledge of those hours for the rest of his life.

Robbie Whitaker

Son-in-law. Saul had interrogated Robbie the first time Annie brought him home (Saul was 53; Robbie was in his twenties) with a cheerful ruthlessness that Robbie would describe, decades later, as the best and worst two hours of my life. He had asked about Robbie's intentions, his finances, his family, his views on the Orioles, and his position on intermarriage (Robbie was also Jewish, which Saul already knew, but he wanted to see how Robbie handled the question). Robbie had passed. Saul had then, immediately and without transition, told Robbie he was welcome at the table and signed him the first of what would become many signed Saul-jokes at Robbie's expense. Robbie had learned ASL primarily to keep up with his father-in-law's mockery. Saul had considered this the highest form of flattery available in the known world.

Personal Life

Residences

Saul and Miri lived in a single rowhouse in Mt. Washington, Baltimore from 1966 to 2042, seventy-six consecutive years. The house was modest -- three bedrooms, one bathroom, a narrow galley kitchen, a small fenced backyard -- and had been made fully accessible for Saul's Usher progression by his son-in-law Robbie in a series of renovations between 2005 and 2035. In 2042, as both Saul and Miri had slowed into their late nineties, they moved into a first-floor suite at Annie and Robbie's home two blocks away, where they spent the last two years of their lives. Annie had designed the space in consultation with her parents and Robbie; it had tactile wayfinding throughout, adapted lighting for residual vision, a small attached kitchen for Miri's baking, and a sitting room large enough to accommodate the family's Friday shabbat dinners.

Social Life and Community

Saul was beloved in Mt. Washington, Baltimore. He was the Deaf Jewish grandfather everyone knew, the man who waved at every passing neighbor, the customer at Grossman's Deli who had been ordering the same corned beef sandwich since 1966, the centenarian who had insisted on walking to his own hundredth birthday party. At his memorial service the community room at the Baltimore Jewish Deaf Association overflowed. Three hundred people came. Many of them were hearing neighbors who had learned his signed good morning over decades. His funeral was conducted in ASL with voicing interpretation; the eulogies ran three hours; no one complained; by the end the attendees were laughing and crying in alternation and several of them were signing his jokes back to his closed coffin.

Legacy and Memory

Saul did not particularly care about legacy as an abstract idea. He did care, ferociously, about his grandchildren knowing him -- who he had been, what he had come from, what had been lost, what had been saved, what was worth carrying forward. He told them, and told them, and told them. He signed them the smuggling-out story in six contradictory versions. He signed them the Fanwood stories. He signed them the stories of meeting Miri at fourteen, and the long walk to the dining hall, and the proposal he had made with a hand-forged (badly) ring and a written note that said only marry me, I will not be funny about this. (He had been funny about it. He had signed the proposal in mock-solemnity and then cracked immediately.) He told them what his adoptive father had told him about the watch. He told them what the surviving Żegota daughter had said to him in 1992.

His legacy was embodied in his grandchildren -- in Lindsay's signed humor, in Leslie's dry dark wit, in RJ's specific tender Pro-Tactile grammar -- and in his daughter Annie, whose entire clinical vocation had been shaped by the fact of having been raised by a man who refused to be tragic about being alive. His legacy was also in the Baltimore Jewish Deaf Association, which he had co-founded, and in the Polish-Catholic family in Warsaw whose names he had finally learned in 1992, and in the single yahrzeit candle his daughter lit every year on the anniversary of his death and which her children continued to light after she was gone.

Memorable Quotes

"The Nazis didn't get to decide. They tried. They failed. Everything after that is extra." -- Signed to Annie during a particularly bleak week in her doctoral training; she wrote it in her journal that night and never threw the page away

"You are the reason I'm funny. Without you none of it lands." -- Signed repeatedly to Miri across decades; became a family refrain Annie and the twins learned to sign in unison at his hundredth birthday

"I miss their faces. Tell them I miss their faces." -- Signed to Miri in his late nineties as his RP advanced; the phrase Miri carried to the grandchildren, and that they carried forward after his death

"I'm a menace, I was born one, I will die one, and if any of you argue with me I'll sign something worse at the funeral." -- Birthday declaration, repeated annually; honored at his memorial when his grandchildren signed something substantially worse at the funeral in retaliation; he would have approved

Characters Supporting Characters Deceased Characters Deaf Characters Jewish Characters Ashkenazi Characters Polish Characters Holocaust Survivors Disabled Characters ASL Users Book 1 Characters