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Saul Rosen

Saul Rosen was a Deaf Polish Ashkenazi Jewish Holocaust child survivor, union printer, and co-founder of the Jewish Deaf Society of Baltimore. Born in occupied Warsaw in October 1944, he reached the United States as a young child and acquired his first full language at the New York School for the Deaf. He and Miri Rosen built a seventy-nine-year marriage, raised Annie, and remained closely involved with their three grandchildren in Baltimore.

Early Life and Background

Warsaw and Rescue

Saul was born profoundly Deaf while his Jewish family was in hiding in occupied Warsaw in autumn 1944. His birth parents did not survive the Holocaust, and their names were lost from the records that accompanied him. He was rescued as an infant with assistance from the Żegota network in late 1944 or early 1945 and placed with a Polish-Catholic family in the Warsaw suburbs. His rescuers risked their lives to shelter him.

The surviving account of Saul’s rescue differed from the stories he later told about it. He claimed to remember being carried in a bread basket, the vibration of a woman’s humming against his chest, and a Polish lullaby. His family could not establish whether these were memories, later stories he had absorbed, or inventions. Saul enjoyed that uncertainty and declined to clarify. His increasingly extravagant versions eventually included a suitcase, a violin case, a nun’s habit, a barrel of pickles, and a trained goose; these were his stories about the rescue, not six separate accounts the family could verify.

A historian tracing Żegota records located partial documentation when Saul was in his forties, allowing him to learn the names of the family who had sheltered him. In 1992, he made his only return trip to Poland to meet their surviving daughter. Saul signed, she spoke Polish, and her son interpreted. Annie saw her father cry for the first time during that encounter. Miri did not accompany him, having no wish to return to Poland. They stayed in touch through telephone calls with Annie signing and voicing for Saul in Poland and a U.S. TTY-relay operator connecting the call to Miri’s text telephone in Baltimore.

Resettlement and Adoption

After liberation, Saul spent time in a Jewish children’s home in Łódź and passed through Jewish agencies relocating orphaned survivors. The agencies’ limited capacity to communicate with a Deaf child complicated his placement. He was eventually matched with a distant surviving cousin of his birth mother who had emigrated to New York before the war. He arrived in the United States in 1948 at approximately three and a half, without a full language.

The name Saul had been given to him during the relief process, after a refugee worker’s father. His adoptive family gave him the surname Rosen, taken from his adoptive father’s mother’s family. His original birth name did not survive in the available records.

His adoptive parents were hearing Polish Jewish immigrants who had remained in America during the war but lost the people they knew in Poland. They were observant and emotionally closed. They gave Saul shelter, kosher food, a bedroom, a Hebrew name, and material security, but they did not know how to provide accessible language. He watched conversations in Polish, Yiddish, and English that he could not hear or follow. A social worker eventually connected the household with Fanwood, where he enrolled as a residential student at approximately five.

Saul retained a lifelong, largely private fury about the years of language deprivation alongside affection and gratitude for his adoptive family. Those years left lasting effects on his use of language, including a preference for concrete, embodied expression and a slight reticence with abstract vocabulary. When he discussed his early years with Annie, he held the family’s intentions and the cost to him together: “They didn’t know. They were good people. It cost me years.”

Education

Saul began attending the New York School for the Deaf, known as Fanwood, around 1949. He arrived without a full language and developed fluent ASL there, alongside a literate command of written English. He did not speak aloud or receive formal oralist training.

At school, Saul became a class clown and skilled signed storyteller. Teachers redirected some of his persistent mischief into theater, where he excelled at physical comedy. He also did well in shop class. In the 1958–1959 school year, he met Miri, who had transferred from Boston’s Horace Mann School at fourteen. He passed her a note combining written English and ASL glosses, asking to walk her to the dining hall. She agreed, and they continued those walks for the next four years. Their courtship continued through their 1962 graduation.

Saul did not attend college. His family could not afford Gallaudet, and he had committed to a trade. He entered a union-linked printing apprenticeship in New York in 1962, trained through 1966, and qualified as a journeyman printer before transferring his union card to Baltimore.

Career

Saul’s union transfer provided the reason for the couple’s 1966 move to Baltimore. His steady local employment and Miri’s tailor-shop work supported their household in Mt. Washington.

Saul worked in Baltimore’s union printing trades from 1966 until his retirement in 2010, a forty-four-year local career following his New York apprenticeship. He remained a retired member of the Baltimore Typographical Union and stayed in Mt. Washington after retiring.

He took pride in printing’s place within Deaf working life and in the close attention his trade required. Hand-set type, inked metal, galleys, presses, and the smell of ink, paper dust, and solvent were familiar parts of his work. Decades of type and press work strengthened his arms and left calluses and small scars on his hands that persisted after retirement. His broad, patient manual work contrasted with Miri’s quick seamstress’s hands; both trades remained apparent in how they handled objects and signed.

Personality

Saul used humor deliberately to resist being defined by loss. His mischief was sustained and socially attentive: filthy jokes at Shabbat, affectionate insults embedded in family nicknames, visual punchlines that nonsigning bystanders missed, and contradictory stories delivered with apparent conviction. He enjoyed hearing strangers’ assumptions that he was a harmless, sweet old Deaf man while the people following his signs knew exactly what he was saying. The neighborhood epithet “Saul the Menace” was one he cultivated; he remained unapologetic about his mischief and the space he took up.

His rescue stories became a recurring family joke. When six-year-old Lindsay believed his claim that he had been smuggled out of Warsaw inside a trained goose and repeated it at school, Saul was delighted. He told the same five stories from his youth in changing versions and refused to explain all his family nicknames to outsiders. The jokes gave his grandchildren a relationship with his history before they fully understood the scale of the loss behind it.

His humor coexisted with steady affection. Saul did not withhold love, disparage Miri in public or private, or answer a family member’s silence by withdrawing his own attention. He told Annie he loved her approximately eight thousand times across her life, including while she cried, slept, or ate dinner with him. His family’s needs, his community, and his refusal to leave people alone with difficulty were central motivations.

Annie understood his mischief as a response to inherited trauma and discussed it in her own therapy with affection as well as seriousness. Saul usually swallowed fear rather than displaying it. His concern about RJ’s faster progression through deafblindness was harder to contain; learning a new tactile language in old age became one practical response. With Miri, he could set aside his public performance and show grief that the rest of the family rarely saw.

Cultural Identity and Heritage

Saul identified as Polish Ashkenazi Jewish, American, and culturally Deaf. Jewish Deaf community life brought his language, religious practice, family history, and friendships together. In 1974, he helped found the Jewish Deaf Society of Baltimore. He attended signed Torah study for more than forty years, with other participants adapting their signing to his narrowing visual field as he aged.

His Reform observance continued the practice of his adoptive household. He also carried fragments of prewar Polish Jewish life through older relatives, Yiddish reading, a few Polish fragments, food, and remembrance. He read Yiddish learned from elder relatives during childhood, although ASL remained his face-to-face language.

Friday Shabbat dinner was nonnegotiable; Saul did not miss it for seventy-five consecutive years of married life. Miri lit the candles; Saul signed blessings over the wine and challah. He preferred signing the blessings to reading Hebrew text and said the signs felt older to him. The family kept the High Holidays, and Saul attended shul on Yom Kippur throughout adulthood. His annual attempts to fast, abandoned around two in the afternoon for challah, became another subject of Miri’s mock severity.

Saul observed an annual yahrzeit on the approximate anniversary of his rescue. He did not know the operation’s exact date or the name of the woman who had carried him, even after partial records identified the sheltering family. He lit a candle and signed the mourner’s kaddish for her alone in his kitchen for more than seventy years. His grandchildren learned the ritual by noticing it, without a formal explanation.

Speech and Communication Patterns

Saul had no usable residual hearing and did not speak aloud. ASL was his first full language, acquired at Fanwood rather than from infancy. He used fluent written English for written or typed exchanges and retained reading knowledge of Yiddish.

His signing combined Fanwood-era New York ASL, Baltimore regional usage, and expressions shared within his generation of Jewish Deaf signers. He signed rapidly and expansively, using his face, shoulders, chest, and upper body as well as his hands. His family described his rich storytelling rhythm as “Saul is telling a story, get comfortable.”

Signed humor was a particular strength. Saul substituted an unexpected sign at a sentence’s last beat, arranged jokes around an initial misreading that a later sign overturned, and enjoyed puns dependent on signed space rather than English wording. Lindsay, Leslie, and RJ grew up with this humor from infancy; some of their jokes did not carry into conversation with nonsigning peers.

With Miri, Saul slowed and reduced his signing space while she broadened her normally compact signs. Their private language accumulated family inventions, school references, and shorthand understood only by the two of them. Their phrase “we walked to the dining hall” could express daily accompaniment, love, endurance, or the fact that they were still together.

As Saul’s visual field narrowed, he asked people to sign more slowly, compactly, and directly in front of his face. He began learning Protactile in his eighties, later than Miri, and found being an inexperienced, slow student frustrating. He persisted so that conversations with RJ would not depend on another person mediating them. Protactile became his predominant form of communication in his nineties, and by his mid-nineties he and RJ were fluent partners.

Saul told Miri that learning Protactile at eighty was the hardest thing he had done since learning English alongside ASL at five, and that love had motivated him both times. His early tactile affection and hand-to-hand signing with his infant grandson preceded his later learning of Protactile.

Health and Disabilities

Conditions and Diagnoses

Saul was congenitally profoundly Deaf and had mild lifelong vestibular dysfunction.

Retinitis pigmentosa began affecting his night vision and peripheral field in his thirties. A Baltimore ophthalmologist diagnosed retinitis pigmentosa in the 1980s without connecting it to his Deafness. Saul was told it was “likely just RP, not uncommon, no known connection to your hearing.”

He adapted to the narrowing field for decades before the conditions were named together. The narrowing became more functionally significant through his fifties and sixties, and he had advanced tunnel vision by his seventies.

After RJ’s infant diagnosis in 2012, confirmatory genetic testing identified Saul’s USH1F Usher syndrome, associated with the family’s PCDH15 c.733C>T (p.Arg245Ter/R245X) variant. Miri’s clinically similar Type I Usher syndrome came from a different gene. Annie was an unaffected carrier at both loci; RJ inherited USH1F through Annie and Robbie.

Saul described the late explanation to Annie with a joke: “Seventy years I thought I was just unlucky twice. Turns out I was unlucky once. The rest was my grandson’s problem.” His amusement about his own diagnosis did not cancel his grief for RJ. He continued to identify as Deaf and never formally adopted deafblind as an identity, even when it described his later sensory condition.

Daily Management and Equipment

Saul’s balance adaptations included a slightly wide-legged gait and keeping his eyes open in the shower. A Deaf-culturally-competent physical therapist at Johns Hopkins taught him a morning orientation sequence in his seventies. He continued it each morning through the day of his death, with Miri signing to him as part of their shared routine.

He stopped driving in his sixties when night blindness became dangerous. Miri drove during the period when her remaining vision allowed it; her own Usher syndrome and progressive vision loss later required further changes. Saul used a white cane outdoors from his late seventies and began using it indoors after a kitchen fall at eighty-three.

Saul used a BrailleSense device for reading from his mid-eighties. Moving from a lifelong print-newspaper habit to refreshable braille was slow, and RJ helped him learn the remaining nuances. He wore no hearing aids because he had no usable residual hearing. A pager-style vibrating signaler provided household alerts for the doorbell, fire alarm, and family members seeking his attention.

The family’s home adaptations included predictable furniture placement, tactile wayfinding, adapted lighting, and visual and vibrating alerts. Saul used close-range visual signing, touch, braille, and increasingly Protactile as his needs changed; these methods did not remove his role in family decisions or his ability to initiate a conversation.

Medical History and Crises

Saul had a mild heart attack in 1998 at fifty-four. He recovered with stent placement and lifestyle changes, although he returned to his preferred corned beef after approximately six months. Miri’s initially anxious response to physical intimacy prompted him to tell her from his hospital bed, “I am your husband. I am not glass. Come here.” Their physical relationship resumed during his recovery.

He broke his hip in a bathroom fall in 2018 at seventy-four and recovered through rehabilitation, with Miri and Annie coordinating care. He underwent cataract surgery on both eyes in 2021, largely to reassure Annie and Robbie, but advanced retinal disease limited the improvement in his vision. He did not develop dementia or cancer.

Relationship to His Body

Saul treated Deafness as part of his language, culture, and ordinary embodied life. He did not accept hearing people’s romanticization of it, and he did not treat it as a defect that explained his worth. His balance differences were familiar; progressive retinal loss required repeated, less familiar accommodations.

He approached those changes pragmatically and with dark humor, expressing his response to another adjustment as “fine, we’ll adapt again.” His frustration with learning slowly and his continued willingness to learn existed together. His hands remained a source of work, comedy, intimacy, and competence as his signing slowed with age.

Saul grieved the loss of visual access to his grandchildren’s faces. In his final decade, he could no longer see them clearly across a table. Knowing them through their hands mattered to him, but it did not make the loss interchangeable or complete his adjustment. On hard evenings, he sat with his hand on Miri’s wrist and signed close to her face, “I miss their faces. Tell them I miss their faces.” He shared that grief only with her. Miri passed the message to the grandchildren, who carried it with them after his death.

His physical relationship with Miri remained affectionate and private across their marriage. Public hand-holding, arms around her waist in the kitchen, kisses before meals, and reaching for her hand during hospital stays were ordinary parts of it. The increasing importance of touch in communication continued a tactile closeness they had already shared.

Physical Characteristics

Saul was broad and compact, five feet seven inches at his tallest and approximately an inch shorter by his nineties. His compact build recurred across generations of his family. He was short-waisted and strong through his chest and shoulders even in old age. Printing had developed lasting muscle in his arms; his grandchildren ran their hands along them when they were small.

He had olive skin, like Annie, and thick dark hair that began graying in his forties and was entirely silver-white by his seventies. He kept it short and brushed back. His eyes were dark brown, a color shared with Annie and RJ. In later life, retinal disease gave his gaze a slightly unfocused quality that he did not try to conceal for other people’s comfort.

His face had a broad forehead, deep-set eyes beneath heavy brows, a prominent nose shared with Annie, his grandmother, and his great-grandmother, and a wide mouth that settled into a scowl at rest. He smiled frequently, and the expression changed his whole face rather than appearing as a small movement at his mouth. Deep laugh lines were evident by his fifties and became more pronounced as he aged.

His hands had broad palms, short, thick fingers, calluses, and small scars from hand-set type and press work. Their shape resembled Annie’s; the relationship was apparent in her handshapes and signing cadence. Saul could sign to one grandchild while tying another’s shoe without looking down or carry a pot of soup in his left hand while signing a joke with his right. These were practiced parts of daily life rather than demonstrations. His hands slowed in his nineties but remained active in communication.

Items and Personal Effects

Saul kept a small, battered tin tzedakah box from the Jewish Deaf Society of Baltimore on his kitchen counter over decades of adult life. Hand-painted silver lettering marked its lid. He dropped coins into it each Friday before Shabbat, and the money was counted and donated annually to the Society. The box accompanied him when he stayed with Annie and when he and Miri moved into their final suite.

He carried a slim silver pocket watch in his trouser pocket whenever he was not in pajamas. His adoptive father had given it to him as a Fanwood graduation gift in 1962, saying it had belonged to Saul’s biological paternal grandfather, a Warsaw watchmaker. Saul could not verify the story and chose to believe it. The watch had never worked during his lifetime, and he did not have it repaired; he said that a watch that had survived what it had survived did not owe anyone the time.

A yahrzeit candle holder inherited from his adoptive mother served his rescue-anniversary observance and the anniversaries of his adoptive parents’ deaths. He deliberately left accumulated wax around its rim rather than scraping it completely clean.

A photograph of his Polish rescuers’ surviving daughter, taken during the 1992 trip, stood on his dresser in a small, inexpensive wooden frame with dusty glass. He never discussed the photograph. He gave Annie a framed duplicate for her fortieth birthday, and she kept it in her home study.

Personal Style and Presentation

Saul wore dark work trousers, plain button-down shirts in navy, gray, or olive, and suspenders that he kept despite Annie’s campaigns against them. He preferred sturdy leather work shoes that could be resoled. For Shabbat, he sometimes wore a white shirt, a plain kippah, and, in later life, a wool blazer. His simple gold wedding band was his only ornamental jewelry.

His glasses became a familiar part of his appearance by his sixties. He shaved daily and used Old Spice aftershave consistently for seventy-five years. His grandchildren associated that scent with his hugs.

Georgie, a hearing Italian-American barber in Mt. Washington, cut Saul’s hair for fifty years. Georgie learned ASL in the 1980s to speak directly with Saul and other members of the community, and the two communicated in ASL. He remained devoted to the Rosen family.

Tastes and Preferences

Saul preferred corned beef to pastrami and defended the choice vigorously. He chose rye over other breads and seltzer over other beverages, and he favored the warm beet borscht with sour cream that his adoptive mother had made. He drank schnapps on high holidays and one beer on Friday nights. He did not drink coffee and detested tea, making an exception for hot water with a slice of lemon, which he regarded as barely tea.

Miri’s challah was his favorite food. Every Friday for seventy-five years, he told her without irony that the current loaf was the best she had ever made; she never corrected him. His loyalty to the Baltimore Orioles was similarly sustained; he followed televised games with closed captions through decades of losing seasons.

He enjoyed physical comedy, repeatedly watching Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin films and laughing at the same moments. In his fifties, he discovered The Golden Girls through captions and became particularly attached to Bea Arthur’s performance. His sense that she communicated directly to him did not depend on her actually signing.

Saul read Philip Roth’s entire bibliography in his fifties and sixties and held specific, vigorously defended objections to several books. He had no wish to become the subject of someone else’s literary work. He warned Annie against allowing a book about his life, although she had not been planning one.

Habits, Routines, and Daily Life

Saul’s mornings began with his vestibular orientation sequence and Miri’s company. He drank hot water with lemon from a chipped enamel mug brought from New York in 1966 and read the newspaper in the same chair, later using his BrailleSense there. He napped in the same recliner in the afternoon.

His week included twice-monthly signed Torah study through his eighties, Friday tzedakah and Shabbat preparations, Orioles games, and a weekly video-relay call with Morris, his surviving childhood friend from Fanwood, who remained in New York. Saul walked through Mt. Washington with his cane and greeted neighbors who knew him; many had learned enough ASL over the years to exchange a good morning.

He went to bed at approximately ten with Miri. Their twenty-minute conversation before sleep continued throughout their marriage, using close, compact signs and hand-to-hand or fingertip-to-wrist contact as light and vision required. The ritual was private even in a household full of family.

Miri normally ran the kitchen and domestic calendar. Saul vacuumed, did laundry, repaired things, took out the trash, and washed dishes after her meals. His limited cooking included scrambled eggs, which he made for Miri and Annie after Miri’s long disclosure of her rescue history in 1991.

Personal Philosophy or Beliefs

Saul’s expressed philosophy joined survival to ordinary pleasure and a refusal to surrender space. He told Annie: “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.”

Annie heard versions of this statement during her own crises, including a bleak period in doctoral training. She regarded his stance as one of the most sophisticated forms of Holocaust survivor resilience she had encountered in her clinical career but never told him, expecting that he would mock the formulation.

His religious life was less glib than the explanation he offered publicly. He used a private invented sign combining memory, continuation, and laughter for something he believed in but would not name more precisely. He maintained his candles, kaddish, and High Holiday observance, discussing their personal meaning only occasionally with Miri.

Family and Core Relationships

Annie Whitaker

Main article: Annie Whitaker and Her Parents

Annie, born in March 1978, was Saul and Miri’s only child. Saul wanted more children, but Miri’s difficult pregnancy and medical advice against another pregnancy ended those plans. He grieved the limitation privately and directed his parental attention toward Annie without making her responsible for the children they could not have.

Saul could not recall a particular reason for choosing Annette, but he insisted that she receive Miriam as her middle name to honor her mother. Within an hour of her birth, he declared her the best baby in Baltimore. He became her principal play parent and bedtime storyteller, signing folktales, adapted children’s books, invented stories, and accounts of his day. Annie remembered his hands in her bedroom lamplight decades later.

Saul teased Annie about her work, hair, wine, and overcommitment: “you get paid to listen?”, “you look like your mother at fourteen, except more tired”, “drink the good stuff, life is short”, and “stop fixing everyone, fix me a drink”. She experienced the affection beneath the jokes as dependable and continued to draw on it in her late sixties after his death. Losing him meant losing a primary source of safety. His steady availability coexisted with the childhood interpreting labor that hearing institutions placed on her.

Her 2033 stroke frightened him intensely. He waited with Robbie during the acute ICU period and said, “If she dies before me I will personally come back and haunt her. I am the one who is supposed to go first.” During her recovery, he stayed in her kitchen and kept signing jokes even when fatigue left her unable to laugh. Their slower conversations after his 2042 move into her home gave them time together that her earlier clinical schedule had often prevented.

Robbie Whitaker

Saul first met Robbie later in 2000, after Annie and Robbie had met that spring. His two-hour signed interrogation covered Robbie’s intentions, finances, family, Orioles loyalty, and views on intermarriage, despite Saul already knowing that Robbie was Jewish. Robbie later called it “the best and worst two hours of my life.”

Saul welcomed him to the table after the interrogation and immediately included him in family teasing. Robbie’s wish to keep up with his father-in-law’s mockery became one reason to learn ASL. Their later relationship included home adaptations, shared waiting during Annie’s stroke, and Robbie’s involvement in Saul and Miri’s final care.

Lindsay Whitaker and Leslie Whitaker

Saul could tell the identical twins apart from infancy, when most of the family still struggled to do so, and became particularly attentive to differences in their signing rhythms. He called Lindsay “the one with the laugh” and Leslie “the one with the stare”; both cherished their family epithets. He taught them signed swear words at four while telling Annie he was teaching Yiddish.

The twins shared ordinary family time, baking afternoons with Miri, school events, and humor with their grandparents. Saul’s expansive signed comedy continued in Lindsay’s humor and Leslie’s dry wit. They later joined Annie in signing his refrain to Miri at his hundredth birthday.

RJ Whitaker

RJ’s 2012 infant diagnosis named Saul’s condition and exposed the different genetic cause of Miri’s similar disability. Saul felt private grief about the speed of RJ’s vision loss. His relationship with RJ involved less teasing and more quiet tenderness than many of his other relationships.

When RJ was an infant, Saul spent hours holding and signing on his hands. RJ retained the security of this repeated presence without a conscious account of each early encounter. Saul’s later Protactile learning preserved direct conversation between them as RJ’s vision narrowed. Their shared condition connected them without making their medical courses identical.

Romantic and Significant Relationships

Miriam “Miri” Rosen

Main article: Saul and Miri Rosen

Saul and Miri met at fourteen and married in October 1965. Their first dining-hall walk at Fanwood became a private description of accompaniment repeated throughout their seventy-nine-year marriage. Saul proposed in June 1965 at a Washington Square park bench with a clumsily hand-forged gold ring and the written promise “marry me, I will not be funny about this”, although his intended solemnity gave way to laughter. He had saved printing wages for three years to afford the ring.

He did not disparage Miri or treat affection as something she had to earn. Their temperamental differences remained: his expansiveness and joking avoidance met her compact signing, patience, and direct requests. When new motherhood left Miri isolated in 1979, her request for his presence at night led him to suspend evening community meetings and stay home with her and Annie.

He repeatedly signed to Miri, “You are the reason I’m funny. Without you none of it lands.” She was also the person to whom he admitted missing the grandchildren’s faces. They continued mutual care through his heart attack and broken hip, both partners’ vision loss, the move into Annie’s home, and their final years.

Personal Life

Residences

Main article: Whitaker-Rosen Family Home

Saul and Miri lived in their Mt. Washington rowhouse from 1966 to 2042. The modest house had three bedrooms, one bathroom, a narrow galley kitchen, and a small fenced backyard. Robbie adapted it in stages between 2005 and 2035 for the couple’s changing access needs.

In 2042, they moved two blocks into a first-floor suite at Annie and Robbie’s home. Saul resisted the move for approximately three years before agreeing. The suite, planned in consultation with both parents, had tactile wayfinding, lighting for residual vision, an attached kitchen for Miri’s baking, and a sitting room large enough for family Shabbat dinners. They lived there for the final two years of their lives.

Social Life and Community

Saul remained closely connected to Mt. Washington neighbors, deli staff, the Jewish Deaf Society, Georgie, and Morris. He ordered the same corned beef sandwich at Grossman’s Deli from 1966 onward and made the waitstaff laugh. Many hearing neighbors learned his signed greetings over decades. He insisted on walking to his hundredth birthday party.

A 1992 Baltimore Sun profile about Holocaust child survivors’ return trips included a brief interview with Saul. He supplied two contradictory versions of his rescue story during it. Miri declined an interview. The family kept the article without making publicity an ongoing part of their lives.

Death, Legacy, and Memory

Saul died in his sleep on a Tuesday morning in October 2044, at one hundred, in the Whitaker-Rosen home’s first-floor suite. Hours earlier, a filthy signed joke made Miri laugh loudly enough that their home-aide nurse came to check on her. Both were laughing. Saul fell asleep approximately four hours later and died about an hour after that. Miri remained with her hand on his chest before telling the nurse he had finished and she was ready. Annie was present during his final hours.

Miri remained with the family for approximately thirty-six hours and then died in her sleep while holding Saul’s pocket watch. Her physician presumed acute grief-related cardiac failure consistent with takotsubo cardiomyopathy. The family’s description of her death as love expressed their understanding of the loss rather than a separate medical finding.

The Jewish Deaf Society of Baltimore held a joint memorial in its community room. Approximately three hundred people attended, including hearing neighbors; the service used ASL with voicing interpretation, and the eulogies lasted three hours. Family members and friends laughed, cried, and signed Saul’s jokes toward his closed coffin. His grandchildren answered his annual threat to sign something worse at the funeral by doing so themselves.

Saul cared less about legacy as an abstraction than about his grandchildren knowing him and what his family had lost and retained. He repeatedly told them about Fanwood, Miri, his rescue, the pocket watch, and the 1992 encounter. His humor continued in the twins, his tactile tenderness in RJ, and his philosophy and steady care in Annie’s work and family life.

Annie lit a yahrzeit candle on the anniversary of his death, and her children continued the practice after her own death. The Rosens’ rowhouse passed to her and continued in use as accessible guest housing for the Society. A joint photograph of Saul and Miri hung in the Society’s community room with a brass plaque reading “We walked to the dining hall.” The phrase continued in family relationships and in Annie’s clinical conversations for decades.

Memorable Quotes

“The Nazis didn’t get to decide. They tried. They failed. Everything after that is extra.” (Signed to Annie during a bleak period in her doctoral training; she copied it into her journal and kept the page.)

“You are the reason I’m funny. Without you none of it lands.” (Signed repeatedly to Miri; Annie and the twins signed the refrain together at his hundredth birthday.)

“I miss their faces. Tell them I miss their faces.” (Signed privately to Miri in his late nineties as his vision narrowed; she passed it to the grandchildren.)

“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.” (His recurring birthday declaration, answered by his grandchildren at his memorial.)

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