Sofiya, Sofie, Sofa, Sophia. They took her name and twisted it every which way, until she decided for herself and it became Sofia. She is eighteen years old and no longer the new girl.
Two years ago, when Sofia Normatov first came from Russia, she was the new girl, and she was new again last year, when she first entered the high school. In between she attended Lexington’s foreign language transition class, and on official school documents from that year, written in various sets of authoritative ink, her name, transliterated from the Cyrillic alphabet, appears in a full array of spellings, as if evidence of her transitional state.
At home her parents persist in calling her Sofa, which she is loath to have any of her school friends discover because then, surely, her name-sign will become couch. So she chooses S-O-F-I-A, which is so deliciously fingerspelled—rapidly, it’s a blur of fingers unfurling from fist to flare to fist again—that she needs no name-sign.
“Get Sofia,” her friends call across the lunch table, their fists springing open and shut. Someone tugs her sleeve and she looks up from a forkful of lettuce. “You want to go to Pat and Joe’s and get an ice cream after school?” Sofia grimaces apologetically at her salad (she keeps thinking she has started a diet), then nods.
“Sure. If I can get Sheema to cover the store,” she amends. This year Sofia is the comanager of the school store, as well as being on the volleyball team, the mock trial team, and the staff of the yearbook. But after school today she goes tramping off to Pat and Joe’s with a bunch of schoolmates and fishes deep in the freezer case for an ice cream sandwich. The deli is full of Lex kids, buying soda and chips and gum, the ones with better speech acting as interpreters for the countermen and the cashier, kids signing to each other across the store, lending nickels and swapping candy bars. It feels so good finally to be in.
This is what Sofia yearned for during her year in the foreign language transition class. Everything seemed awkward and impossible then: learning English, learning how to pronounce things the American way, learning American Sign Language. The latter occurred mostly in the lunchroom, in the halls, on the school bus, in gym, and it was these encounters that decided her so firmly: she must move into the regular high school as soon as possible. The locker room exchanges, the study hall brushes with other students, both fueled and frustrated her. Her world was spinning, and she required ASL for traction; she needed to share the other students’ language and enter their culture. So with a pure, sweet mulishness that would become her trademark, Sofia began to push for a transfer.
The foreign language transition class was formed in 1984 in response to the increasing number of immigrants who were applying for admission to the school. As New York City’s population swelled with Caribbeans, Central and South Americans, Asians, Africans, and Eastern Europeans, so did Lexington’s. And while the public schools could funnel these students into bilingual classes or English-as-a-second-language programs, Lexington faced a more complex task. Many of the students’ home countries had no schools for the deaf. Some students had been schooled with mentally retarded children; some had never been schooled, never seen another deaf person, never worn a hearing aid. Some came knowing a few home-signs or invented gestures; others had no language system at all, signed, spoken, or written.
When Sofia entered Lexington in November 1989, the school had one foreign language transition class; two years later it had four. Lexington currently has first-generation students from thirty-four different countries. The languages of their families include Portuguese and Cantonese, Urdu and Arabic, Farsi and Tagalog. The languages of the school are English and sign. The languages of the students are mixtures, or fragments thereof, or absent altogether.
Sofia enrolled at Lexington after spending eight years in a residential school for the deaf in Leningrad, where she became fluent in Russian and developed excellent oral skills. With a strong base in a first language, she learned English far more quickly than those of her classmates who had never been to school. And while sign languages are no more universal than spoken languages (in fact, British Sign Language is distinct from ASL), Sofia’s fluency in Russian Sign Language helped her to acquire a second sign language more easily as well. With these advantages, she was able to get herself switched into the regular high school by the following September. Her transition was successful in every way except one: she had to leave her little sister behind.
Sofia has two grown-up sisters, Adalina and Nadezhda (or Ada and Nellie, as they are called in the States), who are nearer her own age than Irina, seven years her junior. But it is Irina with whom she is closest, for Irina is also deaf. With disorderly hair forever liberating itself from the constraints of band and barrette and huge glasses magnifying and distorting clever brown eyes, Irina is the quintessential little sister—wheedling and obstinate, admiring and jealous, irrepressible and lovable.
The job of rearing Irina has been largely foisted onto Sofia, who, as a deaf person, is expected to discipline, tutor, and care for her little sister. With her good Russian oral skills, she is also expected to act as the interpreter between her Russian-speaking family and Irina, who has come to rely more on English and ASL. When both sisters entered the single foreign language transition class two years ago, Sofia felt stifled by the rather too close quarters. But from her vantage point in the high school, a different sort of burden now nags at Sofia: Irina has yet to transfer into regular classes.
“Hey, bubs, what are the hearing aids doing on your desk?” Margie Weissman circles in front of eleven-year-old Irina and leans on her desk. This teacher believes in audition. She has a solid, belting voice and almost never signs.
Irina launches into an energetic excuse, her lopsided ponytail galloping crookedly behind her. Her voice, all deep breathy rushes and warbly Russian trills, sounds like wind and water.
“What?” Margie squints, her glasses slipping until they straddle the round tip of her nose. “I can’t understand you. Put ’em on,” she directs, and Irina twists the molds into her ears and hooks the beige receivers behind them.
Beside her, Irina’s classmate Walkiria has brought the voltage tester to her desk to check her hearing aids. She slips the round batteries, no bigger than grapefruit seeds, from her aids and holds them one at a time to a metal plate on the face of the small black box. Behind a little window, a needle springs to the right—good—and a second time—good also. Walkiria replaces the batteries, puts on her aids, and shoves the voltage tester onto Gianina’s desk. They are both from the Dominican Republic.
Next to Gianina, Tericha waves for Margie’s attention, then begins a question in a timid pastiche of gesture and sound. She is from Jamaica and the newest member of the class. Margie shakes back her blunt reddish hair and frowns in concentration. “You need a new battery?” she guesses. She knows that Tericha, who has no aids of her own, has been using a pair of Lexington loaners that work only sporadically. “Where’s the tester? Wait for Gianina, she has the tester.” But that’s not what Tericha meant, and she tries again, pointing to her ear and then to her lap. “Oh, you want the group aid!” cries Margie. “Yes, me too, we’re waiting for that.”
The four girls in this foreign language transition class have all recently had ear mold impressions taken. From these, new aids are being made to fit a group system. When it comes, Margie will wear a wireless microphone; the children will have FM receivers, two each, worn in little harnesses around their waists and wired to their hearing aids. The receivers, tuned to Margie’s microphone, will ensure that the signal of her voice remains constant no matter where she walks in the room; they will also diminish background noise.
A month ago such wizardry was beyond Tericha’s ken. She was living with her grandmother in Jamaica and had never attended school in all her ten years of life. Tericha is not technically a foreign language transition student, since her parents’ native language is English. She might more aptly be called a no language transition student, except that already, after only a few weeks of school, language, or the seeds of it, is visibly straining within her willowy body, tested surreptitiously on shy lips, strung together gingerly on long fingers, soaking into her brilliant dark eyes.
Irina and Walkiria, the class veterans, each having been here for two years, are far less taken with the notion of wearing group aids—having those bulky, chunky boxes hitched to their hips with institutional-looking nylon straps. At eleven and twelve years old, they fancy themselves boycatchers and value certain standards of appearance. Margie has struck a bargain with them: if they wear the group aids in class, they may switch to the less obtrusive, behind-the-ear model on excursions to the library, cafeteria, art room, and gym.
This morning, still without the group system, Margie tests the girls individually. Covering her mouth with a sheet of loose-leaf paper, she addresses each one in a loud voice: “Good morning! Hello! How are you today?” “Are you down?” she bellows when one doesn’t respond. “Are you on? Hello! Hello!” When they do answer her back, she offers modifications. “Do me a favor,” she says, touching her throat. “Down a little, lower . . . lower the pitch . . . yes! How pretty! What a pretty voice!”
Nearly everything in the classroom is fodder for instruction. Room 2-217 is sometimes known as the zoo, since tanks of fish and turtles and hamsters and snakes claim every available countertop. When the smell gets dreadful, Margie pours lemon juice on paper towels and disperses these impromptu sachets around the room. The students don’t complain; they are fascinated with the animals, especially the snakes. Margie has told them that snakes are deaf.
“What happened yesterday with the larger snake?” she is asking. “What’s snake?” she calls to the Spanish-speaking aide who is sorting arts-and-crafts projects in the back of the room.
“La serpiente.”
“La serpiente. What happened with la serpiente?” Margie adds for the benefit of Walkiria and Gianina.
“The snake was sick —” Irina begins to sign, eyes grave behind her glasses with their childish red plastic frames.
“You don’t need to sign to me. Stop. I don’t understand that.” Margie screws her eyes shut and averts her face. Sometimes when hearing teachers say, “I don’t understand you,” they mean just that; other times they mean “I’m ignoring you until you use your voice.” This one obviously means the latter. Irina shrugs philosophically and commences chewing on the collar of her turtleneck.
Walkiria stands and imitates the snake, thrashing and flailing in a little break dance. Rhinestone studs on her jeans catch the light and sparkle.
“What is that?” demands Margie. “Give me some language.”
And gradually they do come up with English for their thoughts: “strange behavior,” “sick,” “spilled the water dish.” Margie, standing by an easel, wields a felt-tipped pen, ready to catch all the vocabulary they can muster and transfer it to paper. All day she will do this, whether as part of a lesson or not; she will write their words for them to see.
Even their snack, delivered mid-morning on a cafeteria tray, becomes a lesson in similes. “This muffin is like a rock,” Margie proclaims, and transcribes her sentence on the board. “Like a rock,” she repeats. She holds the wooden pointer to her chin while her pink lips open and shut, then uses it to tap the extremely solid baked good. The students study her, then bang their dry sesame seed muffins observantly against the desks.
Throughout the day, scores of words appear in colored marker across the walls, labeling, linking, connecting life to language. Pens dry up and are traded. Every few minutes more words are inscribed, some flanked by their Spanish and Russian equivalents, for a key element of the program is maintaining and improving the child’s home language while teaching her English. The first language becomes a scaffold from which to build the second; the two develop in tandem, weaving a bridge between family and school. In the classroom, words overlap and tangle as the faded confetti of yesterday’s vocabulary, half erased, lingers across the board.
In the Soviet Union, the Normatovs lived in Samarkand, a city in south-central Asia near the Black Sea. Bukharan Jews, they spoke a dialect of Farsi as well as Russian, and many of their customs had a Middle Eastern flavor. They were well-off. Mr. Normatov did bookkeeping for a department store. Mrs. Normatov obtained clothes and jewelry from non-Soviet countries and sold them in private transactions from their home.
They lived in a huge one-story house behind a white clay wall, with a vegetable garden and trees that produced apples, pears, cherries, and apricots. The walls and high ceiling of their living room were hand-painted with elaborate designs and Stars of David. They held parties with musicians and belly dancers and many dozens of guests spilling from the living room into the stone courtyard. During the summers the family slept on cots in this courtyard, and above them the stars shone through the grape arbor.
When Sofia was three, her parents sent her to School Number Twenty, an oral school for the deaf in Leningrad, so that she would learn to speak. Eight hours away by plane, Leningrad was so far north that on clear days Sofia could stand at the edge of the Baltic Sea and make out the vast gray shape of the Finnish coast. Sofia, and later Irina, lived most of their lives there, apart from the family, returning home only during the summers. School was their world, deafness their culture.
Early in the spring of 1989, Iluysha and Ister Normatov and their four daughters left behind their family and friends and their large house with the living room frescoes. They left behind their chickens and dog and vegetable garden and much of their china and many of their clothes. With the government-allotted sixty rubles per person, no English, and two diamonds (one smuggled in a suitcase lining, the other in Mrs. Normatov’s back molar), they flew first to Austria, then to Italy, and after three months were permitted to pass on to their final destination, the United States, a country where they could practice Judaism publicly, with a rabbi in a synagogue, rather than covertly, behind their white clay wall.
One of the biggest differences they found in their new home, a modest apartment in Rego Park, Queens, was that it was only three subway stops away from the Lexington School for the Deaf. In addition to adjusting to a new country, the Normatovs had to adjust to having the deaf family members stay with them not for a summer holiday but permanently.
Even the flat white cardboard box containing the few photographs they brought with them from Samarkand bore testimony to the separateness of the two youngest children’s lives. Picture after picture chronicled birth and death, wedding and holiday, years of family gatherings from which the deaf girls were absent. Except for an occasional school photo, showing them in uniform, with their red Pioneer neckerchiefs and tin Lenin badges, they were virtually unaccounted for.
Now, just as the Normatovs moved their religion from behind the wall, so Sofia and Irina emerged. In Rego Park they were no longer in someone else’s hands, with their lives taking place eight hours away, on the edge of the Baltic Sea. They were directly within view, slightly alien blood relatives.
Across the hall from Irina’s classroom, the older foreign language transition students are counting lollipops. Synthetic cobwebs sag across the doorway. Glitter, spilled and trodden into the carpet, winks from the floor like mica. Neatly printed on oaktag and taped on the wall of cabinets are the words WITCH, APPLE, JACK-O’-LANTERN, OCTOBER, BROOM, GHOST, CANDIES, PUMPKIN, MOON. This afternoon the students will host a Halloween party for the younger children.
This is Sofia’s former class. The students range from eighteen to twenty-one years old. They have not much longer to remain in school; after age twenty-one, the state will not pay for them to attend. Some of them know they will never make the transition into the regular high school. They must gather what they can here, in this class: it will be all they take with them when they leave.
Right now the candy-sorting has halted because Jerry, a quiet young man from Haiti, has become intent on ascertaining the French word for lollipop. He thinks he remembers a word, a loose assemblage of syllables, and he tries these out in a low, reedy voice, but the teacher, Marcy Rosenbaum, shakes her head helplessly. So he attempts to fingerspell it, but at this Marcy squints with effort and pleads, “Slower.”
Jerry sighs. Sweet-natured, he is shaped like a string bean with a neat round head.
“Put your glasses on,” advises Angel impatiently, thumping his desk to get Marcy’s attention. He is less sweet-natured, and frequently indulges in rude ASL diatribes he knows his teacher can’t understand. Since emigrating from the Dominican Republic, he has picked up ASL far quicker than English, which is meted out in wrenchingly tedious doses and confounded by misunderstandings that often result in Angel’s lowering his head to his desk and refusing to look up.
Obligingly, Marcy slides down the glasses wedged on top of her cropped brown hair, but she still can’t make out the word, so now Jerry rises, goes to the board, and writes out the letters he remembers, SUCEC, before giving up and diving for the battered French-English dictionary in his knapsack. By now the Dominican and Mexican students want to know their word for lollipop, too. Maria Joya, the Spanishspeaking aide, writes PALETA on the board. A visiting Russian-speaking aide adds LEDENETS to the list. At last Jerry fills in SUCETTE and the class resumes counting out lollipops and mini Nestlé crunch bars.
The students make these forays to the board all day long, whenever they are struck by the need to know something. If their teacher can understand neither their speech nor their signs, they resort to the board as an alternative mode of communication. Now Angel, studying a painted witch replete with glitter-encrusted warts who is hanging on the wall, goes to the chalkboard and writes WATCH, WATCHATION. He summons Marcy for her opinion.
She studies the board with her hands on her hips. “Maybe you mean vacation?” she suggests. Angel, with great irritation, jabs a finger toward the witch decoration. “Oh. No, that’s a different word,” Marcy tells him. “Look: watch, witch.” She emphasizes the movement of her mouth so that he can apprehend the distinction between the two vowels.
This prompts Angel hurriedly to write WOTCH on the board. He whips his head around to the teacher.
“Yes, you’re thinking of the different vowels. You have a good idea, but that’s not a word,” Marcy tells him.
Angel underlines WOTCH and nods, adamant.
“No, that’s not a word,” the teacher repeats.
“I think yes in Spanish,” he persists.
“No, no, that’s not Spanish.”
“Russian, I think,” Angel amends.
Marcy chuckles and shakes her head.
“Or French?” Angel stares at the word, his mouth slightly open. Marcy is already on her way to help another student.
While Jerry is loading film in the Polaroid camera and Miguel and Jose are propping up the beanbag toss with a broomstick and masking tape, Francisco suddenly wants to know if Halloween is a religious holiday. The oldest member of the class, at twenty-one, he came from Mexico less than two years ago and must graduate this June. Strong and squarely built, he keeps his mouth in a constant firm line, tight dimples pressed in at either end.
“Religious?” he asks the teacher, using the correct ASL sign.
“I don’t know what you are saying,” she tells him.
“Religious?” he repeats, this time tentatively, less certain that he has remembered the sign accurately.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know that sign.”
He tries to fingerspell it. “R-E-G-I-L-A-R-Y.”
Marcy chews the inside of her cheek, then flashes Francisco a tiny, defeated smile.
“I think he’s saying ‘regular.’ No?” Maria, the aide, has wandered up behind Marcy. Both Marcy and Maria are taking sign language courses at Lexington during the school day. Last spring, after 127 years of being a famous oral school for the deaf, Lexington began requiring all teaching staff who are not proficient in sign language to start taking classes. But for now, neither of them can comprehend Francisco. He shakes his head, dimples set in resignation. Marcy crinkles her eyes in an apologetic smile. The question goes unanswered.
Marcy Rosenbaum became a teacher of the deaf in the days of oral supremacy. Like Margie Weissman, she believes in speech and auditory training in the classroom. She is convinced that oral communication is the route to success, and it bothers her that so much attention has lately been directed to sign language and deaf pride. She agrees that these things should be given a place at Lexington, but not to the detriment of teaching English literacy, or, as she puts it, advancing the goal of “approaching the hearing population.”
A half-hour before lunch, Marcy gives her students free time. They gravitate to the board, vying for a piece of chalk. The beanbags have given rise to a discussion about beans, only no one can think of a word for bean and they all have different signs for it. Francisco and Angel each manipulate chalk over a patch of board, drawing pinto beans and lima beans, snap beans and kidney beans, and this triggers in Jerry the memory of a French word, HARICOT, and Miguel comes up with FRIJOLES. Then Angel acts out peeling and crying, and Francisco triumphantly scrawls OINON on the board, and Jose knows the sign for it: a knuckle twisted at the eye. Chalk clicks furiously as the clock ticks on toward lunch. This is their vehicle; with a piece of chalk they can make themselves heard, and they continue practicing the art of conversation among themselves until the bell rings.
Sofia and her friends come out of Pat and Joe’s, biting gingerly into their ice cream, and cross Thirty-first Avenue to join the milling crowds of Lexington kids waiting for the public bus. With their student passes, the mile to the Roosevelt Avenue subway is a free ride. The sky hangs low and white, like cotton batting. Leaves in sodden heaps clog the gutters. The afternoon has turned damp and cold; the ice cream thrills dizzily through their teeth. Three stooped women wearing raincoats and clutching shopping bags wait for the bus as well. They eye the signing students with wary curiosity.
Across Seventy-fifth Street, a crotchety homeowner steps out on his veranda to glare at a cluster of Lexington students chatting on the street comer. “Move along!” he tells them, padding halfway down his steps in worn leather slippers. “Don’t stand there!” The students regard him blandly, watch his lips flap unintelligibly and his face grow livid. After a moment they lose interest and resume their conversation.
Sofia feels rain on her face. She glances at the sky, which seems to have sunk even lower, and peers along the avenue for the bus. Then she is caught up again in the activity and talk, all the movements boiling up around her as students relate opinions and gossip while their audiences press close and jockey for clear sight lines. The signing is fast and spicy and physical, with no apologies to the three women in raincoats or the man across the street. One of the students wears a T-shirt he bought at the school store; across the chest it reads “Deaf Pride.”
When Sofia first came to Lexington, she didn’t know her transition would be two-tiered. She managed to speed out of the foreign language transition class in only eight months, substantially less than the average duration of three years. By September 1990 she was an ebullient fledgling American, eager to merge with the rest of the high school sophomore class. And it was here that she encountered the second tier, the part that now allows her to stand boldly on the corner, blinking her lashes against the spattering rain, signing with friends in plain view of the world.
Here she encountered the deaf studies class. The course comprised a variety of subjects, from the history and grammar of ASL to the physiology of the inner ear, from technological developments in devices for the deaf to the students’ personal identities as members of the deaf community. In Russia there had been nothing like it—no talk of deaf studies, deaf culture, deaf pride.
The teacher, Donald Galloway, had created the course at Lexington only four years earlier. He had a wide-open pink face and a ready, gurgling laugh. He was the first deaf teacher Sofia had ever had. He asked the students to keep journals.
Sofia bought a wide-ruled, spiral-bound notebook. In this journal, with the involuntary poetry of one who is not fluent in the language, she recorded her explorations of deafness. Here, in this slim turquoise book, remnants of her journey into herself are preserved. “Who am I?” reads her final entry.
I found out that who I am.
I am Deaf and Jewish girl.
I learned a lot about deaf culture and deaf’s language. Before Deaf Studies I was negative that I am Deaf because I grew up in Russia. In Russia for deaf people didn’t have ability to successful of their goal. Also no technology for Deaf people. That why I thought always I was negative.
After Deaf Studies I learned a lot. In U.S.A. had tty, closed captioned and technology for deaf. Many deaf people has ability to be successful their goal or dream. Now, I am proud of me and everybody who are deaf. Also has club, college, universitet and good school, community for Deaf. I can do anything what I want.
My favorite issue or sentense:
“Deaf can do it except hear.”
On the corner of Thirty-first Avenue and Seventy-fifth Street, the autumn rain is falling in earnest, and the students lift the backs of their jackets up over their heads like so many turtles. The rain is cold. It strikes an old bed frame and box spring that have been dragged to the curb for removal, drenches mashed cigarette boxes, and twists, oily, into the gutter. Sofia remembers the warm, pungent rains of Samarkand, her first home.
She is keeping them straight, her separate lives, as she moves between countries, as she moves between her hearing family and her deaf community. She is piecing them together from what has been available, from what she can gather: a family photograph in which she does not appear, the five American spellings of her name, the stories she has written in her turquoise notebook.
As cool water mats her hair and trickles down her socks, she huddles with the others, glad to be in America amid the strong deaf. “I miss my Samarkand rain,” she signs to a friend, but her smile is not wistful. Just now, down the avenue, the bus is coming into view.