Solomon Schechter

I ponder the core influencers of my life. The death of my father, my marriage to Jo, the birth of my children and confronting Jacob’s developmental challenges immediately come to the fore.

But as I reflect, I increasingly focus on my own learning challenges as a central framing element in my life. It wasn’t until graduate school, when I chanced to read an article in the New York Times on the linkage between dyslexia and auto immune diseases that the pieces fell into place. Two years earlier, I had been diagnosed with idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) an auto immune blood disease that caused my platelet count to drop to a tenth of its normal range . As I read the article, all the pieces began to fall into place. In articulating the symptoms of dyslexia, the author was describing me; my childhood learning challenges, an inability to decode written words; reversing letters; disastrous, undecipherable handwriting and most profoundly of all, a complete inability to spell even simple words – a characteristic that remains with me until this day.

I think back to Mr. Gladstone’s third grade Hebrew Class at the Solomon Schechter School. He was kind and gentle and, in order to spare me the embarrassment of my inability to keep up, he set me aside and gave me the menial task of cutting strips of paper. Even as a third grader I knew this was wrong. He had given up on me and deemed that I was incapable of learning. And I understood that message.

My struggles with Hebrew and other subjects continued and I was a consistent failure in my Solomon Schechter classes. At a young age I accepted my status as a failure and a fool. I remember one fifth grade evening, determined to do best and really try I worked for hours on assigned Hebrew essay. The following day Mr. Chorovsky read my paragraph out loud – and laughed while he derided it in front of the class. I never tried again. That memory lingers in my consciousness and as I retell it, the feeling of embarrassment wells up. It is not a distant memory but a present sense of pain and anger.

These memories of frustration and embarrassment come cascading forth. Mr. Katzir telling my mother, as I stood watching, that I shouldn’t take the New York Statewide Hebrew Regents examination. I would fail and my failure would be a negative reflection on the school. My mother’s response “He needs to learn to fail”. I so distinctly remember being heartbroken by my mother’s response. She saw no hope either. Mom, with all do respect, fuck you. How about “Let’s figure out a way to succeed”. I took the test. And got a 95%. Fuck you Mr. Katzir.

A friend of mine talks of being in the “C” group in a prestigious private school in Baltimore. The “C” group was just what it sounded to be – third tier students who had been tagged and labeled with low expectations. As a perennial “C” group student at Solomon Schechter School I fully related to his experience (having graduated from Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University Law School my friend is now a highly successful attorney in Baltimore). To this day I get flushed and feel a profound sense of failure, of embarrassment of being in the “C” group when I misspell a word in a work document, mispronounce a word when reading out loud or get caught in a malapropism. That sense of embarrassment quickly transitions to a burning anger.

While my dyslexic and ADHD-based limitations and failures were framing my life, there was always a subtle but unidentifiable counter force in the background. A second set of incongruous clues that seemed not to make sense in the context of my daily frustrations began to emerge. One day in seventh grade, the abominable Mr. Katzir announced that he had a headache and left our class alone for an hour. As consciences and thoughtful students in a Jewish day school, we did what any thoughtful group of pre-teens would do in that situation – we rifled through his desk, discovered his record book and perused its pages. In it we found a listing of the IQ’s of each member of the class. Janet’s IQ topped the charts at 160. That was an eye popper. But, strangely enough, incomprehensively, mine was among the highest in the class. It was, in fact, higher than many successful students in the de-facto A group and higher than those who were perennial favorites of the teachers.

Our study of the Bible in the Solomon Schechter School began in third grade. If learning Hebrew was difficult for me that learning to read the bible in that alien language was exponentially more difficult. It wasn’t pretty. The standard for accessing our biblical knowledge was the “Me amar Le me” (who said to who) question. We were given a line from the biblical text and had to recall which biblical figure had said it and to whom. As an example, the text “'Wilt Thou indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” would be written on the exam (in Hebrew) and we would be required to remember that it was Abraham speaking with God in Genesis; negotiating for the salvation of the occupants of Sodom. With profound challenges in reading, decoding and consequently, memorizing, Hebrew text, these test were among the low points of my academic life and a regular confirmation of my incapacities.

But one day in seventh grade, Rabbi Alex Kaplan, the school principal, came to speak to our class. He asked us a puzzling question:

“In the story of creation, God created light on the first day but did not create the sun and the moon until the fourth. How is that possible?”
As always, the A group students were the first to respond”
“Perhaps God created fireflies”
“Maybe the rocks glowed”.

Rabbi Kaplan nodded and graciously accepted these answers.

Risking embarrassment and the furthering of my humiliation in the classroom (can I possibly be reduced below C group status) I raised hand and ventured:

“Maybe the light represents knowledge and wisdom”.

Rabbi Kaplan smiled with gentleness and warmth. It was a spark of success, a moment of accomplishment in a decade of frustration and failure. But in that moment, I had a fleeting sense that I possessed a level of understanding that was of value. I had no capacity to comprehend what it meant but I instinctively knew that it was important. In retrospect, I now understand that I possessed a symbolic capacity that many of my classmates lacked. I understood the meaning of “light” as a metaphor. But symbols and meaning were not the currency of academic success in grade school or, for that matter, in high school. Me amar l’me”. What can you remember? What can you spell? “What can you repeat?” I could do none of these.

Still can’t

Dyslexia Part One

There are a number of jokes about dyslexia:

“The dyslexic “First Church of Dog” and other dog/god related ditties.

How does it change many dyslexics to take a light-bulb?

The dyslexic was thrown out of the restaurant for spitting in the tips jar

My favorite happens to be: “Did you hear about the paranoid dyslexic? He kept on having this eerie feeling that he was following someone”. I see myself in that joke, and am drawn to its existential undertones. “I am dyslexic. What if I have spent my entire life following the wrong people?”

With the help of spell check I now get to use words like weltenstaang and schadenfreude with impunity. I get to use the word impunity. Chances are I even have a vague sense of what these words mean. And, to my great credit, there are even occasions when I use these words in the proper context: “I get a most pleasant feeling of schadenfreude when I observe others falling into open manholes." One could say that schadenfreude is part of my weltanschauung.”

When I am away from my precious laptop and forced to soldier on with paper and pen or when my penchant for verbosity exceeds the capacity of Mircosoft Word’s spell check, my disability becomes far more evident and pronounced. I will change sentences to avoid using certain words. “He was in excruciating abdominal pain” becomes “his tummy hurt”. “He was overcome with a profound anxiety which bordered on a more global and undefined angst” becomes “He was really, really scared. I mean really scared”. This would not be a problem if I was writing children’s books or for the “New York Daily News”.