Stuttering: A Life Bound Up In Words"

An Errant Elbow/An Act of God
                          by Marty Jezer

     There was no thought of me skipping my Bar Mitzvah. All my
friends were being Bar Mitzvahed. Saturday after Saturday during
my thirteenth year, I would get dressed up in an itchy woolen
suit and go to the temple to listen to my friends read from the
torah and, according to Jewish custom, become a man. I didn't
feel like a man and didn't believe that going through this ritual
would transform me into one. I was self-conscious about my egg-
shaped head, and my flat-top haircut made my big teeth and over-
sized ears more noticeable. And, of course, I stuttered. How was
I going to stand up in the temple and recite the required
prayers?

     A part of me wanted to skip my Bar Mitzvah. Call in sick.
Break a leg. Get hit by a car. Hope the Russians drop an atomic
bomb. But had I chosen to skip my Bar Mitzvah, what excuse could
I give? It was one thing to "play sick" with a phony stomach ache
in order to avoid giving an oral report in class, but to beg off
a Bar Mitzvah....how could I explain that to my friends? To
confess that because of my stuttering I couldn't take part in the
most important ritual of a Jewish boy's life was to admit to
stuttering's power. It was one thing to stutter in front of my
friends. I did that all the time and they didn't seem to care.
But to acknowledge my disfluency, give it a name, and concede
that it was affecting my life: that, more than my actual
stuttering, was something I could not bear.

     But it was not just peer pressure that kept me riveted to my
Bar Mitzvah date. I sensed that there was more than tradition at
stake in my going through that ancient ritual. My family was
never much for going to shul. My father, as I've said, rebelled
against the ultra-orthodoxy of his rabbi father and had chosen to
make his mark in the secular world. We went to shul only for the
highest of high holy days and, then, always late, arriving just
before the rabbi's sermon but after the actual prayer service was
halfway done. So it was social conceit rather than religious
observance that had my family so enthusiastic about the impending
event. My father was proud of his life. His was the classic
success story of a second-generation New York Jew. Born poor in
New York's Jewish ghetto, he had become a successful lawyer. I
didn't understand any of this then, but it is clear to me now
that he perceived his good fortune as being part of a communal,
rather than just an individual, success. His business clients,
who had escaped the same religious orthodoxy and immigrant
poverty as he, were our friends. Our families ate out in
restaurants together, went on weekend outings and vacations to
Miami Beach together, took joy in each others' success, and also
shared in each others' tribulations. My Bar Mitzvah, especially
the gala reception that he and my mother had planned for the day
afterwards, was to be a testament to my father's achievement. All
the relatives, including second cousins and distant uncles and
aunts -- some of whom I had barely heard of and never met --
neighbors and friends and all my father's clients would be there
to share his nachas which meant, in a sense, that I, stutter and
all, was cast in the role of symbol of his success.

     If there was any doubt on the part of my parents that I
would somehow pull it off, I wasn't made aware of it.  Miracle of
miracles, I'd somehow get through my prayer reading without
stuttering. I'd be the hero that I always thought I was, rather
than the embarrassment that I often felt myself to be. My parents
tried to make it easy for me. Instead of attending Hebrew School,
the after-school program where most of my friends prepared, I'd
get private coaching from a relative of ours, a young, easy-going
rabbi named Leonard Pearl, who understood the challenge that I
was up against. And I wouldn't have to make the standard Bar
Mitzvah speech welcoming everyone to the reception, and saying
something sufficiently thoughtful to indicate my new maturity.
All I would have to do was say the prayers. And prayers were
chanted in a singsong fashion and in a language, Hebrew, that I
didn't understand. Because singing involves a continuous breath
and has a melody and a rhythm to carry the voice along, it's
usual for stutterers to be fluent in song. Listening to me sing
"Sh-boom" in the shower, for instance, a person would not think
that I stuttered at all. And because Hebrew, being as meaningful
to me as gobbledygook, held no emotional content that might raise
my level of stress, conceivably I could wing my way through it
like Ella Fitzgerald (or "Scatman" John Larkin, a jazz pianist
and singer who also stutters) scatting along.

     On the other hand, I could really blow it, and blow it big.

     The Concourse Center of Israel was one of the biggest Jewish
temples on the Grand Concourse. My mother's father had been one
of the temple's founders, my uncles were prominent in the men's
club, my aunts in the sisterhood. My family occupied the pews at
the very front, just below the podium. Since it was a
conservative synagogue, the women sat separately on the left side
or out of sight, up in the balcony, and the men occupied the pews
in the center and on the right. The walls of the temple were
constructed of cream-colored marble, not just veneer but solid
stone. Stained-glass windows depicting stories from the Old
Testament lined each side. An elaborate array of gaudy
chandeliers cast a golden glow off the marble walls. Entering the
temple in the middle of the service, as my family always did, and
walking down the aisle to our accustomed seats up front was
always an awesome experience. The Jewish God is a judgmental God
-- and certainly He'd be taking note of the disrespect my family
showed by always entering His House late.

     We came early on my Bar Mitzvah day, November 14, 1953.
Already the place was packed, not only with the regular members
of the congregation here to see the grandson of the founder
become one of them, but with my father's clients, our neighbors
and friends, my speech therapist, his wife, and our maid. I was
called to the pulpit in the middle of the service after the Ark
was opened and the Torah, the scrolls on which the Five Books of
Moses were inscribed, was lifted out. My mother sat in her mink
stole between my Aunt Freda in fox and my grandmother in a plain
cloth coat -- all of them, my mother later told me, frozen in
fear and clutching each other's hands. My father's face was paler
than his normal white, and he was drenched in perspiration.
Watching him from across the temple, my mother was as concerned
about his heart as she was worried about how I would get through
the prayers.

     I took my place in the huddle of men surrounding the torah
as it was laid flat, like an open book, across the pulpit. There
was Rabbi Berman; cantor Wolfe; Mr. Rosenfeld, the president of
the shul who knew my family well; and the old shamus or sexton,
Mr. Shuldiner, who had a white mustache and a twinkle in his eye.

     What I remember best of that moment was the sodden heat of
wool suits surrounding me and the bracing chemical smell of
after-shave lotion. Below me and in the balcony above, two
thousand people awaited my first word.

     The first prayer I had to read, like most Jewish prayers,
begins with the word "Baruch" as in "Baruch atoy adonoi, elohaynu
melech, har-oh-lum.... (Blessed art thou Oh Lord, Our God...)" --
a dreaded "B" word. There was no way I could approach this first
blessing in hopeful innocence. For weeks in advance, I had
nightmares about it -- nightmares about the impossibility of
saying Baruch without a stutter and nightmares about the futility
of figuring how best to approach it. I had a history of always
stuttering on crucial "B" words:  Bagels, baseball, friends names
likes Barry and Bobby, and "bye" as when hanging up the telephone
and saying "goodbye."   When striking an ornery attitude in
arguments with my parents, my defiantly felt "BUT!" always came
out as a meek and hapless "b-b-b-but."

     I could dream of nothing but disaster ahead. For "B's," like
"P's," "T's," and "D's," are explosive consonants. And I always
stuttered on explosive consonants!  Simply to get past the first
sound of the first word of the first prayer, I would have to
coordinate the complicated mechanisms of saying a "B" word, and
nail each and every component of fluent speech exactly right.
First there was the problem of shaping the sound. "B" demands a
subtle coming together of the upper and lower lips. With too much
pressure, the lips lock and no sound can come out. With
insufficient pressure, tremors start and I sound like Porky Pig.
Imagine that absurdity:  Porky Pig -- TRAYF! --reciting a
prayer in a Jewish temple.

     Then there would be the problem of voicing, starting the
sound. You cannot talk while holding your breath as many people
tend to do when they are frozen in fear. So I'd have to remember
to breathe, not just in, which was easy, but out -- on the exhale
-- which was the only way to get sound out. But suppose my vocal
chords were locked, another symptom of stuttering exaggerated by
the stress of tension and fear: the natural impulse would be to
blast through the block and, with all the strength I could
muster, force the air out. But using force would only increase
the tension, harden my vocal chords, and immobilize my mouth.
Forcing out a sound would further cause my jaws to jam together
like two pressure-pressed plates of steel. So I would have to
avoid panic and inhale and then exhale gently so that my vocal
chords would stay sufficiently relaxed to open and close as
required by the ever changing sound. At the same time, I would
have to keep my mouth, lips, and jaws flexible so as to shape the
different vowels and consonants that make up each syllable of
every spoken word.

     Fluent people, of course, have none of this to think about.
They may have to think about what they are going to say and they
may end up saying something silly or stupid, but they never have
to think about how they are going to speak, how they are going to
create first this and then that particular sound. They decide to
speak and they do it. The very fact that stutterers have to
agonize over the how of speech makes us self-conscious about
being different, and this feeds our anxiety about speaking and
heightens the stress that causes our speaking mechanism to break
down.

     In other words, success with the "Ba" did not mean that
there would be clear sailing ahead, because very quickly --
without time to recalibrate my situation -- I would have to move
smoothly to the "r" sound in "ruch."  The "r," of course, is a
soft consonant, and I always had trouble with soft consonants!
On the other hand, if I could get through "Baruch" and keep my
breath in a gentle even flow, then I could probably get through
the "atoy" and even, despite the difficult "d" sound, the adonoi
and the elohanu as well. But then I'd be up against "melech," a
hated "m" word. "M" is the first letter of my name, and I always
had trouble saying my name, although I could never be sure if it
was the "m" sound or the name, because if I had had a different
name, like Allen, Harry, Sam, or Joe, I'm sure I would have
stuttered on those consonants just the same.

     But that was my nightmare. Dreams express fear, not the
certainty that whatever is feared is bound to happen. Standing at
the pulpit, in that blessed moment before speech begins, I still
had a clean slate. I was a stutterer, yes!  But I didn't look
like one, and I didn't stutter all the time. With aplomb, I
placed the tasseled edge of my tallis to my lips, kissed it
reverently, and touched the tassels to the open torah, just like
Rabbi Berman did. Physical gestures were something that I could
always handle. For years I had stood in front of my mirror and
practiced looking cool. Now I looked up from the torah and out
into the sea of glowing faces, remembered to take a breath and
began to exhale. But my vocal chords were locked and in the
absence of sound my lips clamped together. I stood there, up on
the podium in this House of God, Moses without his Aaron,
completely blocked on the very first sound of my Bar Mitzvah
prayer, determined to get the "B" word out but completely stymied
by how to go about it.

     It has always amazed me how clearheaded I can become in the
middle of a stuttering block. I can recite the Gettysburg Address
to myself, recall the top 20 hit parade tunes according to the
Make Believe Ballroom's original deejay, Martin Block, or,
feeling self-pity, recall my version of the old Negro spiritual
recently learned in school, "Nobody knows the trouble that I'm
in."  The one thing I still cannot do in the middle of a
stutter, however, is figure out how to get out of it. I cannot
say to myself, "hey, this isn't working; why not relax those
frozen lips, loosen your jaw, take another breath, and try it
again?"  Instead, I was doing the instinctive but the worst thing
I could do: I was trying to force the sound through my vocal
chords by tightening my jaw and pressing my lips together even
harder. As my block increased, I could hear the seconds ticking
away in my head. If I could not recover fluency -- and do it
quickly -- I knew that I would probably stutter on every
subsequent word. There were perhaps 3000 Hebrew words in my
reading and three times that many syllables. I knew from being in
this kind of a situation exactly what my listeners would do. In
the middle of my own speaking block I could always sense their
discomfort. They would fidget, cough, and look embarrassed at one
another. And the rabbi: would he put his arm around me and wave
me off? "Bar Mitzvah called on account of stuttering" I'd be
relieved, but also humiliated. Or would he let me stutter on,
exposing my ineptitude with every disfluent word. I had an
impulse to flee the pulpit and race out the back door, but could
I ever run fast enough or far enough to escape the disgrace?

     Then -- out of frustration, anger, or a blessed insight that
could only come from a communication with God -- Mr. Shuldiner
gave me a firm whack with his elbow, right between my shoulder
blades. The force of the blow made me let go of my breath. My
vocal chords opened, my jaw came unglued, my locked lips
loosened, and the "B" sound came out. Before I could overcome the
shock of being hit in the back, I was past the "ruch atoy adonoi"
and rolling through the "melech har-oh-lum."  I had found my
voice and with it the rhythm of the prayer. I raced through the
blessings in a clear alto voice, building confidence with each
fluent word and able to segue, without a hitch, into the Torah
text itself. I remember very little of what happened next --
except that I felt very lightheaded and sure of myself, as if I
was riding my bicycle up and down the aisle of the temple and
showing off, shouting, "Look Ma, no hands."  Just for a second, I
risked one jaunty look at the audience, a sea of glistening
glasses, dark suits, and fur coats, and I recall, in that
instance, hearing the sound of my own clear voice. It was coming
from someone other than me, and I was amazed at its clarity and
its fluency, but also critical: the chanting, I told myself, was
a little too fast. And then -- blessed art thou O Lord our God --
it was over.

     The rabbi, the cantor, the President of the Synagogue, and
saintly Mr. Shuldiner all shook my hand. The rabbi made a little
speech about it being my Bar Mitzvah day, someone (the President
of the temple, I believe) gave me a book, and then Mr. Shuldiner
ushered me to a seat at the rear of the podium. The next thing I
knew I was shaking. Knees, ankles, elbows, all my muscles and
joints a-twitch with the heebie jeebies and a-trembling like a
quaking aspen in an autumn breeze. Whether it was an errant elbow
or an act of God, I knew I had escaped a life-defining trauma,
but only barely. If speaking in public represented one aspect of
manhood, I had nothing to look forward to but a lifetime of fear.

     On Sunday we had a reception at the Riverside Plaza Hotel
off West End Avenue in Manhattan's then-posh Upper West Side.
There was a band, of course -- three pieces: saxophone, drums,
and bass. The bass player acted as the emcee, cracked jokes in
Yiddish, and crooned "Besame Mucho" like Dean Martin himself. I
danced with my grandmother, my mother, my sister, and all of my
aunts, but I did not dance with any of the girls my age --
invited because they were my cousins or the daughters of
neighbors, clients, and friends -- sitting primly on top of their
crinoline dresses alone at a table of their own. The bartender
slipped me a highball "for the Bar Mitzvah boy," he said, and my
friends and I disappeared into the men's room every so often to
count the Treasury Bonds that all the guests were shoving into my
hand. After the baked Alaska was served on a flaming platter, the
band tore into "Tzena Tzena" and everyone formed a circle and
danced a wild hora. Whirling around in ecstatic frenzy, my
yarmulke fell off my head like Willie May's cap as he chased down
a fly ball in centerfield. For a kid like myself it couldn't get
any better. Maybe Mr. Shuldiner had given me a message from God.
Yes, I knew how narrowly I had escaped a horrendous experience.
The picture of Ralph Branca sitting in the locker room in the
Polo Grounds on October 5, 1951, with his shoulders slumped and
his head in his hands was etched in my mind. Bobby Thomson's
pennant-winning homerun, heralded by the press as the "Miracle of
Coogan's Bluff," was the only miracle that, till now, held
meaning for me. If from Bobby Thomson I knew miracles, from Ralph
Branca I knew humiliation and defeat. I felt that my Bar Mitzvah
had been a miracle; and, more important, a personal triumph. But
I knew how close to defeat I had come. If I was Bobby Thomson
today, I knew I could be Ralph Branca tomorrow. I could not count
on God, or Mr. Shuldiner, to keep me safe all the time. Life
indeed was great, but I was still faced with perils and potholes
every time I opened my mouth.


Comments appreciated:
Marty Jezer  mjez@sover.net