Last year, in a special Thanksgiving collaboration with I Am An Immigrant, Cooking with Granny traveled to California to tell the refugee immigrant story behind Grandma Lan’s crispy Vietnamese quail. It’s baked, fried, and flambeed — and served with a side of her famous fish sauce. Under Communist rule in Vietnam, Grandma Lan thrived as an underground fish sauce dealer in the black market so much so that she came to be known as “Madam Fish Sauce.”
Bob Brody’s father, Lee Brody, as a boy. (Courtesy Bob Brody)
Ask me for my favorite Thanksgiving story and here’s what I’ll now have to tell you.
In 1930, a certain 4-year-old in Newark had yet to speak a single word. So his mother took her first-born son to see a series of physicians for a diagnosis.
It turned out that my future father had been born almost completely deaf.
Two of those doctors recommended sending Lee Brody to a private school, the Central Institute for the Deaf (CID), a kind of Harvard for deaf children, more than 800 miles away in St. Louis, Mo.
My grandparents, despite such heavy expense during the depths of the Great Depression — my Poppa ran a saloon — took that advice.
My father arrived at CID in 1931 and graduated in 1941. There, he learned to speak, to listen, to read lips and to function as well as any hearing person. That much I knew.
But then, two years ago, some old letters arrived in my sister’s mailbox, and from an unlikely source: the woman my father had lived with after he divorced my mother. We’d had no contact with her in the 18 years since my father died in 1997. Our family had long presumed such letters to be either non-existent or long lost.
One of the letters revealed a reality about my father that I neither knew nor ever had cause to suspect. In 1936, with my father now 10 years old and already five years into his stay at CID, my Poppa ran out of money to foot the bill. My father was pulled out of his classes to return to Newark and enroll in a public school.
My Nana then evidently wrote a letter to Dr. Max Goldstein, the prominent ear, nose and throat physician who had founded CID in 1914 and served as its executive director. She informed him that her son was performing poorly in the new school and pleaded for the institute to accept him back.
In response, Dr. Goldstein wrote, “I can readily appreciate your own disappointment in his limited progress (in Newark) . . . and your satisfaction with Irwin’s progress while with us.” She had “made a very frank statement of your family’s financial affairs.”
Dr. Goldstein then agreed to lower the annual tuition fee for my father to $900.
“I hope this concession in the tuition fee will make it possible for you and Mr. Brody to have Irwin return to CID next September,” he wrote, “for I know it will be for the child’s good and will contribute much to your happiness.”
As a result, my father returned to CID the following semester and stayed there for five more years. He would graduate from Weequahic High School in Newark, and then from Rutgers, among the few deaf students ever to do so.
Much later, my father — now age 42, with a wife, two children and a full-time job managing real estate — founded a nonprofit organization, New York-New Jersey Phone-TTY, headquartered in Hackensack. Partnering with IBM and AT&T, among others, he was instrumental in establishing a network of specially adapted teletypewriters, or TTYs, from coast to coast.
As a result, millions of people with hearing impairments could, in written messages transmitted instantaneously, “speak” with each other as never before. The TTYs also connected the deaf and hard-of-hearing for the first time to police stations, firehouses, hospitals, airports and government.
Later, my father received a personal letter of appreciation from then-President Ronald Reagan. Bell Telephone’s Pioneers Club inducted him as only its 29th member since 1911. The Stevens Institute of Technology held a memorial service in his honor that drew 500 mourners. Gallaudet University, the world’s only higher education institution for the hearing-impaired, named a scholarship after him.
My father confided to me more than once throughout my boyhood that without his education at CID, he might never have accomplished much of anything. And he often expressed his gratitude, justifiably so, to his parents for funding it all at considerable sacrifice. No doubt he learned only later about the letter his mother sent to CID arguing her case for his return.
And so a certain question now haunts me. What would have happened to him without Dr. Goldstein’s altruism? We’ll never know. So, in keeping with the spirit of Thanksgiving, Dr. Goldstein, I thank you. As a pioneer in education, you made possible a pioneer in communications. I thank you for seeing the future in my father.
This article was originally published on NYDailyNews.com. Bob Brody is the author of the new memoir, “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age,” and you can read more about him here.
As my mom and I sat in the airport waiting for our ride when we came back from South America this summer, she started telling me how clearly she remembers the day she arrived to this country. She said she remembers the times she got lost. The times she felt such relief when finding someone who spoke Spanish to help, and how tough it was the times she couldn’t find someone.
I asked her if she had to do it all over again if she would. Without any hesitation she said to me,
“Uy, claro que sí! Yo a este país le vivo muy agradecida por que me dio a mis dos hijos y oportunidades que yo nunca hubiera podido tener en Honduras.”
(Oh, of course! I am very grateful to this country, because it gave me my two children and has granted me opportunities I would’ve never had in Honduras.)
My mother is one of the most grateful people I know. Frankly, I sometimes think she’s grateful to a fault. She never forgets the favors people did for her during some of our most difficult times. Her life here has not been an easy one, life in general isn’t meant to be easy. But, it takes a certain level of badassery (not a confirmed word in the Oxford dictionary) to pack up your bags and move to a whole new country you’ve never even seen. Not to mention, leaving your country and family not knowing when you’ll return.
My mom is the ultimate American. She listens to the Star-Spangled banner carefully every time it plays. She likes watching shows like Family Feud bc she says they teach her new words in English. She LOVES Facebook and her iPhone. She’s full of hope. Hope granted to her by living in a place where if you work hard you can come from an impoverished country, not know the language, and raise two professionals. Hope is a gift my mother has never taken for granted. She is forever grateful to this country for granting her that hope.
This Thanksgiving we spent it apart. We have lots to be thankful for- my mom’s health, my new job, amazing friends along with a roof over our heads and food on our tables. My mom came from very little and is always reminding us to give thanks, no matter the occasion. To her you need to be thankful for everything from the bus driver who gets you home safely to the steady paycheck.
Maybe that’s why when it comes time for Thanksgiving if we can’t get together none of us feel all that terrible. When your family consists of three people every gathering is a family gathering. We know how lucky we are and even if we’re apart we know we’re not alone. We’re a formidable army of three who eat turkey weekly (lean meats, ya know?!). We look forward to the next time we see each other and figuring out what vacation we’ll take next.
We’re three people full of hope and for that we are grateful.
Victoria Moll-Ramirez is a broadcast journalist based in New York City. She is originally from Miami, FL and had the great fortune of being raised by the sassiest, spunkiest, wisest, most hysterical Honduran woman in the world. Victoria’s mother, Bélgica, is 60-years-old, resides in Little Havana (Miami) and enjoys a good margarita accompanied by a heartrending ranchera. Victoria blogs about her mom’s funny and wise sayings on, “In My Mother’s Words.”
Baker extraordinaire Dorie Greenspan never attended culinary school, yet she has won the prestigious James Beard Foundation Award three times for her numerous cookbooks and culinary magazine articles. Her 11th cookbook also hit shelves just in time for planning desserts for Thanksgiving.
“Baking Chez Moi” is a culmination of Greenspan’s delicious dessert discoveries while traveling around Paris. For the past 20 years, Greenspan has been dividing her time between New York, Connecticut and Paris, but she says she feels most at home in Paris.
“Every time I’m getting ready to go, I’m excited as the first time,” says the 67-year-old in her sweet manner. “I love the way of life, the rhythm of life…There seems to be more time to have dinner together, or meet for a drink, or a coffee at a cafe. I love the way people love food in France. You can buy a little tartlet, and it’s wrapped so beautifully.”
Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Greenspan remembers vividly her first trip to the City of Lights 43 years ago.
“I came back and went directly to my parents’ house and told them they made a big mistake – I was meant to be Parisian,” she says.
Her love of the kitchen, however, wasn’t as evident to her in the beginning.
“I made French fries when I was 13 years old and almost burnt my parents house,” remembers Greenspan. “I started cooking from cookbooks when I got married [while I was in college]. It was a good feeling to cook for my husband and friends. I loved the whole process – the preparation – I loved having people around the table. That’s when I fell in love with it – as I was learning.”
But she still didn’t think to pursue the craft as her career at this point. She graduated from college, started working, went to graduate school and had a child.
“I thought I was going to be an academic in gerontology,” says Greenspan. “But my fabulous husband said, ‘You really love baking – why don’t you make that your career?’”
That’s when she finally gave in to her calling. She self-taught herself with books and people who inspired her.
“I was really lucky when I think about it,” recalls Greenspan. “I went to work for Elle magazine when it launched in America. It had a wonderful food section – so I got to read about the fabulous French chefs. Daniel Boulud had a huge influence on me, and then I worked with Julia Child. I wrote ‘Baking with Julia.’ I didn’t go to culinary school, but I learned from the best.”
These days, she likes to get up early and starts working around 8am.
“What I try to do is write in the morning and do recipe development in the afternoon,” says Greenspan, who spends most of her day in the kitchen – with happy music playing in the background – and sometimes forgets to leave her house until 7pm.
She doesn’t love all the dishes she has to wash afterwards, but it’s all worth it to her.
“I love the sense of happiness that you get when you’ve made something,” says Greenspan. “I’m inspired by ingredients…and there’s something wonderful about starting something from scratch, and then sharing it with other people and making them happy. I love what I do, and because I write about it, I get to pass it along.”
Greenspan says what she’s most grateful for, this year and every year, is her husband and son. She’s spending this Thanksgiving in NY.
Slow-roasted pineapple (Photo/Alan Richardson)
“I’m such a last-minute person, but I know I’m definitely making my slow-roasted pineapple recipe and the custardy apple squares,” which Greenspan says are two of her favorites from her new book. “I think I’m also going to make the desert roses, which are corn flakes treats.”
Custardy apple squares (Photo/Alan Richardson)
Greenspan seems to flow with ideas, which seem to pour effortlessly onto the pages of more books. She’s already working on her next one on cookies.
If she had one piece of advice she could tell her younger self, what would it be?
“What I would tell my younger moi is say ‘yes’ to everything,” says Greenspan, explaining she wishes she started younger doing that herself. “Be fearless, try things.”
