The Outsider
When I was a boy, I spent hundreds if not thousands of hours paging through a large, white book entitled Nations of the World. Each page of that well-used book contained a colored map of a country, along with useful facts—capital city, major exports, population, language, religion, form of government—along with a vivid reproduction of the national flag.
The countries were arranged alphabetically, by continent. I was naturally fascinated with the small, out of the way nations, places I'd never heard of and was unlikely to visit. Those obscure locales seemed exotic, and therefore more interesting than their larger, more-frequented neighbors. (At the time, I'd only been to Niagara Falls, just over the border in Canada, but we were soon to visit Toronto and Montreal, which made me, in my own small mind, a world traveler).
Somehow, I became fascinated with Iceland. Not that I could find many artifacts of Icelandic life in suburban Cleveland, beyond the occasional article in National Geographic and the short entry in our World Book encyclopedia. I knew that someday, when I was in college or soon after, I'd visit the great cities of the Old World—London, Paris, and Reykjavik.
Eventually, that fascination waned, but I remained an outsider, drawn to people and places on the margins. Maybe it was my sense of being Jewish—of looking at our numbers on that bar graph in our World Book Encyclopedia, tiny in comparison with the other great religions, of growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, in the first generation after the Shoah. But being a Jew in my small suburb wasn't a novelty—we lived in a modern version of a shtetl, in a network of first, second and third-generation immigrants who had clutched the American dream and never let go, the Horatio Alger story with an Eastern-European twist—replace Alger with Bernstein, Schwartz or Leblang—and moved up to the middle class.
On the surface, I should have fit right in—a curious, well-mannered boy among boys, with a good head—a yiddishe kop--on my shoulders. But given our lack of diversity, we Members of the Tribe filled all the roles in the scholastic universe, and by time I reached the upper elementary grades it seemed all the best seats were taken; it was up to me to forage in the remainders section.
The next year I was forced, through redistricting, to attend another elementary school. My life was turned upside down by the machinations of our school board, and suddenly I was a 6th grader at Hilltop elementary. (The school actually squatted in a small gulley, a perfect reflection of the depression I sunk into when I transferred into this new school where I had no friends).
At first, I became chummy with a few of the popular girls. But my popularity, such as it was, was short-lived. Once our gym teacher, separated the boys and girls, I was forced to play softball, or (even worse) four-man football in physical education. I became an outcast, a subject of derision. Even our co-ed kickball games became a source of stress—Cindy Klein, the dark-haired brunette who sat behind me and who knew all the words to "Hair," mocked my weak kicks and girlish run.
Eventually I made it to high school and found my niche. I was no longer obsessed with being popular. Instead I patched together a group of friends who shared some of my interests—travel, politics, and getting good grades. One of my friends, Paul, had become president of the Model United Nations club, and encouraged me to join. I knew that "Model UN" wasn't cool, or even lukewarm, but I'd already spent two years in Junior Achievement, which was considered even dorkier in our high school universe, and I was naturally interested in what was happening beyond our borders.
At 18, I'd stumbled on sign language while observing a class for deaf children in Cleveland. The world of the deaf, their beautiful language, and the secret hand signals most hearing people couldn't understand became a source of fascination for me.
After college, I got a teaching job at the Ohio School for the Deaf, a state-run residential school in Columbus, Ohio. There I tried—and usually failed—to impress my deaf students, to find rewards in teaching instead of what usually awaited me, a growing sense of frustration as I came to realize that I lacked the patience to teach the students I was given. That frustration was intertwined with a sense of shame—my desires for men still dominant, while I continued to date women.
One summer during my years at the deaf school, I traveled to Ireland. There I met a young woman about my age, Deborah from New Jersey. She had traveled to Paris, met a young Frenchman, and fallen in love. Now she was married, living life in another language, reinventing herself. Her story seemed magical to me, a fantasy. Yet the marriage wasn't working out; she was roaming through the Irish countryside alone, unsure of what to do next. Watching her, I realized I had taken my own version of a geographic cure—in the American Deaf Community, in American Sign Language.
Deborah's real-life fantasy of living in Paris, of becoming French, did not change her identity—a Jewish girl from New Jersey, running away from home. Likewise, I was a gay man who felt fundamentally flawed, who couldn't accept my difference.
A few years after meeting Deborah, in the mid-1980s, I finally crept out of the closet, left the deaf school, and moved to Boston. I still have an affinity for out of the way places.
Judah Leblang is a writer, teacher, and storyteller in Boston. He will perform his one-man show, "The Expiration Date" at King's Chapel Parish House, 64 Beacon Street in Boston, December 4 at 7:30 pm. Tickets and more info at: https://bit.ly/4qDrHPI