Cyril Axelrod

Chapter Three
My Early Years

For the five years after their marriage, Abe and Yetta longed for a child. According to the Mosaic Law, parents should have a child in order to fulfill God’s covenant with Abraham that his progeny would multiply like the stars in heaven. Just after midnight on 24 February 1942, my mother gave birth to a boy.

Eight days after my birth the rite of circumcision, Bris, was performed with great ceremony in the presence of my assembled family in our small apartment. At the ceremony, I was given the Hebrew name Sheftil ben Avram Abba. Sheftil was my maternal grandmother’s family name and as my grandfather, Abe, had been a rabbi, it was also a great honour to have ‘ben Avram Abba ‘Son of Father Abraham’, in my name. Unfortunately, when my father tried to register me under this name, the South African Birth Registry refused to accept it because it was not ‘English’ enough. So my parents decided to register me under the name Cyril, after Prince Cyril of Russia, brother of Tsar Nicholas II.

I was a frail and unresponsive baby and as the months went by my parents began to feel anxious. They could see that my physical and my mental development were slow but they had no idea why. Doubts began to creep into their hearts and eventually they shared their concerns with my mother’s eldest sister, my Aunt May. One day when we visited her, she noticed that I was showing no signs of learning to walk and she urged my parents to take me to the doctor to find out what was wrong with me. Eventually, I was taken to the children’s hospital for physiotherapy. There, with the help of arm bars, I learned to walk. On the last day, my parents stood at the front door of the hospital and, with tears in their eyes, watched me struggling to walk independently towards them. My parents were most relieved that I was now starting to make progress but they still did not understand the cause of my unresponsiveness - and my struggles were only just beginning.

My parents could barely speak English. Their mother tongue was Yiddish and this was what they used with me but I did not respond. A fresh anxiety gripped them and my in mother, in her distress, turned again to the support of her eldest sister. From this time on, my dear Aunt May became one of the most important people in my early life, and it was she who arranged for me to see a hospital specialist for an ear examination when I was three. I was taken into the consulting room, together with my mother, my father, Aunt May and her daughter Beulah, who was then about nineteen years old. The door slammed loudly behind me but bliss fully unaware, I continued to play happily with the toys on the floor. It was Beulah who commented that I had not responded to the sound. When the specialist confirmed that I was congenitally profoundly deaf and informed my parents that I would never hear, it was Aunt May who took me on her lap and held me close to her.