THE BRAILLE ENCYCLOPEDIA: Charles Rammelkamp reviews a collection of essays by Naomi Cohn which reflect on her experience of losing eyesight
The Braille Encyclopedia
Naomi Cohn
Rose Metal Press, 2024
ISBN: 978-01-941628-33-1
160 pages $15.95
Classified as memoir, Naomi Cohn’s collection of short alphabetical essays, ninety-six meditations beginning with “Academia” and ending with “Zutz,” manages not only to tell the story of her own loss of eyesight and long struggle to become proficient in braille but also to explain the issues of altered sight generally. And it does all this in precise but poetic detail.
We learn about Louis Braille who developed his language in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, the second entry is “Awl,” the tool with which, as a boy in his father’s saddle-making shop, Braille accidentally hurt himself, which ultimately led to his blindness. (Cohn later speculates, in “Knife,” that the tool with which he injured himself was a kind of pruning knife called a serpette.) His parents were able to get him a place as a student at the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, at the age of ten, and by fifteen he’d already devised the key features of his system for blind people to read and write. Called raphigraphy (aka, decapoint), Braille’s system was completed in 1839, when he was thirty.
Cohn’s own story begins in Chicago, in Hyde Park, where her parents were both professors at the University of Chicago. As the child of academics, Cohn was surrounded by books and written words, absorbing their value as if breathing air. We learn in “Fifteen” that though she wore glasses with corrective lenses, ‘l had no expectation of becoming blind.’ At thirty, she was diagnosed with progressive retinal decay. ‘New capillaries nudged their way into the tissues of my retinas,’ she writes in “Blood.” Less than fifteen percent of legally blind people are totally blind, we learn in the entry, “Blind.”
Cohn began learning braille in 2010 as part of Adjustment to Blindness Training. In “Braille” she writes, ‘Braille is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, those almost touching fingers of God and Adam. When my finger touches braille bumps, something moves in me.’ And yet we learn in “Slivovitz,” the Eastern European plum brandy, whose fermentation Cohn describes in detail, that when she and her husband Ray planted a plum tree on their Minnesota property, ‘I started learning braille about the same time we planted that plum tree. Five years to arrive at anything like literacy. Another patient fermentation.’
Cohn writes about advances in technology to help the blind, from dictation software like Dragon NaturallySpeaking to Kindle, JAWS and podcasts. She writes in “Homophone” about the difficulty of making software distinguish between words like “need” and “knead.” And yet braille, she notes, allows her to distinguish between “all” and “awl.”
Cohn taps into her Jewish background throughout the collection, from “Oyg,” the Yiddish word for “eye,” to references to her Yiddish-speaking ancestors in “Slivovitz,” and from “Torah” (‘The Braille Torah is not, strictly, kosher since it was not made by a traditional Torah scribe and since, to be read, it needs to be touched. Not by a yad…but by a human hand.’) to “Yahrzeit,” which Cohn writes on the fifteenth anniversary of her mother’s death. The last entry, “Zutz,” likewise refers to a Yiddish word. It means a poke or a punch. Cohn brings the collection to a humorous conclusion. When her husband comes into her home office, watching her hovering over a braille slate with a stylus, and asks her what she’s up to, she answers, Just zutzing some dots.
Naturally, since The Braille Encyclopedia is organized as an abecedarian, entries often begin with a dictionary-like definition. “Focus” begins ‘What draws attention, interest or energy.’ “Gadget” begins ‘Device, invention, or piece of equipment.’ “Xerophthalmia” begins, ‘Fancy-pants word for dry eyes.’
The entry for “Glance” begins: ‘A swift sort of looking,’ and later she poignantly reports that glancing ‘no longer works for me. My eyes still dart but don’t take in what they used to.’ We learn in “Knowledge” that in braille, ‘this word is contracted to a letter K with a single dot in front. We want knowledge. We want to know.’ Contractions, Cohn tells us in “Contraction,” are a ‘series of symbols in the braille code, shorthand for words and letter combinations.’ Their teacher, Cindy, spent entire lessons on each millet-sized delicate dot, ‘just getting the feel of it, how not to crush the symbols under a searching finger.’
How daunting the learning of braille seems from Cohn’s account! She describes her frustrations and difficulties but also her perseverance: ‘now I am older and blinder, and I love braille…I’ve fallen hard. It’s taken years to begin to know the bumps and oddities. The lighter my touch over braille’s contours, the more I understand.’
Cohn introduces the entry for “Village” by noting that Coupvray, where Louis Braille was born and buried in 1852, is a village. A hundred years after his death, she goes on to write, his writing system was in use in one hundred and thirty-three languages worldwide. On the centenary of Braille’s death, France honored his accomplishments by entering him into the Panthéon, the famous mausoleum in Paris. This required digging up his bones, to which the village objected. ‘A compromise was reached. Paris got his body, cremated into ashes. Coupvray. in an urn atop his former grave, kept his hands.’
Rose Metal Press has always been recognized as an innovative publisher of word and image texts. Naomi Cohn’s The Braille Encyclopedia is no exception, the alphabetic arrangement of this unique collection the perfect format, as the subject of her work truly is knowledge.
Oct 21 2024
THE BRAILLE ENCYCLOPEDIA
THE BRAILLE ENCYCLOPEDIA: Charles Rammelkamp reviews a collection of essays by Naomi Cohn which reflect on her experience of losing eyesight
Classified as memoir, Naomi Cohn’s collection of short alphabetical essays, ninety-six meditations beginning with “Academia” and ending with “Zutz,” manages not only to tell the story of her own loss of eyesight and long struggle to become proficient in braille but also to explain the issues of altered sight generally. And it does all this in precise but poetic detail.
We learn about Louis Braille who developed his language in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, the second entry is “Awl,” the tool with which, as a boy in his father’s saddle-making shop, Braille accidentally hurt himself, which ultimately led to his blindness. (Cohn later speculates, in “Knife,” that the tool with which he injured himself was a kind of pruning knife called a serpette.) His parents were able to get him a place as a student at the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, at the age of ten, and by fifteen he’d already devised the key features of his system for blind people to read and write. Called raphigraphy (aka, decapoint), Braille’s system was completed in 1839, when he was thirty.
Cohn’s own story begins in Chicago, in Hyde Park, where her parents were both professors at the University of Chicago. As the child of academics, Cohn was surrounded by books and written words, absorbing their value as if breathing air. We learn in “Fifteen” that though she wore glasses with corrective lenses, ‘l had no expectation of becoming blind.’ At thirty, she was diagnosed with progressive retinal decay. ‘New capillaries nudged their way into the tissues of my retinas,’ she writes in “Blood.” Less than fifteen percent of legally blind people are totally blind, we learn in the entry, “Blind.”
Cohn began learning braille in 2010 as part of Adjustment to Blindness Training. In “Braille” she writes, ‘Braille is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, those almost touching fingers of God and Adam. When my finger touches braille bumps, something moves in me.’ And yet we learn in “Slivovitz,” the Eastern European plum brandy, whose fermentation Cohn describes in detail, that when she and her husband Ray planted a plum tree on their Minnesota property, ‘I started learning braille about the same time we planted that plum tree. Five years to arrive at anything like literacy. Another patient fermentation.’
Cohn writes about advances in technology to help the blind, from dictation software like Dragon NaturallySpeaking to Kindle, JAWS and podcasts. She writes in “Homophone” about the difficulty of making software distinguish between words like “need” and “knead.” And yet braille, she notes, allows her to distinguish between “all” and “awl.”
Cohn taps into her Jewish background throughout the collection, from “Oyg,” the Yiddish word for “eye,” to references to her Yiddish-speaking ancestors in “Slivovitz,” and from “Torah” (‘The Braille Torah is not, strictly, kosher since it was not made by a traditional Torah scribe and since, to be read, it needs to be touched. Not by a yad…but by a human hand.’) to “Yahrzeit,” which Cohn writes on the fifteenth anniversary of her mother’s death. The last entry, “Zutz,” likewise refers to a Yiddish word. It means a poke or a punch. Cohn brings the collection to a humorous conclusion. When her husband comes into her home office, watching her hovering over a braille slate with a stylus, and asks her what she’s up to, she answers, Just zutzing some dots.
Naturally, since The Braille Encyclopedia is organized as an abecedarian, entries often begin with a dictionary-like definition. “Focus” begins ‘What draws attention, interest or energy.’ “Gadget” begins ‘Device, invention, or piece of equipment.’ “Xerophthalmia” begins, ‘Fancy-pants word for dry eyes.’
The entry for “Glance” begins: ‘A swift sort of looking,’ and later she poignantly reports that glancing ‘no longer works for me. My eyes still dart but don’t take in what they used to.’ We learn in “Knowledge” that in braille, ‘this word is contracted to a letter K with a single dot in front. We want knowledge. We want to know.’ Contractions, Cohn tells us in “Contraction,” are a ‘series of symbols in the braille code, shorthand for words and letter combinations.’ Their teacher, Cindy, spent entire lessons on each millet-sized delicate dot, ‘just getting the feel of it, how not to crush the symbols under a searching finger.’
How daunting the learning of braille seems from Cohn’s account! She describes her frustrations and difficulties but also her perseverance: ‘now I am older and blinder, and I love braille…I’ve fallen hard. It’s taken years to begin to know the bumps and oddities. The lighter my touch over braille’s contours, the more I understand.’
Cohn introduces the entry for “Village” by noting that Coupvray, where Louis Braille was born and buried in 1852, is a village. A hundred years after his death, she goes on to write, his writing system was in use in one hundred and thirty-three languages worldwide. On the centenary of Braille’s death, France honored his accomplishments by entering him into the Panthéon, the famous mausoleum in Paris. This required digging up his bones, to which the village objected. ‘A compromise was reached. Paris got his body, cremated into ashes. Coupvray. in an urn atop his former grave, kept his hands.’
Rose Metal Press has always been recognized as an innovative publisher of word and image texts. Naomi Cohn’s The Braille Encyclopedia is no exception, the alphabetic arrangement of this unique collection the perfect format, as the subject of her work truly is knowledge.