While the neighborhood boys continued to play stick games in the streets of the Bronx, Mr. Kriegel embarked on a two-year residency at the New York State Reconstruction House. He came out of rehab able to walk, but only with crutches and “twelve pounds of leather and steel strapped to lifeless legs,” he later wrote, and with the first terrible indications of the challenges his illness would face.
And soon he realized—“slowly, agonizingly, but relentlessly,” he wrote—“this disease is not being ‘conquered’ or ‘overcoming’, two terms he would have liked to leave out of the lexicon. He became a professor and writer known for memoirs and essays marked by blazing rage. and insight into what it takes to “survive as a disability in America”.
Mr. Kriegel, a longtime professor at City College of New York, died on September 25 in a nursing home in Manhattan. His wife, Harriet Kriegel, said he was 89 and had heart failure.
Mr. Kregel has chronicled his experience with polio and its lasting consequences in his life in books including “The Long Walk Home” (1964), “Falling Into Life” (1991), and “Flying Solo: Reimagining Manhood, Courage, and Loss” (1998).
“As a writer,” he remarked in the second volume, “I am of the making of the disease. There was life before polio. And there is no doubt that it was mine. But like my grandfather’s faded picture,” he added, referring to one of his shtetl ancestors in Poland, “after About me is its most important meaning.”
Leonard Kriegel was born in the Bronx on May 25, 1933. His father worked in a deli office, and his mother was a housewife. Both were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.
Mr. Kriegel was away at summer camp when he contracted polio, a virus that attacks the nervous system, especially in young children, and unleashed waves of terror before a vaccine appeared in the 1950s. Polio causes mild effects in some patients, paralysis in others and death in severe cases. Fellow camper Mr. Kriegel died in the 1944 outbreak.
One of Mr. Kregel’s most enduring memories of the early days of his illness was the feeling of his father at his side.
Mr. Kriegel wrote in his book Flying Solo: “He sat beside my bed, pleaded for me to live and fed me vanilla ice-cream. What remains as vivid in the memory today as it was more than fifty years ago is the scent that clung to my father’s hand as he fed me this ice-cream. I could. to smell dry sweat on my death from that hand. But then, the scent of saltwater pickle, smoked salmon, and chopped herring mixed with the rich, creamy taste of vanilla ice cream. For some inexplicable reason, the mingling of scents was a father’s promise to his son that he would live.”
This promise was fulfilled, but not – here was the euphemism that Mr. Kregel despised – the promise of a “normal life”. The steam baths that were a staple in the treatment of polio patients at the time failed to restore his legs.
Mr. Kriegel came home at the age of 13 and took private tutoring for his high school education. One day, as he watched from the window his brother playing stickball, he experienced what he described as an outpouring of rage at his luck and at anyone in a situation like his. His anger proved a transformative and long-lasting, fire that would ignite decades of writing about disability.
Mr. Kriegel graduated from Hunter College in New York in 1955, and after receiving his master’s degree from Columbia University, he received his Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University in 1960.
He taught for three decades at City College, where he was also director of the Center for Workers’ Education. His writings included a 1971 study of critic and writer Edmund Wilson. “Working Through: A Teacher’s Journey in the Urban University” (1972), on academic life in the early years of his career; “Memoirs for a Two Dollar Window” (1976), memoirs of growing up in the Bronx; “On Men and Masculinity” (1979), a meditation on masculinity; and a novel, Quitting Time (1982), about labor unions in New York.
Mr. Kregel’s comments have also appeared in publications including The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Partizan Review, and The American Scholar.
In his writings on disability, Mr. Kriegel sought to invert the image of the disabled person as Tiny Tim, the kind, dimensionless charitable cause that warms the frozen heart of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The image that Mr. Kregel presented to himself was rather one of physical and intellectual strength. For years, he would lift weights vigorously so that his arms were as strong as his weak legs. As an essayist, he has spoken forcefully about the disappearance that appears to accompany the condition of disability.
Mr. Kriegel wrote in an article in 1969 that a disabled person “does not even have the feeling that society hates or fears him, because society feels somewhat uncomfortable with his presence”. “He treats him as if he was a wayward, somewhat ugly, little disciple.”
When Mr. Kriegel met his future wife, he remembered his son Mark in a eulogy, her parents objecting to their marriage on the grounds that he could not dance with her at their wedding.
“It doesn’t matter,” Harriet Burnsweg told her mother. “I want someone to have breakfast with.” They eloped in 1957, without her parents’ blessing, and remained married until his death.
Among the survivors is his wife from Manhattan. his son Mark, from Santa Monica, California; another son, Bruce Kriegel of Manhattan; And two grandchildren.
Although Mr. Kriegel was harsh in his portrayal of life as crippling, there was some optimism to be discovered beneath the surface of his anger.
“The anger has cleansed me of the horror that I will accept the future that the virus wanted to define for me,” he wrote. “Anger has taught me that I can still make demands upon mind and body, and that being a paralyzed does not mean one has been excused from the duty of being a man.”
Originally published at San Jose News Bulletin
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