Janet Gordon

All The Ways You Taught Us

A Memoir of Ability, Disability and the Pursuit of Meaning

DEDICATION
To my family...
Thank you for inspiring me to delve into the histories of our lives.
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A hopeful love story that lasts 60 years…Mort Gordon writes to his fiance from graduate school that he is going blind from retinitis pigmentosa. Bernice Rubinstein walks with a limp from spina bifida and even after college, isn’t expected to earn a living. They marry anyway. All the Ways You Taught Us is a daughter’s memoir of how her family rides the waves.

Reading guide

Dive deeper into the book: explore themes, characters, and critical writing prompts.

Group Discussion Questions
Take your book club (or any gathering!) to the next level. Get your group talking with these insightful questions.
Essential Themes
A guide you to a richer understanding of the book through its main themes.
Journal Prompts
Explore your thoughts and feelings about your family's history.

Artifacts

Letters, recordings and pictures that intimately tell the stories in the book.

Love Letter

The day after his 25th birthday on November 9, 1949, Mort Gordon writes to his fiancé, Bernice Rubinstein, from Washington University in St. Louis where he is finishing his PhD in Physics. “Sometimes, I get depressed over the possibility that I won’t ‘pay off’ for such a fine person as you are...The next question is, then, given say, five years of respite, can I establish myself to such an extent that my blindness will not affect my financial status?”  See the original letter, read the full text below it, or listen to Janet read a part aloud (4.48 mins).

Recorded Lecture Notes

Mort Gordon records his lecture notes after studying the textbook recorded by Bernice Gordon. In this excerpt (2 mins), he prepares his April 1982 lecture on Chapter 14 of Classical Electrodynamics, by John David Jackson (known as “Jackson” for short). Max Plank once commented: “When we turn our attention to the general case of electrodynamics…our first impression is surprise at the enormous complexity of the problems to be solved.”  Mort would revisit these notes when he taught the course again, provided the text was the same.

Recorded Publication

Read by
Bernice Gordon

Bernice Gordon records a draft article prior to its publication in the journal, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in 1986. For this near-final version, the process is likely as follows: Bernice reads the article; Mort listens and records corrections; They review the corrections together while Bernice edits the typed version by hand; the draft is retyped by the secretary at the lab and reviewed by the co-author. This process would be repeated until an article was final. (Mort authored or co-authored at least 80 papers/reports while at MSU.) Article details and the abstract are provided in text. Recording of abstract (2.48 mins).

Testimonials
All the Ways You Taught Us is inspiring reading not only for children of parents with physical disabilities, but also for anyone grappling with a complex family legacy. Janet Gordon writes with tremendous honesty, insight, and love about her remarkable, sometimes challenging parents, along with her own search for a meaningful life.
— Dawn Raffel, author of The Secret Life of
Objects
Janet Gordon has written what the great German-Swedish poet Nellie Sachs called “the ancient journey of the daughter.” All the Ways You Taught Us contains the biography of her remarkable parents’ marriage, but also Janet’s coming to hard-earned knowledge of herself as a working mother, wife, sister and writer. Rebbe Nachman asserted that Eternity resides in the past; truly this memoir speaks to Eternity. It is one of the most fearlessly bittersweet—and joyful—family albums I have ever paged through.
—Howard Norman. author of Come To The Window
Meet the Author

Janet Gordon

JANET REBECCA GORDON was born in Gainesville, Florida and grew up in East Lansing, Michigan. The author now lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC where she has benefited from workshops on memoir at The Writer’s Center, in Bethesda, Maryland and at Politics and Prose, a community bookstore.

All the Ways You Taught Us, A Memoir of Ability,Disability and the Pursuit of Meaning is Janet’s first book. She writes in Medium about her experiences with travel in the slow lane. Janet finds a home at nearby Temple Micah, and through that synagogue, volunteers to promote wise aging and assist refugee resettlement.

Before leaving the federal government in 2018, she had a long career crafting programs to encourage bank financial services for low- and moderate-income people and communities.