Inside Actress Marlee Matlin's Silent World  When my mother
talks about her early years, it is a story of abandonment and
disappointments. An aunt and uncle had helped Libby's mother,
Rose Hammer, and Libby's older sister, Sara, and brother, Jack,
who changed his name to Jason, emigrate from Bledow, Poland–a
village about halfway between Warsaw and Lodz– in the late
twenties, saving them from the almost certain death they would
have faced as Jews had they been there for Hitler's invasion in
1939. Libby, the family's last child, was born in 1930 in Kansas
City, Missouri. It was a new world full of possibilities. But
the family would soon begin to fracture.  By the time Libby was
nine, her family had moved to Chicago, where her parents ran a
small baked-goods store, though that didn't last long. Libby's
father, Paul, diagnosed with tuberculosis, soon moved into a
treatment facility in Denver, her brother eventually left to
live with the aunt and uncle in Yakima, Washington, who'd helped
the family emigrate and