A World Tour No Barriers Could Stop
By: Jeff Joiner | February 6, 2024
When Jane Saginaw’s mother was dying and in hospice care, Saginaw MS’23 often sat with her and spent time thinking about this amazing woman’s life. Rose Saginaw was diagnosed with the polio virus in 1946 when she was 19 years old and only recently married. She soon gave birth to her first child, Harry. Neither he nor Jane, born seven years later, would ever see their mother walk after the devastating illness left her paralyzed.
“I would sit by her side as she slept and just marvel at the life she lived,” Saginaw said. “How did she do it? She was an amazingly strong, determined woman. I started writing down little memories I had of her and our life together. They were what I called shards of stories, but I didn’t know what to do with them. Even though she was confined to a wheelchair, she raised a family, had a fabulous career in advertising and she traveled the world.”
Saginaw, a successful Dallas attorney at the time, was so motivated to assemble her written shards into a memoir that she earned an online certificate in creative nonfiction writing from Stanford University. After years of writing and editing, the book, “Because the World is Round,” was published in 2022 and tells the story of her family’s trip around the world in 1970 when Saginaw was 15 years old.
Saginaw enjoyed a successful legal career – including an appointment as a regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration – before retiring from trial law in the late 1990s. Hungry to continue her education, Saginaw enrolled at UT Dallas in the PhD in humanities program in the former School of Arts and Humanities. There she fed her interests in the history of domestic life during World War II and the memories of women Holocaust survivors by taking classes at the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies along with courses in creative writing and poetry. And while working toward her PhD she earned a master’s degree in humanities.
“UTD has been a real gift to me,” Saginaw said. “It has opened so many doors and opened my mind in so many ways through what is offered in programs like the Ackerman Center.”
With her master’s degree conferred last year, Saginaw has now switched to pursuing a PhD in literature and has begun work on her dissertation, which she plans to focus on the Holocaust and will include her own poetry based on the memoirs of women who survived.
A mother’s strength
Though she was confined to a wheelchair, Rose Saginaw was fiercely independent, but it was her young daughter’s job to help her when she needed it. Saginaw spent much of her teen years as her mother’s caretaker and faithfully spent much of their world trip at her side helping her navigate a world full of barriers.
“We had a very close relationship because there was this mutual interdependence,” Saginaw said. “We spent a lot of intimate time together, and people are surprised at how much I helped her physically. I dressed her and took her to the bathroom and took her to her meetings. It made for a very close relationship.”
Saginaw’s father, Sol, owned an automobile brake-repair business and in 1969 had an opportunity to sell. With time on their hands and money in the bank, there were new opportunities for the family. Now a teenager, Saginaw suggested an international trip, and after thinking about it, her parents agreed.
A sophomore, Saginaw took time off from high school while her brother took a semester break from law school at the University of Texas at Austin. The trip would ultimately take nearly six months. While many families travel internationally and visit posh resorts and luxurious European cities, the Saginaw family chose instead to travel to out-of-way destinations like Iran, India, Afghanistan, Turkey, Israel and Yugoslavia.
“We went to places where we had some kind of contact,” Saginaw said. “We had a good friend whose daughter had married a man from India and was living there, so we visited her. And then a doctor friend of ours knew a doctor in Afghanistan, so we went to Afghanistan. Very few people at the time knew anything about Afghanistan, but we went.”
The trip was full of adventure and even moments of danger. While in India, the family was being driven to visit the Taj Mahal when the driver hit a young girl on the side of the road. The driver fled, leaving the Saginaws to face a crowd of angry locals. With people banging on their car, Saginaw’s father flagged down a passing car, and Saginaw and her mother took the young girl, who was not seriously injured, and her father to a nearby Red Cross hospital. But they left Saginaw’s father and brother to face the crowd.
“It was a harrowing experience and there was a lot of emotion,” she said. “We didn’t know what had happened to my father and brother. We truly thought we would never see them again.”
Daughter and mother arrived at their hotel destination and found Sol and Harry waiting for them. They, too, had flagged down a passing car for a ride after the crowd calmed down once the girl was taken to the hospital.
For Saginaw, the highlight of the world tour was meeting the prime minister of Israel Golda Meir in Tel Aviv. While touring Israel, the ladies were invited to join a small delegation of American Jewish women from Dallas for a meeting with the recently elected prime minister.
“I have never seen such a powerful human being, let alone a woman,” Saginaw said. “She just exuded a confidence and a seriousness, a gravitas, that was amazing. That really had an impact on me, and when we talked, I felt like she saw me as a person, as someone with a future.”
Meeting Meir left a lasting impression on Saginaw, later influencing her decision to attend law school at the University of Texas at Austin after earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
According to Saginaw, the world tour changed everyone in the family, but it was particularly impactful on her and her mother, including bringing them even closer. The two worked together to travel throughout underdeveloped parts of world where accommodations for those with disabilities were unheard of. Everything from boarding airplanes to using restrooms to accessing hotels was a nightmare for a woman in a wheelchair.
“She was truly remarkable,” said Saginaw. “How she had the vision and the energy and nerve to do what she did, I don’t know. That’s why I wrote the book.”
Saginaw said the trip was also an amazing one for a Jewish family traveling in parts of the world where they were distinct minorities. One visit included meeting the head of the Jewish Federation of Yugoslavia, which at the time was in a Communist country behind the Iron Curtain.
“We had all these amazing opportunities to have insight into things that Americans really didn’t know very much about,” Saginaw said. “It changed all of us in really significant ways. For me, it set me up as a lifelong learner. I couldn’t wait to go to college and continue to learn about the world that I got a taste of having traveled so much at a young age.”
Saginaw’s memoir, “Because the World is Round” is available from Deep Vellum Publishing in Dallas.