In Silence: Growing Up Hearing in a Deaf World

by RuthSidransky (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2006

  $27.97

  An account of the author's growing up as the hearing daughter of deaf Jewish parents during the 1930s and 1940s, revealing the challenges deaf people faced during the Depression and afterward. She portrays her family with honesty, and her account provides a living narrative of the Deaf experience in pre- and post-World War II America.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1992

  $4.25

  This is a recollection of growing up as the hearing child of two deaf parents. It is the story of a young girl's life in the silent world of her family's household. Ruth's mother tied her infant to herself, so that she could detect any movement in the baby whose cries could not be heard. As a young girl Ruth was placed in a class for the mentally retarded because she spoke only sign language, until an astute principal recognized that she could both speak and hear. This book also offers an evocation of a vanished New York City of close-knit Jewish neighbourhoods, where people had to endure the poverty and turmoil of their place and time - the Bronx and Brooklyn of the 1930s and 1940s.