In Silence: Growing Up Hearing in a Deaf World (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781563682872)

At last, Ruth Sidranksy's groundbreaking book In Silence: Growing Up Hearing in a Deaf World is back in print. Her account of growing up as the hearing daughter of deaf Jewish parents in the Bronx and Brooklyn during the 1930s and1940s reveals the challenges deaf people faced during the Depression and afterward.

Inside her family's apartment, Sidransky knew a warm, secure place. She recalls her earliest memories of seeing words fall from her parents' hands. She remembers her father entertaining the family endlessly with his stories, and her mother's story of tying a red ribbon to herself and her infant daughter to know when she needed anything in the night.

Outside the apartment, the cacophonous hearing world greeted Sidransky's family with stark stares of curiosity as though they were "freaks." Always upbeat, her proud father still found it hard to earn a living. When Sidransky started school, she was placed in a class for special needs children until the principal realized that she could hear and speak.

Sidransky portrays her family with deep affection and honesty, and her frank account provides a living narrative of the Deaf experience in pre- and post-World War II America. In Silence has become an invaluable chronicle of a special time and place that will affect all who read it for years to come.

Author: Ruth Sidransky
ISBN-10: 1563682877
ISBN-13: 9781563682872
Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
Language: English
Published: 03/15/2006
Pages: 352
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.11lbs
Size: 8.54h x 6.06w x 0.93d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 04/15/2006 pg. 126
Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2006 pg. 167